hello,
last days I try to find most suitable way to make various things/attributes deformed by the sound.
I try to import displacement maps in AfterEff and then animate whiteness & various stuff with Trapcode Sound Keys [trapcode.com] plugin, and I got some coollooking results when rendered as a displacement, but that's just one cool-looking thing, I'd like to have more control on how & what I want to “alter” with a sound..

to have something like:
load a kind of soundNode, make it become animation curve , and connect it to any attribute that can be animated.
some controls for audio would be cool, separated chanells, controls for bass, etc…

but, I don't have a day spent in writing my own script from scratch…
just copy/pasting and using scrips made by the wise men
so some help on this would be greeEeat

respect,

Djordje

Check out this recent thread from the mailing list:

click here [sidefx.com]

the magic thing about houdini is that everything is there, you just have to find it… thanks
I'll see if I can manage on my own to make it work.

should be easy enough to do in Chops.

Just bring in your audio files as a “.wav” or “.aiff” with a “file” Chop.
No MP3 support yet


You will probably need to use a “resample” chop to get rid of your extra data.

You can also use a load of “filtering” options…
such as the “Filter” chop to smooth out the waves,
and “Pass Filter” chop to isolate certain frequencies.

You will also probably want to play around with a “Math” chop to normalize the waves values between 0 and 1.

These channels can then all be exported out of Chops and used to control shaders, geometry, whatever you want.

Just attach a null as the last step, RMB on it and select “Exporter - set scope”. From here just click on your channels and drag and drop them into the paremeters that you wish.

1) You will need to turn on “realtime playback”. DO this by turning on the “clock” Icon in the lower right hand corner of the interface.

2) Set your playback (in the global animation options… “the little plus sign in the right hand bottom corner”, so that “play every frame but never faster than FPS” is checked on.

3) Turn audio on by activating the little speaker icon in right hand lower corner.
Set this to “time line” and to “chop”.

4) Of course you will need to also turn on the “green audio out flag” inside your network to hear the file. Choose your original file for this (or non-resampled).

My recomend start with small files to test, until you get the hang of it. Save often. Audio can make Houdini a bit crashy.

On a side note you can actually compose music in Houdini.
Check out Chops, it's a ball.

that should get you started.

Jim Ellis

8)
this is one super-cool how-to
thank you so much
The main idea, for now, is to use audio to drive some displacement maps, and to try setting up blendshapes/morphs to be driven by sound too..
It will be a tough one, cause I am am a houdini noob, but I'll try hard
I'll post the results, when I get good ones, of course…
respect

what I wrote about here will still work.

Say you have five displacement images (or seq of images).
Let's just say they are 5 different .tiff sequences.
You will need to convert them to “.rat” files to avoid displacement bugs. You can do this in Mplay by loading them and resaving them.

Next you need tpo build your shader in VOPS,
here is how you do it.

1) put down a displace vop on the top level

2) enter into and put down 5 “texture vops”.

3) run each texture vop into a different “Multiply” vop.

4) on the extra input of each “multiply” vop, RMB and “create parmeter”. This will create 5 sliders that you can use in the shader to blend between different displacement maps.

5) Take all of the outputs from the Multiplies and throw them into an “Add” vop.
6) take the output of this “Add” and throw it into the “P” of the “Output” vop.

now you need to get the UV/ST info from your model for the shader.

7) Drop down a “Shading layer” Vop (this has your UV info that will be converted to S and T)

8) Run the output of the “Shading layer” into a “Convert Vector to Float”.

9) Take the first output of the “Convert Vector to Float”, and plug it into the “S” on your “Texture Map” vops.

10) Take the 2nd output of the “Covert” and plug it into the “T” of all your texture maps.

11)Finally RMB on each “Map” input of all your “Texture” vops and “RMB” to create a new parameter for each. This will create a methoid for you to chose your 5 texture files from the shader.

12) now make the shader so you can access it in shops by“RMB” on the “Output” vop and “Create new shop from vop network”.

look in Shops now, you should have a new shader you can use.

You can now manually adjust the blending inside the shop shader.
You will see 5 sliders (created by you with the 5 multiply vops) that will allow you to blend between the value of each displacement map.

You will also see how you can access your 5 diffent files.


There are a couple things to keep in mind:

a) If you have one slider all the way up in your shader, and the others all the way down, your one image will have reached it's full luminace.

b) If all 5 sliders are up, all 5 images are at full luminance and you will get very blown out displacement.

c) you can manually adjust and set keys on the sliders of the shader,
or export from your channel data that was created inside of Chops from your audio file.

That should get you started.
From there you can tweek you VOP network and your shder will update.

I think that should get you what you're after… unless I'm missing something.

Good luck

Jim

hehehe, great, thank you very much…
now I feel a bit obliged to make something good after this kind of help
If I stuck somewhere, I'll cry for help