All Posts tagged “Tutorial”

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.

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

VEX in Houdini: Movie Color Visualisation

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 […]

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.

Guest Tutorial: Yader – Poly Garden

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 […]

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 […]

Special Guest Tutorial: Shortest Path Growth

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.

Naive Path Finding

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 […]

Custom Particle System in VEX

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.

VEX / VOPs Basics: PCFind

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.

Colored Trails (Point Advection & Rendering)

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 […]

Differential Mesh Growth

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 […]

Differential Line Growth

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 […]

Loops & Subdivisions

Recently two projects caught my eye – one is called “Subdivisions” by Adam Heslop, the other one is the new SideFX Ident by Simon Holmedal. Both employ (as far as I can guess) a technique to subdivide a selected part of a mesh over and […]

Fractal Ornaments

It often occurs to me that I need to look up certain functions in Houdini. One of those things that I constantly struggle with are For-Loops. So as a reminder to me and to you – here’s a tutorial about their use. We’re gonna build […]

Quicktip: Abstract Shapes

After publishing the VDB denting tutorial, we received some questions regarding how we created the geometry used in the preview rendering for that tutorial. In this quicktip we’ll show you how to create the organic shapes we used when testing that setup. It’s a neat […]

Houdini: True 3D Reaction Diffusion

You might have seen this effect more frequently during the last months: Those growing organic blobs that cover a surface in intricate Patterns (sometimes resembling the texture found in a Keith Haring painting). These patterns are the result of a process called Reaction Diffusion.

Creating Geometry With Python In C4D

HI people from the internet. After posting my geometry creation tutorial for Houdini, people approached me with the question, if such a plexus effect is possible in Cinema 4D, too. And I said no, not without plugins. But after thinking about it for a little […]

Houdini: Boolean Volume Denting

When I saw this tutorial on Greyscalegorilla, it occurred to me that although I liked the results a lot the process of sculpting and posemorphing would be a bit too unflexible for my needs. And of course it would also be too tedious for a lazy […]

Creating Geometry With VEX

Did you ever wonder how to create polygons and polylines through code in Houdini. It’s a straigtforward concept. But you have to know some things about the way Houdini organizes and stores geometry in memory. In this tutorial Manuel will walk you through the process […]