All Posts tagged “Tutorial

Papers Please – Graph Bundling Pt. 2: Building The Setup

Watch pt. 2 here. In part two of our tutorial on Kernel Density Estimation Graph Bundlig we’re implementing the setup and adapt it to create smooth animations. EDIT: It’s been brought to our attention that there is another neat graph bundling technique based off of […]

Papers Please – Graph Bundling Pt. 1: Theory

Watch pt. 1 here. Let’s spread a bit of joy and dive into VEX and Houdini-SOPs again to implement a really neat technique from a french/dutch paper covering graph bundling. While graph bundling is usually found in network analysis or geovisualization, we’re gonna adapt the […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 20: That’s All Folks!

That’s it for the first sprint of “Houdini in five minutes”. We’ll probably publish additional five minute tutorials in the future but for now it’s back to our default schedule: Bi-Weekly Free tut and premium courses on Patreon. Free Resources (Apart from Entagma): Matt Estela’s […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 15: Packed Primitives (Theory)

Let’s dive into our last bunch of videos in this first sprint of “Houdini in five minutes” with a seemingly dry topics: Packed Primitives / Instances. Although slightly technical, it’s a powerful concept that enables Houdini to work on massive scenes.

Houdini In Five Minutes 14: Rendering Grains In Redshift

After we’re done setting up our simulation, let’s render it! This time using Redshift, one of our favorite engines when it comes to working and rendering in Houdini. Yes it doesn’t come with Houdini. Yes it’s a third party addon. Yes it costs money. However […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 13: Setting Up Grains

With version 17, Houdini introduced a new simulation framework called vellum. It is based on position based dynamics and thus offers a relatively fast way to simulate a multitude of effects. In our case we’re gonna use it to set up a bunch of grains […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 12: Setting Up Particles

Houdini isn’t just a great tool for procedural geometry creation – it’s also the single most powerful particle system we’ve seen to this day. Plus: The particles are deeply integrated into Houdini’s functionality, so you can combine them with virtually any tool Houdini has to […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 11: The Foreach Loop

Ever wanted to take your meshes apart and work on their individual polygons? No? Doesn’t matter – here’s the foreach loop which allows you to do exactly that! Download Project File

Houdini In Five Minutes 09: For-Loops & Extrusions

Apart from attributes, loops and iterative techniques are maybe the most useful concept when building your procedural geometry inside Houdini. With very efficient node trees we can cook up pretty intricate effects. NOTE: As I might have mentioned, Mantra is by no means a fast […]

Houdini In Five Minutes 08: Exporting To Alembic

A few words on how to get our animated geo out into other tools. And more importantly a few thoughts about helping yourself when stuck in Houdini. NOTE: As I might have mentioned, Mantra is by no means a fast render engine, so I decided […]

Houdini In Ten Minutes 07: Animating The Spheres

Let’s get things moving and build procedural animations using our scatter setup. And while we’re at it why not talk a bit about more or less clever ways to set this up… NOTE: As I might have mentioned, Mantra is by no means a fast […]

Production Setup Walkthrough: Color Dust Explosion

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.

Houdini Game Tools: Assembling a 3D Scan Of The Earth

Although they are technically called “Game Tools” there are quite a few cases in which you might want to use these assets built by the talented folks at SideFX. For example when you’re gonna do geodata visualisation.

Quicktip: Instancing In Redshift (Bonus: Particle Advection)

Last week Germany was still under a massive heat wave. And an office doesn’t get colder by running smoke sims and rendering. That’s why I had to keep this one relatively short (let’s call it a speedrun): We’ll build a particle system advected by a […]

Interference Patterns

While on season break we received quite a few questions. One of those mails pointed us to the amazing work of Loris Cecchini, a sculptor who created (among other stunning artworks) those wave pattern sculptures. At first it didn’t seem clear what’s going on there.

