We’re overwhelmed by this season and the feedback we receive from you – thanks a lot for your support and the frequent input you share! As you might be aware we’re running Entagma in our spare time, which sometimes makes it difficult to stick to our ambitious weekly release schedule. Read More
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 when it comes to flight data. We’re taking publicly available airport and route data and model the (usually) invisible lines that connect our world by air travel.
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This time Manuel is talking about a straightforward way of dynamically connecting simulated yarns. Although, this can be achieved with the wire solver this tutorial uses the PBD solver (grains) in Houdini to simulate the yarns, as it’s easier to work with and gives nice results, quickly. Especially as collisions between yarns are not important here.
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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 map.
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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 the knit conform to the animated mesh.
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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 mapping the individual frames’ colors on a 2D plane, this time I wanted to create something that took advantage of 3D space.
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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 VEX and volumes. Also we’ll talk a bit about rendering our result in Mantra and Redshift.
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At FMX 2017 Entagma had the pleasure to talk as part of “Houdini Day”. Among other things we explained how to create a propagation growth solver. Here we’ll show how to build this setup. We introduce the concept behind propagation growth and implement the solver in VEX. It is point based although one might want to implement it directly in volumes. The point approach is simpler to tackle, though.
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 standalone.
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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.
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