All Posts tagged “Rendering”

Melting Complex Objects

Melting Complex Objects Part 2 – Rendering

Welcome to the second and final part of our mini series on how to melt complex objects with fine details, textures and multiple materials. All without melting your pc as well! In the first part we built a setup to retain geometric detail and now […]

Melting Complex Objects

Melting Complex Objects Part 1

You guys seem to like melting things! So over the next two free tutorials, we’re going to answer one of the more common questions: How to melt more complex objects with fine details, textures and multiple materials. All without melting your pc as well! Watch […]

Freetut H20 Clouds

New In Houdini 20: Cloud Workflow

Houdini 20 comes with a completely rebuilt cloud workflow, which makes it a whole lot easier to create a wide variety of realistic clouds. So let’s build one from scratch and take a look at the new cloud shape tools, noises and shaders! Download Project […]

New In Houdini 20: Feathers 03 – Simulating And Rendering

Houdini 20 is out and the literal poster child of this release is the new Feather workflow. And this really is a whole workflow, because it offers tools not only for creating feathers but also for creating a whole plumage, simming and rendering. So, let’s […]

DIY Rendering Engine Like It’s 1975

What do you do when you need fast info passes rendered out but are too stupid to set up something in ROPs and too lazy to use Solaris? Right – you build yourself a 1970s render engine straight in SOPs. Clever? Not sure. Useful? Definitely. […]

Stable Diffusion 2.0 Quickstart

It’s come so far that even Mo couldn’t ignore AI any longer, so he reluctantly started diving into diffusion models. When he emerged a month later (and very unkempt) this is what he found out. This tutorial covers installing Stable Diffusion 2.0 using Automatic1111’s webUI, […]

KarmaXPU Quickstart Pt.4: Excursion – Visualizing Lipid Membranes

Notes:– I’m recommending to stay away from refractive materials in rendering. This is due to the fact of this particular group of students having limited rendering resources. If however you have those resources, go wild! Mo had the pleasure of joining Dr. Jeroen Claus of […]

KarmaXPU Quickstart Pt.3: Excursion – Visualizing Proteins

Notes:– It *could* be that 1 Houdini unit = 1 angstrom (which is 0.1 nm)– I’m recommending to stay away from refractive materials in rendering. This is due to the fact of this particular group of students having limited rendering resources. If however you have […]

KarmaXPU Quickstart Pt. 1 – Basic Lighting, Shading & Rendering

In this tutorial we’ll shade, light and render the geometry we created in our previous tutorial, inspired by Alex Valentina’s Work for Form Mag. We’ll be setting up a simple scene graph in solaris, import and light our geometry using an HDRI and then spend […]

KarmaXPU Quickstart Pt. 0 – Creating Our Test Geometry

It’s finally time we talk about Karma again. Nope not your spiritual system, but Houdini 19.5’s built in new’ish rendering engine. It’s been making quite fast progress since the time it’s been released a few versions back, so in our opinion with KarmaXPU being in […]

Procedurally Create Detroit Agate with a Karma Shader

If layers over layers of car paint accumulate in the factory over the years they create grey rocks with magic hidden inside. Once you start to cut and polish these rocks all the individual color layers are revealed and create a color explosion. In this […]

Demystifying Hamburg’s Concert Hall’s Acoustic Panels

Having visited Hamburg recently I was smitten by the city’s concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie. What looks quite minimalistic from afar turns out to be an incredibly detailed building. Of special interes to me were the acoustic panels within the main concert hall, developed by Yasuhisa […]

Geometry Nodes 3.0 – Plant Growth with Fields

Now that Blender 3.0 is in beta it is time for a little more advanced setup. In this tutorial Manuel will build a multi-layered growth effect. Fully procedural plants are scattered on a procedural terrain and controlled by an effector empty. They all grow individually […]

Test Driving Houdini 19: Creating Wrinkles & Rendering Them In Karma XPU

It’s Halloween(ish). – so Mo decided he’d create something creepy. And this is as creepy as his mind gets. No judging. In this tutorial we’ll cover the creation off stress maps to drive the procedural generation of wrinkles using Houdini’s Karma XPU and MaterialX displacement. […]

Geometry Nodes 3.0 – Cube Grid with Fields

The Geometry Nodes Team decided to redo the architecture of Geometry Nodes for the Blender 3.0 release. Fortunately we can have a look at the new way of working immediately by using the 3.0 Alpha. This tutorial creates a similar effect as my older Cube […]

No VEX Houdini: My First(ish) Setup: Abstract Sails

Continuing our “No VEX Houdini” tutorials, Mo presents one of the first setups he built when he started using Houdini. He also rambles a bit about what Manu and Mo actually mean when they talk about using VFX tools for abstract design. In this quick […]

Cube Grid – Use Color on Geometry Nodes Instances

Geometry Nodes inside of Blender is constantly updated and expanded on. Using the latest Blender 3.0 Alpha we can now transfer color to geometry generated through instances. This wasn’t possible before and opens a wide range of possibilities for creative expression in Blender. Follow Manuel […]

A Procedural Polka Dot Shader with Analytic Normals

Today we’ll build a procedural shader that produces a polka dot pattern. While this is quite informative, as we learn how to tile the uv space, the interesting part is creating the normal map. We want to use the implicit sphere equation to derive z […]

Rope Typography Using Houdini’s Vellum & Octane Render

After seeing polygonpen’s C4D Rope tutorial on Lesterbanks, we though – why not give it a go in Houdini. So in this tutorial we’re gonna go over creating a basic vellum sim which will form the backbone of our rope typo, then creating said rope […]

Axiom Solver: Dissolving Logo

In our tradition to being late to the party, we’re giving Matt Puchala’s Axiom solver a spin. It’s a lightweight and fast pyro solver for SideFX Houdini, enabling interactive workflows with smoke or fire simulations. In this video we’re gonna use it together with Houdini’s […]

Production Setup: Audioreactive Particles Using Vellum & POPs

You wanted to know how to set up something similar to Daniel Sierra’s “Oscillate” in Houdini. So in this tutorial we’ll walk you through the steps necessary to not only create an audioreactive Vellum simulation but also add secondary particles into that simulation and create […]

Holiday Giveaway: Mantra Thinfilm Shader

Happy Holidays! Turns out rendering spherical objects has become our very own tradition by now, so as an addon to Monday’s tut and the question “But can u do it in Mantra?” – Here’s a small present hastily thrown together by yours truly: A VEX […]

Bubbles Again: Simulating Soap Swirls Using FLIP

By now it might have become apparent that Mo might be a bit fixated with soap bubbles and soap films. We covered Minimal Surfaces, soap film shading in Octane and in Redshift. Yet we deliberately omitted one crucial step in rendering nice soap bubbles: Creating […]

New In Houdini 18.5

Full Playlist Here Houdini 18.5 is out! And here are the features that got us excited! Of course there’s much more. (SOP based rigging anyone?!) We had great joy in seeing that Karma has come a long way and that real time pyro sims in […]

Workshop: Unreal Engine Quickstart

Full playlist here. Super hyped to have Matthias Winckelmann on board! You might know him from “Rachael is not real” where he built an AI design influencer bot that posts daily renderings to instagram. Matthias has been using Unreal Engine in his personal design process […]