This is the start of a new mini-series on fundamental Houdini techniques. Demonstrated using mushrooms. Of course. We’re starting off by setting up a softbody simulation in Vellum and then using Houdini’s point deform node to transfer the low resolution simulation results onto high res […]
We’re thrilled to have Houdini artist extraordinaire and educator Chris Kopic for a guest tutorial. Chris agreed to shed some light onto how he created this endless looping flower. Using vellum and a bit of houdini trickery. Download Project File
Recently I’ve been talking to our dear friend and übertalented designer/creative/artist Vincent Schwenk about his recent main- and side projects. One thing that came up was a certain dynamics setup he’s been working on in Cinema 4D and we agreed it’d be a funny idea […]
Our friend Alvaro Moreira put quite a lot of work in optimizing small scale fluid meshes over the last couple of months. Today he wants to share his findings with the Entagma community. Watch him smooth a fluid’s surface while maintaining sharp creases between the […]
EDIT: Simon Fiedler just informed me that in fact we’re not the first ones to do a Houdini Donut tut. Dang! Kudos to Konstantin Magnus! — Mo has recently started learning Blender. (Don’t worry – we won’t ditch Houdini. We just think Blender makes for […]
Mo has recently started learning Blender. (Don’t worry – we won’t ditch Houdini. We just think Blender makes for a nice addition to our toolkit.) And while watching a certain popular donut tutorial, it became painfully obvious that sometimes procedural modeling is king. As is […]
A popular misconception we often encounter when answering questions, is the notion that in order to simulate an effect A that looks somewhat similar to another algorithm we built to simulate effect B, all you need to do is tweak a few parameters. While true […]
After we went over shading, lighting and rendering refractive materials in our latest video in Rendering 101, you wanted to know how the liquid splash we used had been created. Look no further – in this tutorial Mo walks you through all the necessary settings […]
You asked us how to visualize the corona virus, but we’re by no means biologists… So we went out (Only virtually of course – we’re still curfewed as of today.) and found someone who is more qualified than us to cover that task. May we […]
Building on our last setup, we’re covering rendering out your caustics using COPs, art directing their pattern and making your caustics tileable. Download Project File
Last week we’ve been visited by our good friend Fritz “Frizz the Whizz” Kemmler – a most talented developer. And while pondering some other algorithms, we needed a bit of distraction. So we ended up throwing together this one: A very straightforward and not so […]
Watch pt. 2 here. In part two of our tutorial on Kernel Density Estimation Graph Bundlig we’re implementing the setup and adapt it to create smooth animations. EDIT: It’s been brought to our attention that there is another neat graph bundling technique based off of […]
Watch pt. 1 here. Let’s spread a bit of joy and dive into VEX and Houdini-SOPs again to implement a really neat technique from a french/dutch paper covering graph bundling. While graph bundling is usually found in network analysis or geovisualization, we’re gonna adapt the […]
That’s it for the first sprint of “Houdini in five minutes”. We’ll probably publish additional five minute tutorials in the future but for now it’s back to our default schedule: Bi-Weekly Free tut and premium courses on Patreon. Free Resources (Apart from Entagma): Matt Estela’s […]
In our final project for this first sprint of “Houdini in five minutes” we’re gonna build a tactical shooter style isocontour map with a bunch of moving particles. We’re gonna be using Houdini’s built in SOPs, a bit of MOPs (www.motionoperators.com) and Redshift (www.redshift3d.com). In […]
In our final project for this first sprint of “Houdini in five minutes” we’re gonna build a tactical shooter style isocontour map with a bunch of moving particles. We’re gonna be using Houdini’s built in SOPs, a bit of MOPs (www.motionoperators.com) and Redshift (www.redshift3d.com). In […]
In our final project for this first sprint of “Houdini in five minutes” we’re gonna build a tactical shooter style isocontour map with a bunch of moving particles. We’re gonna be using Houdini’s built in SOPs, a bit of MOPs (www.motionoperators.com) and Redshift (www.redshift3d.com). In […]
Let’s put our newfound knowledge of packed primitives and the MOPs toolkit to use and build a straightforward mechanical display! Download Motion Operators for free. Download Project File
Let’s dive into our last bunch of videos in this first sprint of “Houdini in five minutes” with a seemingly dry topics: Packed Primitives / Instances. Although slightly technical, it’s a powerful concept that enables Houdini to work on massive scenes.
