Quicktip: Abstract Shapes

comments 14
Free Tutorials

After publishing the VDB denting tutorial, we received some questions regarding how we created the geometry used in the preview rendering for that tutorial. In this quicktip we’ll show you how to create the organic shapes we used when testing that setup. It’s a neat combination of geometry and VDBs.

Download Project File (.hpinc)

Liked it? Take a second to support Moritz on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!

14 Comments

  1. NoDeRunner

    would you mind telling which Hardware you use??
    Just RAM/CPU/GPU

    Apart from that… Thumbs up !! Clear loud audio, not too much talking around.

    • Heyhey,
      we’re using different hardware. For example my personal workstations are one quite old i7-990x with 12GB RAM and one GTX580, my newer is an i7-3920 with 32GB RAM and 2xGTX780 + 1xGTX980Ti. At the office we still have other configs. As far as Houdini is concerned you’re good if you have a fast CPU (at least a 6-core i7) and at least 32GB (better 64GB) of RAM.
      Cheers,
      Moritz

      • NoDeRunner

        Thanks for that, so I can have kind of a rough estimate how much coffee to prepare, when tryin to”recreate” Your Tutorials…

        I am actually a physics/CS student, but our 9TFlops cluster is sadly not available for Houdini…:-(

        So I have tostick with my laptop and expand it at its limits… (32GB+SSD)

        THX again for the Tuts&info

      • Hi Moritz,

        A bit off-topic, what kind of HDD size would you recommend for simulating/caching setups of a scale such as those in all your tutorials?

        Flawless platform – thanks for the tutorials!

        • Hard to say. I personally have a 256GB SSD as primary disk and a 2TB HDD as data drive. Nowadays I’d go for a 512 GB SSD though. In general bigger = better ๐Ÿ™‚

          Cheers,
          Mo

  2. Felicia Fuchs

    Thank you very much for the tutorials! I am quite new to Houdini so it helps me a lot.

    In your tutorials you connect points and then turn these into wireframes. ( as well in your loops and subdivisions) tutorial I was wondering if there is a way to connect these to polygons? like somehow from connected points to a polygon mesh. been struggling for a while now with that issue.
    would be great if you could help

    thank you very much!

    • Hi Felicia,

      for me the most straightforward (and maybe not very clever way) to come up with something like what you’re mentioning is this setup:

      https://www.dropbox.com/s/8gpr8gcdnf8v4c7/connect_adjacent_with_polys_and_polylines.hip?dl=1

      Is that what you are looking for? In genereal you have to figure out which points should form a polygon and that you’d have to tell Houdini somehow. In the above setup I’m just generating the N nearest triangles. I’m sure there are lots of variations on this topic ๐Ÿ™‚

      Cheers,
      Mo

      • Also you might want to have a look at the Tetrahedralize-SOP.

        • Felicia Fuchs

          Thank you for your fast reply ๐Ÿ™‚

          Tetrahedralize-SOP what I was looking for in this case but the other solution gives me some very interesting effects now and I will certainly play around with it some more once Iยดve finished this project!

          Very cool.
          Cheers!

  3. Thanks for all the amazing tutorials!
    I had a question about animating the following similar setup:

    1. scatter points (generators) within a volume
    2. connect neighboring points (generators) at frame 1 and use wireframe node to generate a surface
    3. scatter new points on the resulting surface
    4. animate points (generators) from (1) and keep scattered points from (3) in their relative positions (managed to do this using the attribute interpolate node)

    What I’d like to do now is connect neighboring points from (3) similarly to what you’ve done in the video, but preserve those connections as the animation plays and the points move away/toward each other.

    Maybe this is also going to use the attribute interpolate node? I’d also be very happy to see a Vex solution to this kind of problem.

    Thank you again!

Leave a Reply to NoDeRunner Cancel reply