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 […]
All Posts filed under “Free Tutorials”
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 2
This is the second part of a two part tutorial. Part one
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 […]
Giveaway: Redshift Thinfilm Shader
Head over to our Patreon for the free .hip files. We recently had to create a physically based thinfilm shader in Redshift. This is the result. It’s a slightly simplified version of this OSL shader from gamedev.net, implemented using purely Redshift nodes.
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 […]
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. On our patreon page we offer several options of in-depth content: Hi-Res Renders For those who longed for that high reasolution […]
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 […]