After we’re done setting up our simulation, let’s render it! This time using Redshift, one of our favorite engines when it comes to working and rendering in Houdini. Yes it doesn’t come with Houdini. Yes it’s a third party addon. Yes it costs money. However […]
With version 17, Houdini introduced a new simulation framework called vellum. It is based on position based dynamics and thus offers a relatively fast way to simulate a multitude of effects. In our case we’re gonna use it to set up a bunch of grains […]
Houdini isn’t just a great tool for procedural geometry creation – it’s also the single most powerful particle system we’ve seen to this day. Plus: The particles are deeply integrated into Houdini’s functionality, so you can combine them with virtually any tool Houdini has to […]
Ever wanted to take your meshes apart and work on their individual polygons? No? Doesn’t matter – here’s the foreach loop which allows you to do exactly that! Download Project File
The very first (and still imho the most fun) way to dive into simulation territory is Houdini’s SOP solver: It allows you to execute a node tree on a previous frame’s data. This gives you the ability to create evolving shapes, hand built particle systems […]
Apart from attributes, loops and iterative techniques are maybe the most useful concept when building your procedural geometry inside Houdini. With very efficient node trees we can cook up pretty intricate effects. NOTE: As I might have mentioned, Mantra is by no means a fast […]
A few words on how to get our animated geo out into other tools. And more importantly a few thoughts about helping yourself when stuck in Houdini. NOTE: As I might have mentioned, Mantra is by no means a fast render engine, so I decided […]
Let’s get things moving and build procedural animations using our scatter setup. And while we’re at it why not talk a bit about more or less clever ways to set this up… NOTE: As I might have mentioned, Mantra is by no means a fast […]
How about we start art directing our scattered spheres and rebuild our setup so we can paint where we want our objects to got? Look no further! NOTE: As I might have mentioned, Mantra is by no means a fast render engine, so I decided […]
A bit of depth of field can never harm! Learn how to tweak your render settings in Mantra for final rendering. Download Project File
What is geometry worth if we can’t generate an image out of it? Let’s do this by setting up Mantra, Houdini’s built in render engine. Download Project File
What on earth did we just do?! Let’s talk a bit more about one of Houdini’s fundamental building blocks: Attributes. Download Project File
Let’s get cracking and build our very first setup! Download Project File
Skip to 02:05 if you’re tired of Mo’s semi-motivational ranting. Houdini 2020! We’ve seen it pop up often enough on our social media timelines. And to help you transition to this amazing tool, we’re creating these five minute(ish) tutorials to help you quickly graps the […]
Since the release of Blender 2.8 people are looking into Eevee, their rasterisation real time render engine. Eevee is free and gives good and quick results, so why not bringing over effects from Houdini to render there. In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the […]
A quick and easy method for guiding particles / agents / things around obstacles, using Attribute Blur and Measurement SOPs. Download Project File
In this Quicktip Manu will share his settings for combining standard navigation in Blender’s viewport while keeping most other shortcuts untouched to be able to follow Blender tutorials using Blender style shortcuts.
Houdini 18 has been released! While Manu is still busy wrapping his head around Solaris (tutorials covering his efforts are coming…), I had the absolute pleasure to comb through H18’s new features list and compile my list of neat new nodes I found. I grouped […]
While Manu and I have been on season break, my twitter stream washed up these mesmerizing, beautiful videos. Turns out they are created by Sage Jenson, a genius digital artists. But not only do they create these fantastic pieces of art, they also go to […]
Mo caught a cold, Manu is freezing, we’re both so pale our cameras have trouble finding a proper exposure – that’s right, it’s finally summer in Germany! Yes, it definitely took us longer than anticipated to get back and restart the free stream! We’ll be […]
We finally FINALLY(!) got a redesign for entagma.com! Believe me it was a ride. We should maybe talk this through in a nerd rant. This video gives a quick overview of the site’s major new features. However be aware this is all pretty new and […]
Thanks so much for your feedback, support, links, questions, everything! You are amazing – we’re glad & proud to be part of this community! Wow – it’s been a long season! Time for us to recharge our batteries, read some papers, try failing less at […]
Data Viz – ever tried creating a bunch of smoothly connecting lines manually? Me neither, that just seems too involved. Enter Houdini. But how do you create control vertices for those subdivision curves? In this tutorial we’ll roll our own little algorithm for creating control […]
As position based simulation techniques are very fast theses days, it is possible to use them to confrom intersecting spheres to each other, to model foam. Nevertheless there are other possibilities, too.
Usually you’d find pyro setups behind all kinds of explosions, fires and sometimes fireworks, but how about something more calm? Something like a wind tunnel used to evaluate the aerodynamic properties of cars, trains and planes? (Please do not use this setup to evaluate any […]
This is the second part of a two part tutorial. Part one
This is the first part of a two part tutorial. Part two will be available soon. Polyfolding is an interesting effect where you split up an object to individual bands and make them curl up. It can be used to disintegrate an object or make […]
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When my office mate Benno asked me to come up with a setup to turn a bunch of hexagons into a voronoi cell pattern, it came to my mind that there is a wide variety of techniques in Houdini to achieve such a transition effect: […]
