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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Position Based Dynamic effects are quite popular today as these provide us with fast, predictable and stable simulations. Houdini comes with PBDs packaged inside of the “Grains” node and with H17 with XPBD inside of the vellum solver. This video shows how to implement one of the ancestors of the PBD technique. The idea comes from an aritcle on gamasutra called Advanced Character Physics
By implementing this Verlet based cloth solver we gain quite some insight in the principles behind Position Based Dynamics.
Recorded back in October when Mo was cranky due to reasons, Manu decided to discuss his (then) favorite topic when it comes to Houdini: DOPs. Turns out it is not so much Mo’s favorite topic. Watch this nerd rant to see us being cranky and stupid about dynamics in Houdini.
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M y grudge with social media is that it is virtually impossible to find posts after a few weeks. I saw this effect on twitter in some real time engine. Unity or Unreal. I’d love to give credit to whoever cooked it up, but I’m unable to find that !”ยง$%& post again. So if you know who/what I’m talking about => comments plz!
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S moke and mirrors! Well Smoke mainly in this quicktip. We’ll look at a few of Houdini 17’s new pyro features – namely the new sourcing workflow and the ability to (easily) color your smoke simulation using a mesh’s colors.
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W ith the Houdini 17 party still going, let’s have a look at a somewhat hidden gem in H17’s tools: The UV-Layout SOP. “Wait! I don’t care about ’em UVs!” you might say. We hear you, but they are not really the focus of this tutorial. The very same tech underpinning decent UV layouts can be hijacked and used to pack something other than UV Islands. That’s right, we’re talking geometry packing!
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One of the most exciting features that Houdini 17 introduces is Vellum: A new simulation framework based on XPBD. (Extended Postion Based Dynamics – In essence grains on steroids.) That means stable and fast simulation of (almost) everything softbody: Cloth, Wires and well – softbodies. In this quickstart series we’ll take you through the bare basics of how to get started using Vellum.
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Today we’ll create a procedural rope and simulate it using the grain solver. There are always many different ways to achieve stuff in Houdini. In this tutorial I chose the VEX route to generate the rope. This gives a nice self-contained node that can easily be turned into a digital asset. The procedural rope is then deformed to a simulated wire using wire deform.