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 […]
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.
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 […]
This is the second part of a two part tutorial. Part one
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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.
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 […]
This time we extend the setup from two weeks ago.
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.
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
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.
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. […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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.
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.
One of the great things about the Houdini community is that we’re always confronted with clever questions and with clever answers too. “How do I color strands using an image’s color palette?” was the comment on Vimeo that led to this setup. Yet when talking […]
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 […]
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 […]
In this quickie we’ll go over how to turn standard voronoi cells into something alittle bit more organic. We’re going to use a combination of standard SOPs to quickly build a versatile procedural setup which allows you to create a plethora of different patterns.
