A few years ago I create this image in Blender and I would like to recreate it in Houdini to get it into my fingers:



I managed to get this far with the model right now, which is a quite ok:



The structure:



Currently the object is a unified polygon mesh.

Now I would like to add a bevel at the joint between the balls and the tubes. What would be the best approach to achieve this?

Hi Wout,

you can union boole the whole geometry and identify sharp edges with the group sop to bevel it. And if the spheres` topology does not line up with the pipes you can still melt everything together using VDBs.

Wow, thanks! Using VDBs really smooths everything out. In terms of the end result, that's a great approach.

Just a question, would it be possible to get a similar result using NURBS? Or would that be a task better suited for Rhino and the likes?

NURBS would be ideal: NURBS SOPs like Project > Trim > Bridge should give you a mathematically perfect model. Unfortunately the trim node keeps crashing on recent Houdini versions when set to process profiles individually.

Rhino is a dedicated NURBS modeling program therefore it's NURBS toolset is bigger and more reliable. But for this simple object I dont think it's necessary.