All Posts tagged “VEX”

Procedurally Create Detroit Agate with a Karma Shader

If layers over layers of car paint accumulate in the factory over the years they create grey rocks with magic hidden inside. Once you start to cut and polish these rocks all the individual color layers are revealed and create a color explosion. In this […]

Creating An Abstract Wire Sculpture

One of those classic setups again! This time we’re combining custom point advection with a few nifty techniques in Houdini to analyze how our base geometry is shaped and where its edges are. Also we’ll talk briefly about a basic rendering setup in Octane. Napoleon […]

Houdini Tutorial: Melting Things using FLIP

Learn how to turn any object into molten lava by adapting one of Houdini’s presets to liquify any geometry. Ben Watt’s tutorial that triggered Mo to look into this. While we’re not talking about shading & rendering in here, we provide a scene file that’s […]

No VEX Houdini: Organic Modelling Using Winding Numbers

Continuing our “No VEX Houdini” tutorials, Mo covers implementing a very clever technique to model organic surfaces using a mesh’s winding number, as presented in this thread on Twitter by Daniel Piker. In this quick (sub 10 min) tutorial, Mo will use one of Houdini’s […]

No VEX Houdini: My First(ish) Setup: Abstract Sails

Continuing our “No VEX Houdini” tutorials, Mo presents one of the first setups he built when he started using Houdini. He also rambles a bit about what Manu and Mo actually mean when they talk about using VFX tools for abstract design. In this quick […]

No VEX Houdini: Dancing Mocap Trails

Houdini without using VEX? It is possible. Although Mo doesn’t enjoy it, he guides you through setting up a simple abstract mocap animation using nothing but built in SOPs. No scripting in this one. Promised. Of course everything is heavily inspired by Method Studio’s seminal […]

TD Essentials: Create a Swept Phyllotaxis Operator in Houdini

Plant growth has a strong connection to mathematics. Especially the special phyllotactic distribution pattern shows up a lot in nature. Be it the head of a sunflower, a pinecone or a pineapple. The dense packing of seeds and other organs on the surface of these […]

Shadow Projections

When stumbling upon Kumi Yamashita’s amazing artworks, we felt inspired to try our hand at the underlying technique of projecting shadows from a light source. In this tutorial we’ll be creating shapes and object arrangements that form a shadow image when hit with a single […]

Guest Tutorial – Jeroen Claus: Origami Bunny

Super happy to have Phospho’s Jeroen Claus back to present one of his production setups, this time covering how to turn any geometry into an origami version of itself, inspired by the amazing work of Robby Kraft. Project Assets Download Project File

Houdini: Baking Point Attributes To Textures

EDIT: For more point to texture attribute trickery have a look at the scene files. In our tutorial on dissolving geometry we hinted at baking point distances into a texture rather than using highly subdivided geometry to store attributes from a point cloud. While this […]

Guest Tutorial: Simon Fiedler – Controlling Swirly Particles

It finally happened – our dear friend Simon Fiedler agreed to record a guest tutorial for us. He decided to share one of his production tricks for controlling particles: Building a swirly vector field to advect particles. Although it looks organic and natural, it’s highly […]

Keycap Sculptures (Disco Ball Tiling)

When we received an E-Mail by Eduard, asking if we had any idea about disco ball packing, we were intrigued. Eduard pointed out that his (apparently very patient) wife manually tiled this sculpture and was wondering if there’s any way to automate it. He also […]

Bubbles Yet Again: Implementing Glassner’s Bubble Triplets in VEX

Bubbles. Again. How thrilling. Wait – before you leave hear me out: Building this setup was one major step for me towards becoming brave enough to tackle implementing my first computer graphics paper. Andrew Glassner wrote a fantastic article about how soap bubble triplets form […]

Holiday Giveaway: Mantra Thinfilm Shader

Happy Holidays! Turns out rendering spherical objects has become our very own tradition by now, so as an addon to Monday’s tut and the question “But can u do it in Mantra?” – Here’s a small present hastily thrown together by yours truly: A VEX […]

Bubbles Again: Simulating Soap Swirls Using FLIP

By now it might have become apparent that Mo might be a bit fixated with soap bubbles and soap films. We covered Minimal Surfaces, soap film shading in Octane and in Redshift. Yet we deliberately omitted one crucial step in rendering nice soap bubbles: Creating […]

Guest Tutorial: Path Solver

We’re thrilled to have Houdini artist supreme Vladyslav Lavrenov for a guest tutorial. And quite a hefty one! Vlad takes us through his reasoning and steps to build a path solver in Houdini to have seemingly random momevements on a grid form a coherent behaviour. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

Voronoi Morph

When my office mate Benno asked me to come up with a setup to turn a bunch of hexagons into a voronoi cell pattern, it came to my mind that there is a wide variety of techniques in Houdini to achieve such a transition effect: […]