It finally happened – here is the long feared hardware episode you’ve not been waiting for! As Mo recently started freelancing, he decided he’d need a new computer. Also he decided to build it himself. Enjoy the resulting chaos.
All posts filed under “Free Tutorials”
Quicktip: Instancing In Redshift (Bonus: Particle Advection)
Last week Germany was still under a massive heat wave. And an office doesn’t get colder by running smoke sims and rendering. That’s why I had to keep this one relatively short (let’s call it a speedrun): We’ll build a particle system advected by a […]
Isocontours: Importing & Exporting Vectors to/from Houdini
Niklas Rosenstein is with us again! And if Niklas is in the house, chances for some Python code are pretty high. This time we’ll import vectors from Illustrator into Houdini, create an isocontour-effect and export the result back to illustrator.
Low Poly Transform
Blending smoothly between a high-poly mesh and its low-poly representation is a subtle but useful effect. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create two versions of the same object, one smooth and one facetted, with the exact same topology. This enables you to blend […]
A Tribute To Numberphile: Visualizing Recamán’s Sequence in VEX
One of my favorite Youtube Channels is Numberphile. They are one of the driving forces behind my newfound interest in maths. In a recent video they shed some light onto a sequence of numbers called Recamán’s Sequence.
Kitbash Vein Growth Part 2
This time we extend the setup from two weeks ago.
Kitbash Vein Growth Part 1
This tutorial shows you how to create a procedural vein, that is composed of small segments that you drawn by hand. This way the overall look of the vein is art-directable.
Constraint Networks For Rigid Body Simulations
Ever tried having a bunch of instances rotating without intersecting each other? It’s a task we commonly encounter. The solution that usually works for us is a constraint network that’ll pin our instances to their position while still allowing them to rotate freely.
Quicktip: Signed Distance Outlines
S Due to the fact that the SDF is defined in 3D space the setup can easily be animated, too, to create some fake water ripples. Download Project File
Interference Patterns
While on season break we received quite a few questions. One of those mails pointed us to the amazing work of Loris Cecchini, a sculptor who created (among other stunning artworks) those wave pattern sculptures. At first it didn’t seem clear what’s going on there.
Directions From Growth
When dealing with growth solvers, often you not only need the growth itself, but a direction vector. For exapmple to copy feathers onto a surface, or other directed object, like knitting loops. In this tutorial Manuel explains how to calculate direction vectors on the surface […]
Quicktip: Rayleigh Taylor Instability (Season 3 Is Here!)
Yeeeha! We are back. To start off season three in a gentle way, let’s look at an easy setup to produce intricate eye candy. Also watch Mo burning his fingers on microwaved ink. The pleasures of real world experiments.
TD Essentials: Parallel Transport
Curve framing is important for a lot of things, like trajectories, creating geometry from curves or aligning copied geometry to curves. In this tutorial Manuel implements the parallel transport algorithm that transports an initial normal vector along a curve to create a smoothly varying frame. […]
Season Two Is Coming To An End
With our new years resolutions still fresh and our bellies still full with cookies and christmas cake, we decided that in order to deliver everything we have in mind for 2018 it would be good to start the new year with… a break. Season two […]
Fakebroidery: Needlework in Houdini
There are very few things more hypnotic than watching an embroidery machine do its work. When watching my wife’s machine working on festive decoration, I thought about how I’d create something similar in Houdini. Turns out it isn’t too complicated once you’ve figured out how […]
PBD: Dynamic Weave
Today it’s about dynamically generating a piece of woven fabric. Manuel explains how to write a VEX wrangle in the DOP context to generate connecting yarns in every frame.
