Hi Everyone,

Just a short introduction about myself. My name is Kai. I am currently in Brunei. I am a freelance 3D artist. I have been a 3D artist for about 3-5 years now. I mainly do game assets for small gaming companies around the world. I mainly use Maya 2009 and moving to Maya 2013. But I wanted to try out Houdini because the gaming industry are using procedural methods to make buildings, NPC character assets and much more.

This revolver took roughly 3 days to model out from scratch, I was making it during a foundation workshop course from Houdini. I have done a revolver before in Maya but I wanted to compared modelling techniques/methods and process between Maya and Houdini. New thing for me are Nodes in Houdini.

What I love about Houdini is the ability to adjust the topology/ poly count very easily. Example would be the revolver cylinder, i can easily change the poly count on the cylinder and the bullet chambers in that cylinder without having to redo it from scratch. Down side about nodes is slow rate of speed to build the overall revolver but I understand the importance of nodes though.

Comparison with Maya, that revolver cylinder would require a lot of proper planning in the topology. Things like the milling and the bullet chambers need to be exact to make the shape right and after that there cannot be anymore changes. I remember one of the instructors, SP from Singapore showing me that I can take it further with the revolver cylinder, where I could make the cylinder hold 3,6,8 or more bullets without having to redo it from scratch.

I attached the Houdini file for anyone to look through it. It has no textures or UVs. I am not proficient with Houdini yet to properly do UV maps and make UV pelts. I labelled most of the nodes but certain nodes I didn't label them because they are very specific parts to the revolver which i didn't know what to label them as. So when looking around you will probably see some nodes called “circle_03”

I attached a rendered still from Houdini and a still rendered real time with Maya. The Maya version does have textures like Diffuse, Normal, Specular, Gloss map and even has a cube map to ‘fake’ reflection. The Maya version is considered low poly. If you look at the revolver cylinder's bullet chamber it's quite polygonal and isn't smooth. something I cannot edit easily to fix this problem. i would need to do a lot of tweaks or redo the entire revolver cylinder from scratch.

If anyone is interested you can click the links below and visit my facebook group and join and post you artwork, 3D or 2D. I welcome anyone to join. I would love to see more stuff from people here. I just recently saw one with the Ice cream viscosity test as well as the Procedural roof generator.

Cheers,
Kai

Hey these are really looking interesting…