All posts filed under “Free Tutorials”

Houdini In Five Minutes 15: Packed Primitives (Theory)

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.

Houdini In Five Minutes 14: Rendering Grains In Redshift

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 […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 13: Setting Up Grains

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 In Five Minutes 12: Setting Up Particles

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 […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 11: The Foreach Loop

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

Houdini In Five Minutes 09: For-Loops & Extrusions

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 […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 08: Exporting To Alembic

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 […]

Houdini In Ten Minutes 07: Animating The Spheres

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 […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 04: Rendering It

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

Houdini In Five Minutes 01: Houdini’s Structure

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 […]

Rendering Houdini Effects in Eevee

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 […]

Obstacle Avoidance: Flow Fields

A quick and easy method for guiding particles / agents / things around obstacles, using Attribute Blur and Measurement SOPs. Download Project File

Quicktip: Blender – Alt-Navigation

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.

New In Houdini 18

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 […]

Physarum Slime Mold

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 […]

Summer’s Finally Here! (We’re Back)

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 […]

Website Redesign: How To Use The New entagma.com

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 […]

Season 3 Finale: SeeYou in Summer!

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 […]

Season Finale: Procedural Subdivision Curves

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 […]

Analytical Foam

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.

Quick Wind Tunnel

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 […]

Polyfolding – Part 1

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 […]

Quicktip: Double Pendulum In Vellum

Another one of those physics/math/CG tropes is the double pendulum: Take a standard pendulum (one arm that can rotate around one or more axis) and attach another pundulum to its end. The fascination for this contraption comes from the fact that it behaves extremely different […]

Voronoi Morph

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: […]

Alien Orb: Vellum Grains & Redshift

The long (well – not really) lost holiday special surfaced! This was my first attempt at making something wintery, trying to cook up a snow globe. Turned out I tend to be better at producing weird alien orbs – so here we are.

Production Setup Walkthrough: Color Dust Explosion

Happy holidays everyone! After my planned snow globe tutorial turned more into a disgusting alien egg thingy, I decided to instead dig out a production setup I did a while ago, doing the (very) popular dustsplosion.

Implementing A Position Based Cloth Solver From Scratch

Position Based Dynamic effects are quite popular today as these provide us with fast, predictable and stable simulations. Houdini comes with PBDs packaged inside of the “Grains” node and with H17 with XPBD inside of the vellum solver. This video shows how to implement one […]

VOPs Quicktip: Shaping Displacement Using Modulo & Noise

My grudge with social media is that it is virtually impossible to find posts after a few weeks. I saw this effect on twitter in some real time engine. Unity or Unreal. I’d love to give credit to whoever cooked it up, but I’m unable […]

Houdini 17 Quicktip: Setting Up Colored Smoke

Smoke and mirrors! Well Smoke mainly in this quicktip. We’ll look at a few of Houdini 17’s new pyro features – namely the new sourcing workflow and the ability to (easily) color your smoke simulation using a mesh’s colors.

Houdini 17 Quicktip: Packing Geometry Using the UV-Layout SOP

With the Houdini 17 party still going, let’s have a look at a somewhat hidden gem in H17’s tools: The UV-Layout SOP. “Wait! I don’t care about ’em UVs!” you might say. We hear you, but they are not really the focus of this tutorial. […]

Houdini 17 Is Here – A Quickstart to Vellum

One of the most exciting features that Houdini 17 introduces is Vellum: A new simulation framework based on XPBD. (Extended Postion Based Dynamics – In essence grains on steroids.) That means stable and fast simulation of (almost) everything softbody: Cloth, Wires and well – softbodies. […]

Create and Simulate a Procedural Rope

Today we’ll create a procedural rope and simulate it using the grain solver. There are always many different ways to achieve stuff in Houdini. In this tutorial I chose the VEX route to generate the rope. This gives a nice self-contained node that can easily […]

Crochet – Blending between Delaunay and Voronoi

Here at Entagma we love to deal with yarns. This video extends the “yarn-effects” with a crochet approach. Using the delaunay triangulation of an input mesh and its dual diagram, the voronoi mesh, we build a procedural model that uses point color to blend smoothly […]

Houdini Game Tools: Assembling a 3D Scan Of The Earth

Although they are technically called “Game Tools” there are quite a few cases in which you might want to use these assets built by the talented folks at SideFX. For example when you’re gonna do geodata visualisation.

Building Your Own Houdini Workstation

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.

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 […]

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.