Creating A Procedural Snowflake
we have something special for the upcoming holiday season for you: Snowflakes! This was the very first paper I ever implemented in Houdini – what a feeling! I recorded it a while back in summer but then decided to wait until the right season. As […]
Procedural Modeling Of Water Droplets
If you want to make your product appear nice and fresh in your TV commercial, chances are that you’ll put water droplets on it. This effect is very popular in advertising. In todays installment of the Entagma tutorial stream, Manuel shows you how to procedurally […]
Procedural Modeling: Quilling
What popped up as some random images on my pinterest feed turned out to be a whole universe of an art form in itself: Quilling. The art and craft of rolling and shaping paper to form intricate mosaics depicting a wide variety of subjects.
Live Rendering of Heightfields in RS
Heightfields are a nice addition to Houdini 16 for environment work. They more or less replicate the functionality of programs like Worldmachine. In today’s tutorial Manuel shows you how to create a terrain from scratch in Houdini and how to render it directly in Redshift3D, […]
Yarnworks: Wire Solver and Constraint Networks in DOPs
To complement our PBD Wire Setup, here is a tutorial on a topic I’ve personally been struggling a lot when I first tried wrapping my head around constraint networks. Similar to what we’ve been doing in PBDs, we’re gonna build a network of interconnecting wires […]
Scaling The Bullets Dynamically
Today we scale live dynamic objects and make the scaling affect the running sim. You’ll gain some insights into how the Bullet solver inside of Houdini works and how it operates more efficiently using packed primitives. Manuel goes over the ins and outs of modifying […]
Artistic Quadtrees
You might not be aware of the fact that you most likely have been using the algorithm we’re discussing here – at least if you’ve ever worked in 3D. Quadtrees (and their relatives, KD-Trees and Octrees) are used to accelerate point queries (ever used pcfind() […]
VEX in Houdini: Space Colonization
Branching growth is fascinating as it has a lot of hidden structure to it and is very intricate. Many methods have been proposed over the years to model branching structures, like trees. One algorithm that is particularly beautiful and simple is the “Space Colonization” algorithm, […]
We’re on Patreon!
Whoopee! The inevitable just happened. We’re on Patreon now. If you wanna show us your appreciation, we’ve got some special things prepared for you.
Quicktip: Visualizing Flight Paths
The past decade has seen a wealth of data visualization elements in UI design, movie sets and motion graphics. When it comes to creating these elements you’re left with two approaches: faking it vs. the real thing. In this quicktip we’re doing the real thing […]
Connect The Yarns – With the PBD Solver
This time Manuel is talking about a straightforward way of dynamically connecting simulated yarns. Although, this can be achieved with the wire solver this tutorial uses the PBD solver (grains) in Houdini to simulate the yarns, as it’s easier to work with and gives nice […]
Niklas Rosenstein: Python in Houdini – Visualizing Satellite Data
Finally we venture into new territory in Houdini: Python! With the help of our very talented friend Niklas Rosenstein we’ll have a look at how to import actual satellite data from ESA’s Gaia mission into Houdini and use it to render our very own star […]
VEX & VOPs: Perspective Halftone Illusion
Occasionally we find an E-Mail in our inbox that asks how to achieve a given effect. This time Jesper asked us how we’d go about creating something like this – spheres arranged in space to create the illusion of a halftone image when viewed from […]
Knitting in 3D – Building a UV deformer
Knitting in 3D is quite popular these days. Although it is not too hard to achieve, building a knitting setup presents some challenges to the TD. In this tutorial Manuel shows you one way of modeling a knitted 3D object and a method of making […]
VEX in Houdini: Movie Color Visualisation
Quite some time ago I was trying to cook up something like the guys at moviebarcode.com: Some setups that’d deconstruct a given movie into its individual colors in a visually pleasing manner. Recently I thought it was time to try another attempt. Instead of linearly […]
VEX in Houdini: Diffusion Limited Aggregation (Plus Rendering in Mantra & Redshift)
When we saw Andy Lomas’ “Aggregation” series a few years back we were struck. How could you generate those intricate particle sculptures? The series’ title hinted at one possible solution: Diffusion limited aggregation or DLA. In this tutorial we’ll build a basic DLA setup using […]
FMX Special: A Point Based Growth Solver
At FMX 2017 Entagma had the pleasure to talk as part of “Houdini Day”. Among other things we explained how to create a propagation growth solver. Here we’ll show how to build this setup. We introduce the concept behind propagation growth and implement the solver […]
Easy Soap Film Shader
By far the most frequent question we received after our minimal surfaces tutorial was “how do you build that bubble shader?”. The wait is over – in this tutorial we’ll go over how to build a plausible soap film shader in Houdini’s Mantra and Octane […]
Easy Minimal Surfaces
This episode we managed to get away from our workstations and head outside to Munich’s beautiful olympic park. There we found some prime examples of the shapes soap films form when they evolve between metal wires.
