All posts tagged “Houdini”

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

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

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

Nerd Rant: DOPs

Recorded back in October when Mo was cranky due to reasons, Manu decided to discuss his (then) favorite topic when it comes to Houdini: DOPs. Turns out it is not so much Mo’s favorite topic. Watch this nerd rant to see us being cranky and […]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

Knitting in 3D – Building a UV deformer

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 […]

Easy Soap Film Shader

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 […]

Easy Minimal Surfaces

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.

Modeling and Rendering a Quartz Crystal in Houdini 16

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 […]

Quick VDB Clouds

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.

DIY Scatter Tool (Solving Problems in Houdini)

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 […]