Tutorials

Understanding how to massage data in Houdini is key to giving yourself the creative edge and allowing you to unleash mind-blowing visual effects. In this 18 part tutorial series, we cover a variety of simple yet essential weapons in your arsenal including Global, Standard and Custom Variables to Math and String Modification functions.

In this class, Developer Graham Thompson will teach you how to implement custom tools that are fully featured and artist-friendly using the Houdini Object Model HOM and Houdini’s Digital Asset technology. The class will detail the anatomy of a tool in Houdini, from design to development to distribution, as well as discuss the advanced features of HOM that can be used to empower tool creators and artists.

In this class developer Robert Vinluan will take you through the design of a few real-life and prototypical projects which use Python and the Houdini Object Model (HOM). The projects demonstrate how Python and HOM can be used to create tools for network rendering, HDK development and animation workflow.

In this video tutorial you will learn about a very powerful feature in Houdini called Copy Stamping.

In this video series, you will learn how to use Takes in Houdini 9.

In this video series, you will take a look a the new Houdini 9 interface and learn how it will make your work faster and easier.

In the following tutorials you will learn some various uses of the Carve tool in Houdini.

In this series of tutorials you will learn some useful surface operations and modeling tools. These include: Modeling and Shelf Context, Sweep, Rails, Carve, Creep, and Align.

This tutorial teaches how to sweep an object along a curve while orienting the object to the curve’s direction.

This series of videos focuses on a typical UV workflow in Houdini 9. Learn how to create projections, edit UVs with a variety of tools, save out UV maps, and apply textures. Please download the project files below to follow along with the lessons.

This tutorial video focuses on the basics of CHOPs and an introduction to the Motion View. Through the creation of a simple animation learn just how useful CHOPs can be.

These two lessons illustrate a valuable and efficient means of modeling an animated surface in a manner not generally considered. It provides an explanation of the advantages to this approach and compares it to a more traditional means of animating a surface.

These lessons illustrate a means of animating a surface without keyframes and/or character tools

In this master class, developer Derrick Moser introduces you to the new fur tools in Houdini 9.5. The lesson begins with a review of the artist’s workflow, after which you will dive down to explore how the tools work. You will learn how fur can be customized as it goes through the rendering pipeline and how to use the new CVEX VOP context to build shaders that define the fur’s appearance.

This five part series covers an entire rigging workflow using the H9 Quadruped Auto Rig shelf tool. Take an in-depth look at setting up joint controls, creating proxy geometry, generating animation and deformation rigs, and painting weights. The concepts presented in this tutorial series will apply equally as well to a Biped Auto Rig set up.

In this master class, developer Mark Elendt shows you some of the latest features of Mantra including PBR (Physically Based Rendering) and the new volume rendering architecture. He will also review the process of rendering with different rendering engines in Mantra.

MPlay has an often overlooked feature called “Compare Images” which can be used to simplify the process of comparing frames during the set-up stages of your renders. A simple feature which can make your workflow a bit more convenient.

This tutorial covers a new feature in Houdini 9.5: The Wedge ROP. Wedging will render a specified ROP multiple times, each time varying some parameters in the .hip file. This is useful for exploring how changing parameters will change the final product of things such as simulations

This tutorial takes a quick look at one method that can be used to create a wireframe render of any type of surface which may then be composited over the lighting passes.

This video series focuses on various aspects of lighting and rendering in Houdini 9.

In this three part tutorial, that shows how to dissolve an image using Houdini particles.

This three part series continues to show the strength and diversity of the Creep Tool in Houdini.

This two part series focuses on using the creep tool in conjunction with copy stamping to achieve some unique results.

This two part tutorial focuses on creating wind spray generated on the crest of a wave.

Learn how to manipulate normals without using expressions in this two part series.

In this series of videos we will establish a particle stream that is then used to create a surface that evolves over time.

This video series focuses on examples of when and how to use Attribute Transfer.

This is a three part, intermediate level, tutorial that demonstrates the use of ray sops to find distances between surfaces, then creating a custom attribute to apply that data to maintain a distance between feathers. This is a method developed by Jeff Wagner.

In this video tutorial series, we will examine the Pyro FX workflow in-depth and the parameters used to create Fire and Smoke effects. We will also examine how volumetric data is created and recorded, and how to visualize it.

In this video tutorial, we take a look at the Pyro FX workflow used to create high-quality Fire and Smoke. The Pyro tools were created with the artist in mind and make it easier than ever to get your effects out the door.

This tutorial uses one of the production-ready Pyro FX presets to get you started. You then learn how to navigate the network, cache out a low-res sim, up-res to get more detail, then use IPR and the VEX Pyro shader to complete your effect.

Houdini’s Fluid Tools offer a powerful simulation environment for visual effects artists. Senior Mathematician Jeff Lait introduces you to the basic building blocks for generating fluids and low level tools that make it easier to control the simulations.

Created by Houdini Product Specialist Stephen Tucker, this crash course series focuses on the concept of fluid dynamics and how they work within Houdini. This 2 hour 48 minute long collection of 15 Fluid Dynamics Tutorial Videos can be downloaded using either individual quicktime files or a single Bit Torrent.

This 5 part series covers how to create a simple gas solver in dynamics from scratch.

This 7 part series about how to transfer color using dynamics is a great place to start to understand Houdini’s dynamics in a significant way.

In this video series, learn how to create a simple dynamic simulation by creating a procedural pre-vis avalanche.

In this video series, you will take a look at the new dynamics shelf tools and see how easy it is to create fairly complex simulations very quickly.

Houdini Technical Directors have long been able to choose from a number of ways to create tools for artists. Scripts, custom nodes via HDK or VEX, and most importantly Houdini Digital Assets (HDAs) are all well established means to creating ready-made tools in Houdini.

With the addition of the Shelf and supporting Python modules to Houdini 9 we now have an important extension to these capabilities. TDs can make use of a unified way of organizing and creating tools, and perhaps most critically a language to allow interaction with those tools. Whether as part of the Houdini distribution or as 3rd-party add-ons the new methods for creating tools will enhance the capabilities of the TD to create tools and vastly improve the experience of the artists using them.

This technical paper has been created to provide an overview of the different toolbuilding techniques available in Houdini with a special focus on building sets of tools that take advantage of the new tool shelf.