Packing The Torus
Dense packings of objects onto surfaces always look stunning. There are many analytical algorithms out there to compute such a packing. In this video we’ll explore a simulation based approach to achieve a dense packing of particles with varying radius. This is more versatile and […]
Guest Tutorial: Yader – Poly Garden
We’re happy to present to you another special guest on Entagma – this time it’s Yader (who some of you might know through his great Cinema 4D tutorials). In his tutorial he’s gonna shed some light on how he built his Poly Garden setup that […]
Modeling and Rendering a Quartz Crystal in Houdini 16
When testing out a new render engine (or any tool that can do rendering), one of the typical objects I try to get a decent image of is a quartz crystal. In order to get that right, a rendering needs to contain effects such as […]
Refine The Ripple Solver
Last time I announced a second part to the ripple solver tutorial. And here it is! This time, I rebuild the ripple solver setup by using a SOP solver to update the simulated geometry. Then I show you how to vary the wavespeed spatially. And […]
Using The Ripple Solver
The nice thing about Houdini is its versatility. Not only does it offer DOP solvers for fluids, RBDs and cloth, like many other applications, but it has some very specialized solvers, too. One of them being the ripple solver, that can be used to propagate […]
Quick VDB Clouds
After being asked how to create clouds for rendering in Octane (or any other Engine that supports VDBs) we dove into that topic a bit and the quickest way we found was to use the cloud tools that Houdini provides.
QUICKTIP: Select And Navigate
Today for something a little different. I know, Houdini is mainly about complex simulations, VEX and VOPS, but when I started out with the software, it was mainly the little things, like navigating and selecting, that I needed to learn, to feel at home. That’s […]
DIY Scatter Tool (Solving Problems in Houdini)
We get the question “why are you doing that setup this particular way?” reather often. As with most setups in Houdini there are many ways of building it. In this tutorial we’d like to go over different approaches of solving a very basic problem: Scattering […]
Special Guest Tutorial: Shortest Path Growth
Say hi to our very good friend Ben Watts of BW Design. We’re thrilled to have him on Entagma for a guest tutorial showing his newest technique for vein growth in Houdini without any VEX.
Naive Path Finding
This one is a rather brute force approach for a problem we had to solve on a recent job: Finding a path through a bunch of obstacles. Admittedly what we implement here isn’t a very sophisticated algorithm, but its power lies in its simplicity: It […]
Custom Particle System in VEX
Dobromir of Inlifethrill Designs asked us how we’d go about recreating this. And as I’m quite untalented with Houdini’s particle system, I turned to VEX to create this custom particle system in which individual particles attract each other.
Special Guest Tutorial: Creating Digital Assets For Cinema 4D
We are thrilled to introduce to you our very first special guest: Noseman! Not only is he an awesome teacher, he also tackles one of the most requested tutorial topics.
VEX: Space Filling Curves (aka “that Windows 95 Screensaver”)
Another question that we’ve been asked is how to rebuild a setup similar to that infamous screensaver that slowly filled your display with a maze of pipes. Among various approaches (including some L-System experiments) the most naive setup won. Of course.