Wow – it’s been a long season! Time for us to recharge our batteries, read some papers, try failing less at implementing them and researching new tools. Yes, we are taking a season break. If you can’t get enough of our lovely voices until we’re back, we’ve got a hint for you…
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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?
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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.
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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 aerodynamic properties, it’s a visual setup, not necessarily a scientifically accurate one.)
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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 it appear from nothing. To achieve the curling behaviour some matrix math is needed. All primitives are treated like individual objects, with their own distinct transfomation matrix attached. Then, they can be put into a hierarchical relationship to make the successive curl happen.
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Another one of those physics/math/CG tropes is the double pendulum: Take a standard pendulum (one arm that can rotate around one or more axis) and attach another pundulum to its end. The fascination for this contraption comes from the fact that it behaves extremely different depending on its initial condition.
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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: Using built-in nodes vs. using VEX.
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The long (well – not really) lost holiday special surfaced! This was my first attempt at making something wintery, trying to cook up a snow globe. Turned out I tend to be better at producing weird alien orbs – so here we are.
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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.
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