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 […]
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.
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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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 […]
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.
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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() […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
We’re overwhelmed by this season and the feedback we receive from you – thanks a lot for your support and the frequent input you share! As you might be aware we’re running Entagma in our spare time, which sometimes makes it difficult to stick to […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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.
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.
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.
One of the top three questions we’ve been asked during season one was “How does PCFind work?!” and indeed the question is important as so many setups rely on the ability to find close points.
Hello people of the internet! After a tremendous start followed by a small hiatus to prepare new tutorials, setups and renderings we’re back for a second season!
We are amazed. We’re amazed by the feedback we got from you during the first months of Entagma. We’re amazed by the wealth of your artwork. We’re amazed by your enthusiasm. Entagma has come to be everything that we hoped for. And more. However as […]
Deskriptiv (https://www.deskriptiv.de) inspired me very much over the years, with their unique mixture of intricate setups and beautiful design. In this tutorial I want to show you how to rebuild one of their creations “Double Mesh” inside Houdini. “Dual Mesh”, the Houdini variant, is an […]
We’ve been visiting Ars Electronica this weekend. It was amazing. Such a weird and wonderful collection of modern nerd art presented in an astonishingly creepy environment. (Think nuclear shelter underneath an abandoned logistics center). What that meant however is that there was only very little […]
The “Spline Wrap” deformer inside of Cinema4D is a versatile tool that many artist use on a daily basis. Whether you want to wrap paint strokes along a spline or animate a snake, the defomer gives you a quick and easy way to do so. […]
As some of you already found out, it is quite possible to set up differential growth not only on a line but also on a mesh. This tutorial goes into the details of doing exactly that while allowing for some degree of art-directability (is that […]
This is a classic effect in Houdini. I stumbled upon it over at Odforce. As you will see from that thread there are many elaborate ways of achieving this kind of growing curve. However we’re gonna build a very simple version which yet offers a […]
