Procedurally Modeling A Raspberry

Mo has recently started learning Blender. (Don’t worry – we won’t ditch Houdini. We just think Blender makes for a nice addition to our toolkit.) And while watching a certain popular donut tutorial, it became painfully obvious that sometimes procedural modeling is king. As is […]

Essential TD Skills: Designing & Implementing Algorithms

A popular misconception we often encounter when answering questions, is the notion that in order to simulate an effect A that looks somewhat similar to another algorithm we built to simulate effect B, all you need to do is tweak a few parameters. While true […]

Quicktip: Fluid Splashes Using FLIP

After we went over shading, lighting and rendering refractive materials in our latest video in Rendering 101, you wanted to know how the liquid splash we used had been created. Look no further – in this tutorial Mo walks you through all the necessary settings […]

Nerd Chat: Dr. Jeroen Claus – Covid, Proteins, Visualisation

Mo chats with Phospho’s Jeroen Claus, covering topics such as protein visualization, virus nubbins and Folding@Home. Jeroen’s Company: https://www.phospho.co.uk/ David Goodsell: https://ccsb.scripps.edu/goodsell/ Folding@Home: https://foldingathome.org/

A Bit Of VEX : Easy Caustics Generator

Last week we’ve been visited by our good friend Fritz “Frizz the Whizz” Kemmler – a most talented developer. And while pondering some other algorithms, we needed a bit of distraction. So we ended up throwing together this one: A very straightforward and not so […]

Papers Please – Graph Bundling Pt. 2: Building The Setup

Watch pt. 2 here. In part two of our tutorial on Kernel Density Estimation Graph Bundlig we’re implementing the setup and adapt it to create smooth animations. EDIT: It’s been brought to our attention that there is another neat graph bundling technique based off of […]

Papers Please – Graph Bundling Pt. 1: Theory

Watch pt. 1 here. Let’s spread a bit of joy and dive into VEX and Houdini-SOPs again to implement a really neat technique from a french/dutch paper covering graph bundling. While graph bundling is usually found in network analysis or geovisualization, we’re gonna adapt the […]

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 […]

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