Hey, there! I'm a brand new Houdini Indie user who is eager to learn and make the most out of the program. As such, I have a lot of questions about it. But it might be rather cumbersome to make a thread about each question that I have. So I thought it would better to list the most relevant questions and go from there, if that's okay.

1) Where do I look in the menu to access the Render Settings?

2) How do I set Renderman RIS as my default renderer?

3) Can Houdini correct visible displacement UV seams? If so, then how do I do that?

4) I've made several characters using Maya and “The Face Machine” and “The Setup Machine 2” plugins by Anzovin Studio. I want to be able to apply effects such as fur and crowd simulations to them. But whenever I import them into Houdini using alembic files, the controllers for the rigs fail to work correctly. So what would be the best approach to incorporating this content into Houdini without losing their functionality?

5) Does Houdini include an animation tool that uses audio files to produce auto-lip-sync animation for facial rigs?

6) Lately, I've been really interested in using toon shaders to produce a visual style like the ones seen in these trailers for a couple of video games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urUM2Ne_vTw [youtube.com] , and , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4aRNa32AtE [youtube.com] . However, I have not found a written guide or a video tutorial yet for Houdini that would be thorough enough for this task. Would it be alright to request educational material on the topic for this website?

7) When modeling inside of Maya, I use the “Edge Ring Utilities” quite a bit by hitting the ctrl-right/mouse/buttons to access the menu. If I wanted to do the same thing in Houdini, then what would the short-cut keys be for the command?

8) When using the follow path animation tool, how easily can I control the object's starting position and the way an object moves along the path?


I would be grateful for any help that could be given in regards to these questions.

Moin,

welcome to Houdini!

Please do read the documentation and take a walk through the huge number of video tutorials available for Houdini. A good part of your questions is “FAQ” and you should be able to find extensive responses for those by simply googling.

> 1) Where do I look in the menu to access the Render Settings?
> 2) How do I set Renderman RIS as my default renderer?

Render “settings” depend on the render engine you use. Start here:
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/render/render [sidefx.com]

> 3) Can Houdini correct visible displacement UV seams? If so, then how do I do that?

That depends on what you are doing. If the displacement map has been created correctly, i.e. the values match “over seam boundaries” AND if you have some “bleed” added to the displacement map, you should not get seams in the first place.

> So what would be the best approach to incorporating this content into Houdini without losing their functionality?

That depends on what you want to do in the end. Rigging is, still, a very much platform dependent thing. There's not “use this Rig there”-button. If you want to do platform-independent rigging, you need to use platform-independent rigging systems, which in themselves are, well, platforms.
What you can do is “bake” animations, bring them over as Alembic or FBX, add effects, bake the effects and bring those back to your animation system. Obviously you have to repeat that if you change the animation after the fact.
“Pipelining” … is still not easy.

> 5) Does Houdini include an animation tool that uses audio files to produce auto-lip-sync animation for facial rigs?

I'd say: The answer you need to read is “no”, because there is no “out of the box Houdini face rig”, which would be required for a “shelf” tool to lip sync.
There are several possible approaches to create a lip-sync-system for Houdini. But those require a fair bit of development work on your side, so - no, what you ask there is not available in Houdini. That is something for “end user rigs”, where you have a fixed rig for characters and a tied-in workflow for facial animation.

> 6) Would it be alright to request educational material on the topic for this website?

Asking for tutorials on NPR shading is always welcome, since this is one of my favorite topics as well The examples you linked actually *are* well documented. Guilty GearXRD for example uses a neat trick of aligning all UV map boundaries to x/y axis, allowing for boundary lines to be thickened or thinned without loosing resolution. Google for Guilty Gear …

> 7) When modeling inside of Maya, I use the “Edge Ring Utilities” quite a bit by hitting the ctrl-right/mouse/buttons to access the menu. If I wanted to do the same thing in Houdini, then what would the short-cut keys be for the command?

I have no idea of Maya, but googling for what you asked brings up this suggestion: Go to edge selection mode (mouse over 3d viewport, press “s” for selection, “3” for edges). Select the edge in question and use one of the options from the right mouse button menu or one of the shortcuts listed there.

> 8) When using the follow path animation tool, how easily can I control the object's starting position and the way an object moves along the path?

Quite easily. Although “move along the path” is not the same as “do not move along the path”. Houdini is “procedural”, so you have full control over everything, including deviations from given values.

Marc

Hello, Marc. Thanks for the warm welcome and the informative reply . But if it's okay with you, I would like to clarify a couple of things real quickly.

> 3) That depends on what you are doing. If the displacement map has been created correctly, i.e. the values match “over seam boundaries” AND if you have some “bleed” added to the displacement map, you should not get seams in the first place.


