Alien Orb: Vellum Grains & Redshift

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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.

What started out as a snow setup using vellum grains to simulate falling (and settling) snow inside a snow globe turned (through some accidents) into this more abstract setup. So why not embrace it, give it a good redshift shading and celebrate alien holidays instead? 🙂

Happy 2019 everyone from us here at Entagma!

Download Project File (.zip)

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14 Comments

  1. Emil Galotti

    After seeing all the cool stuff you and others do with Houdini, I decided to download the free version of it and give it a try!

    I started by trying to recreate your alien snowflakes thing and just after the first few steps I could feel the growing status of despair und desperation, because I can´t find the „Vellumconstraints-grain-node!“

    Where is it? Is it hidden in a secret sublevel, unable for me to open, because I am a newbie?

    I can find a Vellumconfigure-grain node in my copy of Houdini, maybe we can make a deal and exchance them, I would throw in an additional Vellumconstraints- Node without the grain for free!

    Please help me, and many thanks in advance!

    • Hi Emil,

      did you have a look at the scene file we provide? Maybe that can shed some light onto your question 🙂

      Cheers, Mo

      • Emil Galotti

        Hui, thanks for the quick response!

        Yes, I did open your project-file, it was there, but I wanted to create the scene for myself to get a better understanding of the very scary node- system !

        Maybe I should give it another try! Thanks a lot!

        • When you’re just starting out it makes sense to have both the video and the scene file open to get a grasp of what we’re doing in a certain setup. The more fluent you’ll get in Houdini the quicker you’ll be when it comes to getting a grasp of the node system, until it becomes second nature. Keeping our fingers crossed! Welcome to the Houdini world. And also – good nerves to you!

          Cheers 🙂

          • Emil Galotti

            Yeah, thanks for the motivation! I will try my very best to learn the basics, because you can do some amazing stuff with it!

            Keep up the good work and thanks again!

            Emil

  2. Mark Pamatat

    Actually wrote you guys an email not realizing i could comment down here.. New to houdini my self, i wanted to know which renderer you would recommend for houdini, i want to get this setup all done and purchase what i need as far as the indie of houdini and a renderer. I noticed you used redshift here, is that where u are leaning for future tutorials as well??

    Thanks

    • Hi Mark,

      Already replied to your mail 🙂 But for the record (And everyone else):

      most of our render engine decisions come down to a certain amount of personal taste, as there are valid arguments for and against every single engine.
      That being said, in Houdini we tried Mantra, Octane and Redshift.

      We settle on redshift for most of our projects/renders, as it is very fast, supports vertex/point attributes and comes with a very solid set of material nodes.

      However Redshift won’t be able to pull of everything Mantra does (take for example Volume Procedurals), but in our experience it is totally sufficient to use in our daily production work.

      We haven’t tried it yet but there’s also a beta of VRay for Houdini out there – so if you’re already used to working with VRay, you might wanna give this a try 🙂

      So far – hope that helps 🙂
      Cheers,
      Mo

  3. Thanks for your time and effort. The scene files are a bonus too.

  4. I can´t find the „Vellumconstraints-grain-node 🙁 where is it?

  5. Thank you for gread lecture!! But.. When i connect trail node below filecahe node on 239th frame, error occurs. I think problem is . Whenever Trail length is over even 11, then red error marks pop up on filecache and trail node. Can i know how to fix?

  6. Thank you for great lecture!! But.. When i connect trail node below filecahe node on 239th frame, error occurs. I think problem is “Trail length”. Whenever Trail length is over even 11, then red error marks pop up on filecache and trail node. Can i know how to fix?

    • Hey Kim,

      have you tried comparing your setup to the scene file we provide? That’s usually the quickest way to diagnose errors. Otherwise it’s kinda hard to pin down what exactly is happening in your setup 🙂

      Thx & Cheers,
      Mo

    • You need to check ‘Evaluate Within Frame Range’ on the Trail… will work fine then.

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