Fakebroidery: Needlework in Houdini

There are very few things more hypnotic than watching an embroidery machine do its work. When watching my wife’s machine working on festive decoration, I thought about how I’d create something similar in Houdini. Turns out it isn’t too complicated once you’ve figured out how […]

Creating A Procedural Snowflake

we have something special for the upcoming holiday season for you: Snowflakes! This was the very first paper I ever implemented in Houdini – what a feeling! I recorded it a while back in summer but then decided to wait until the right season. As […]

Live Rendering of Heightfields in RS

Heightfields are a nice addition to Houdini 16 for environment work. They more or less replicate the functionality of programs like Worldmachine. In today’s tutorial Manuel shows you how to create a terrain from scratch in Houdini and how to render it directly in Redshift3D, […]

Yarnworks: Wire Solver and Constraint Networks in DOPs

To complement our PBD Wire Setup, here is a tutorial on a topic I’ve personally been struggling a lot when I first tried wrapping my head around constraint networks. Similar to what we’ve been doing in PBDs, we’re gonna build a network of interconnecting wires […]

Artistic Quadtrees

You might not be aware of the fact that you most likely have been using the algorithm we’re discussing here – at least if you’ve ever worked in 3D. Quadtrees (and their relatives, KD-Trees and Octrees) are used to accelerate point queries (ever used pcfind() […]

VEX in Houdini: Space Colonization

Branching growth is fascinating as it has a lot of hidden structure to it and is very intricate. Many methods have been proposed over the years to model branching structures, like trees. One algorithm that is particularly beautiful and simple is the “Space Colonization” algorithm, […]

Quicktip: Visualizing Flight Paths

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 […]

Knitting in 3D – Building a UV deformer

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 […]

VEX in Houdini: Movie Color Visualisation

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 […]

Easy Soap Film Shader

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 […]

Easy Minimal Surfaces

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.

Guest Tutorial: Yader – Poly Garden

We’re happy to present to you another special guest on Entagma – this time it’s Yader (who some of you might know through his great Cinema 4D tutorials). In his tutorial he’s gonna shed some light on how he built his Poly Garden setup that […]

Modeling and Rendering a Quartz Crystal in Houdini 16

When testing out a new render engine (or any tool that can do rendering), one of the typical objects I try to get a decent image of is a quartz crystal. In order to get that right, a rendering needs to contain effects such as […]

Quick VDB Clouds

After being asked how to create clouds for rendering in Octane (or any other Engine that supports VDBs) we dove into that topic a bit and the quickest way we found was to use the cloud tools that Houdini provides.

DIY Scatter Tool (Solving Problems in Houdini)

We get the question “why are you doing that setup this particular way?” reather often. As with most setups in Houdini there are many ways of building it. In this tutorial we’d like to go over different approaches of solving a very basic problem: Scattering […]

Special Guest Tutorial: Shortest Path Growth

Say hi to our very good friend Ben Watts of BW Design. We’re thrilled to have him on Entagma for a guest tutorial showing his newest technique for vein growth in Houdini without any VEX.

Naive Path Finding

This one is a rather brute force approach for a problem we had to solve on a recent job: Finding a path through a bunch of obstacles. Admittedly what we implement here isn’t a very sophisticated algorithm, but its power lies in its simplicity: It […]

Custom Particle System in VEX

Dobromir of Inlifethrill Designs asked us how we’d go about recreating this. And as I’m quite untalented with Houdini’s particle system, I turned to VEX to create this custom particle system in which individual particles attract each other.

VEX / VOPs Basics: PCFind

One of the top three questions we’ve been asked during season one was “How does PCFind work?!” and indeed the question is important as so many setups rely on the ability to find close points.

Colored Trails (Point Advection & Rendering)

One of the great things about the Houdini community is that we’re always confronted with clever questions and with clever answers too. “How do I color strands using an image’s color palette?” was the comment on Vimeo that led to this setup. Yet when talking […]

Differential Mesh Growth

As some of you already found out, it is quite possible to set up differential growth not only on a line but also on a mesh. This tutorial goes into the details of doing exactly that while allowing for some degree of art-directability (is that […]