I'm still trying to get the hang of doing displacement maps, so I don't know the steps to take to do things like adding some “bleeding” to a displacement map within my edition of Maya. Do you know where I could find a step-by-step guide for the subject?

> 4) That depends on what you want to do in the end. Rigging is, still, a very much platform dependent thing. There's not “use this Rig there”-button. If you want to do platform-independent rigging, you need to use platform-independent rigging systems, which in themselves are, well, platforms.
What you can do is “bake” animations, bring them over as Alembic or FBX, add effects, bake the effects and bring those back to your animation system. Obviously you have to repeat that if you change the animation after the fact.
“Pipelining” … is still not easy.

Your recommendation sounds good for applying visual effects such as fur, but what would I need to do for effects that require more interactivity like crowd sequences?

> 8) Quite easily. Although “move along the path” is not the same as “do not move along the path”. Houdini is “procedural”, so you have full control over everything, including deviations from given values.


That's good. I'm trying to rig a door panel within Maya so that it would go up and down along curve. Like something you would see on a sci-fi show such as Star Trek. But whenever I try to attach the door to the curve, it moves away from the starting position I would like it to be at, and flips all over the place when trying to animate it along the curve. So would it be possible to bring the door and the curve into Houdini, back-out the animation after I refine it, and then create some set-driven keys to control that animation inside of Maya?

Moin, Water,

(or is your first name “Bird”? )

> I'm still trying to get the hang of doing displacement maps, so I don't know the steps to take to do things like adding some “bleeding” to a displacement map within my edition of Maya. Do you know where I could find a step-by-step guide for the subject?

Like I said: I don't know Maya - at all.

“Bleed” means that you have data (“slightly”) outside the boundary defined by the UV “edge”. The reason for this being, sometimes, necessary is FFP precision. Although we are in a more-or-less 64bit age, computer floating point precision is still kind of “C64-ish”, read: Bad. If, for example, an UV island is very small but covers a lot of (desired) data, it is quite possible that position calculations don't hit a point inside the UV island, but just outside it. If you don't have the “edge” or “border” data “bleeding out” (i.e. covering more space on the texture map than “exactly” defined by the UV island), you may get a value of 0 instead of the needed 0.75 or whatever.

Maybe some Maya user can step in and help - in theory you could just shrink your UV islands ever so slightly, but if your displacement map is very detailed, that may not solve the problem but create creases.

> Your recommendation sounds good for applying visual effects such as fur, but what would I need to do for effects that require more interactivity like crowd sequences?

Like I said: It really depends. Crowd rigging is, again, different from hero-character rigging. You might want to familiarize yourself with basic rigging concepts, by which I mean e.g. “weight maps”, that are usually transferable between applications. If you can do with pure FK rigging, you should be able to get a (basic) rig transferred between e.g. Maya and Houdini - but it is possible that the different deformation procedures do not give you the exact same visual results. So, again, start from the ground up and define your actual needs for the actual shot you are working on and find a solution for that - alternatively, rig your characters in a cross platform environment.

> That's good. I'm trying to rig a door panel within Maya so that it would go up and down along curve. Like something you would see on a sci-fi show such as Star Trek. But whenever I try to attach the door to the curve, it moves away from the starting position I would like it to be at, and flips all over the place when trying to animate it along the curve.

Are you sure that the “item center”, i.e. the object's origin position is set to where you want the door to be pivoted? Because if not, the “door” geometry may be floating somewhere in space, moving it around like a ghost on steroids. Here you might want to learn about basic modelling rules like “where are the points located in respect to the item's animation center”.

> So would it be possible to bring the door and the curve into Houdini, back-out the animation after I refine it, and then create some set-driven keys to control that animation inside of Maya?

This, again, is “rigging” :-)

The same idea applies that I described above: To some degree you can get animation data transferred between the applications - it would be wise to animate on controls (locators/Nulls) instead of geometry, so that you can strip off or mass-process animation data independent from geometry items.
However, rigging and animation really still are very much DCC-local, so moving animation data back and forth between Houdini and Maya will, most likely, slow things down instead of actually helping you.

My suggestion is to first learn about the fundamentals in rigging and animation - which is completely platform independent, because the technical ideas apply everywhere - and then choose the animation platform as a “single point of failure” instead of an embedded pipeline in itself.


Marc

Here is a commercial tut on cartoon rendering:
https://cmivfx.com/products/369-houdini-cartoon-effect [cmivfx.com]

Konstantin Magnus
Here is a commercial tut on cartoon rendering:
https://cmivfx.com/products/369-houdini-cartoon-effect [cmivfx.com]

Thank you for the recommendation, Magnus. I shall see about investing in the tutorial as time permits.

That being said, there is still the issue of importing my character rigs into Houdini that I need to address. Would studying about and utilizing Houdini's “digital assets” be a logical next step in pursing this goal?