It finally happened – our dear friend Simon Fiedler agreed to record a guest tutorial for us. He decided to share one of his production tricks for controlling particles: Building a swirly vector field to advect particles. Although it looks organic and natural, it’s highly […]
You just want to distract yourself on twitter and you stumble upon this tweet by Daniel Piker. Naturally we had to give it a go in Houdini. And it turns out it can be done with surprisingly few nodes and without any sort of scripting… […]
When we received an E-Mail by Eduard, asking if we had any idea about disco ball packing, we were intrigued. Eduard pointed out that his (apparently very patient) wife manually tiled this sculpture and was wondering if there’s any way to automate it. He also […]
Bubbles. Again. How thrilling. Wait – before you leave hear me out: Building this setup was one major step for me towards becoming brave enough to tackle implementing my first computer graphics paper. Andrew Glassner wrote a fantastic article about how soap bubble triplets form […]
Happy Holidays! Turns out rendering spherical objects has become our very own tradition by now, so as an addon to Monday’s tut and the question “But can u do it in Mantra?” – Here’s a small present hastily thrown together by yours truly: A VEX […]
By now it might have become apparent that Mo might be a bit fixated with soap bubbles and soap films. We covered Minimal Surfaces, soap film shading in Octane and in Redshift. Yet we deliberately omitted one crucial step in rendering nice soap bubbles: Creating […]
EDIT: Damn it, I think specular in UE and me are cursed. When I was testing this setup I had post processing exposure cranked up, which messed up my results. Turns out that specular expects a value between 0 and 1 which internally is remapped […]
Part two of working sloppily in Unreal covers setting up raytracing and materials. Also we’ll tackle the generation of normal maps from a grayscale image in Houdini, talk a bit about different approximations for the Fresnel term and finally poke around in Unreal’s console in […]
Mo has been silent for a while. That’s due to him spending his days finishing projects and yelling at Unreal Engine. The goal is getting to a point where we’re comfortable bringing together Houdini workflows and UE. That road is long. To discover Unreal, the […]
Been watching This Old Tony, Wintergatan and Stuff Made Here a lot in quarantine. And while the idea of having your own home shop and being able to weld is quite romantic, our reality is that neither do we posses the space nor the skills […]
Full Playlist Here Revisiting an old technique Manu covered a while ago. But this time using H18.5’s new KineFX tools to make it a tiny bit less painful. Nevertheless Mo of course dives into VEX and a bit of linear algebra. Links Manu’s previous tut […]
Full Playlist Here Houdini 18.5 is out! And here are the features that got us excited! Of course there’s much more. (SOP based rigging anyone?!) We had great joy in seeing that Karma has come a long way and that real time pyro sims in […]
Full playlist here. Super hyped to have Matthias Winckelmann on board! You might know him from “Rachael is not real” where he built an AI design influencer bot that posts daily renderings to instagram. Matthias has been using Unreal Engine in his personal design process […]
Watch Matthias’ Unreal Engine Quickstart here. Matthias Winckelmann talks Unreal Engine, his perspective on realtime in the commercial space, AI design influencers and what to expect (and what not) from real time engines in a design context. You might know Matthias from “Rachael is not […]
EDIT: Thanks so much for the many comments & hints! Josh Rizzo on Twitter pointed out I’m missing a few import options when loading in the alembic. Here’s how to import animated attributes without a deforming/animated mesh:– Import Alembic– Check “Set Frame Range” and “Is Sequence” […]
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Watch Mo fail as he tries rendering out a 3D Scan in Houdini’s new (and very beta) rendering engine, Karma. The perils of using beta software… 3D scanned mushroom from www.aixterior.com Download Project File
We’re thrilled to have Houdini artist supreme Vladyslav Lavrenov for a guest tutorial. And quite a hefty one! Vlad takes us through his reasoning and steps to build a path solver in Houdini to have seemingly random momevements on a grid form a coherent behaviour. […]
For our final sprint we’re talking shading, lighting and rendering our simulation results in Redshift 3D. Download Project File
This might be the first time in Entagma history that Mo is touching CHOPs. And it’s for a reason: we’re gonna adjust and filter our simulation’s result. Download Project File
In part two of our silly pillow series, Mo adds detailed wrinkles by tweaking our Vellum sim’s constraint parameters. This makes our pillow look more like something out of a Franquin comic. Also you’ll be exposed to two lines of VEX script. You’ve been warned. […]
Mo needed something relaxing after a longer stretch of math, algorithms and OpenCL. So we decided to build something quick, rewarding and fun: A weird inflatable structure in Vellum. Download Project File
One particular comment on YouTube pointed out that apparently Mo’s recordings had some sort of weird Audio issue. Today Mo goes about fixing it.
Be careful what you whish for! 🙂 In this video we’ll be diving into the depths of Houdini’s point deform node. What superficially looks like a trivial task turns out to be a bit more involved than Mo initially hoped for. Brace yourself for some […]
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 […]
