Houdini in Five Minutes

A few techniques covered in this course: Procedural Growth (pt. 10), Simulating & texturing grains (pt. 13) and simulating particles (pt. 12)

About This Course

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 principles of what working in Houdini is like

Recommended Prerequisites

  • Useful but not mandatory: Prior knowledge in any 3D DCC
  • Definitely needed: At least an intermediate level of frustration tolerance
  • Maybe: Willingness to do a bit of scripting
Liked it? Take a second to support Moritz on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!

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 […]

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 20: That’s All Folks!

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 […]