VEX & VOPs: Perspective Halftone Illusion

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Occasionally we find an E-Mail in our inbox that asks how to achieve a given effect. This time Jesper asked us how we’d go about creating something like this – spheres arranged in space to create the illusion of a halftone image when viewed from the right point.

What this illusion combines are two vintage techniques: Halftone rasterization and perspective projection.

Halftone rasterization is the process of breaking down a greyscale image into discrete dots of varying size in order to create the illusion of different brightness values when viewed from afar.

Forced perspective is a technique that’s been used as a practical effect in movies like “Close Encounters of The Third Kind” or “The Aviator” to make models appear bigger than they are. (It’s been abused all too often to seemingly hold the tower of Pisa as well.)

Also this article on Wired does a really great job at explaining how perspective and forced perspective works.

Download Project File (.hipnc)

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8 Comments

  1. I am the guy suggesting to stick to one way of VEX-ing per tutorial, Wrangle or VOP. You know, for consistency. Thank you for your quick response! Coming from Xpresso in C4D, I am used to experimenting with nodes, rather fighting the computer on syntax of code language. Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally aware of of the advantages of code, just not felling familiar with it yet. Thank you again!

  2. Also, the biggest advantage of using VEX instead of VOP is its blazing speed. Middle click on the nodes (Wrangler and VOP) and compare the Last cook time parameter. VEX is going to be much faster, especially on big setups.

  3. Pingback: Create a Halftone projection With VEX and VOPs in Houdini - Lesterbanks

  4. Hello Moritz, it is probably a stupid question, but i am new to houdini and i can’t figure out how to make a camera rail like in C4D?
    Thank you for great tutorials! I’ve learned a lot from you

  5. Thanks for the tutorial guys, I am new to vex so I found this to be a good start for me. I used your system for my student Renderman project at SCAD but added in a motion picture instead of a static image. Please have a look and feedback is welcomed. https://vimeo.com/237399595

    • In my case for points positioning I’ve simply blended original points positions with the camera one. But I like your full math one 😉

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