Grainy wooden veneers:

Edit: For me, the video sometimes crashes, long before it’s finished.

The modelling is done around the idea of buildings that somehow aligns to the sunlight. Also learnt to use the group by bounding object for this. Modelling was done quickly in order to be able to render an animation. Tried some noise on the camera pos/rot and lens distortion but it looks a bit crap in most parts. I am most satisfied with the zooming shot. The render took about 19 hrs on my 10 year old gaming laptop with Karma CPU.

I spent most of the time trying to add a backpanel based on shapes created in COPs. I got halfway there, and then just messed around with lighting and Physical camera lens

Let’s say I have a height+alpha map made in COPs, and I like how it looks in the COPs preview material on a plane. But now I want to process like geometry. What would be the most straight forward way to go from COP to a SOP to achieve this. So basically, how to create a masked grid, with displacement, both based on COPs textures?

In an attic we find a dubiously named relic of the 2010s…



Pretty much my first render in Houdini. Already learnt a lot today!

After a bit more Googling I think what I am looking for is the Split Mesh feature, which seems to only be available in Unreal counterpart of Houdini Engine…

Hello,

I’m having trouble creating an HDA that outputs multiple meshes. I’ve tried separating the meshes with a ‘name’ attribute, and a ‘instance’ attribute. I have also tried putting each mesh in it’s own group, which doesn’t work and also is ridiculously slow with many meshes.

I would like to be able to have separate LOD groups for each mesh created by the HDA.

Bonus question:

Ultimately, I would like to be able to generate, say, 10 meshes with their own LODs in Houdini, and then use copy-to-points to instantiate them for efficient use in Unity.

Simon Verstraete has a tutorial on instancing with Houdini and Unity, but he doesn’t show how to use meshes that are also generated in Houdini, only how to scatter Unity objects using placements provided by Houdini. So that would require the meshes to be generated first by step/HDA 1, and then set up to be scattered with HDA 2. Which I imagine is a little less flexible and quick for iterating. But to be honest, if anyone has dealt with setting up something like this in a somewhat satisfactory manner, I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks very much for the help!

What I missed was enabling the ‘default size’ in the COP network properties tab. Without it, the resolution fields are greyed out. But I think this property is unticked by default.

Everything works well now, though it would be nice to be able to set a fixed output resolution in the resample node, rather than only a scaling ratio.

What would be the smartest way to oversample using COPs? I.e. render a higher internal resolution than you output to disk.

To be honest, I’ve not even really figured out how to change the resolution of a COP network except when rendering it with a ROP node.

But what I really hope to achieve is render at 4096x4096, and then save at 1024x1024 for a nice anti-aliased image.

Hi,

I’ve been playing around, and following some Houdini tutorials for the last couple of weeks. I must say, I am a little conflicted on whether I actually like the program.

My problem is definitely not that the program is too technical or ‘closer to programming than artistry’. My biggest issue is actually that it so far for me does not really live up to the flexibility and logicality I had expected from it…

I am an experienced programmer, and reasonably practiced at making things into formal recipes, algorithms etc. However, I find in Houdini it’s often more knowledge of how to do something, rather than reasoning your way to an approach.

This is due to the fact that the program is quite obscure and inconsistent about many things. Obscure: each node has many hidden features that you need to know to make the most of it. They may listen to specific attribute names, which cause them to set parameters in per point/vertex/etc. basis, suddenly making a simple node infinitely more powerful. Which attributes names are listened to, and which parameter can be set like this is quite a mystery to me, so you kind of happen to stumble upon it in a tutorial, it seems. Or is there a way to show in the software which attributes a node uses for parameter modulation?

Inconsistent: there are many different ways nodes can influence each other. Initially you might think node connections indicate which nodes are affecting each other, but then you have different ways parameters and attributes from different nodes can be referenced, or for example the SOP import in a COPnet, where a SOP is referenced without the SOP out being connected to the COP in. To me, it makes networks feel not clear and clean, unnecessarily hard to understand because it’s too hacky. Not to mention the need to have different coding and expression languages going on, each for their own little purpose…

Lack of flexibility and modularity: rather than being able to grow project by gradually adding more complexity to the node network, it seems that you need to build a network already with each part in mind. For example, if I build a tree network which has some random parameters for branch numbers, angles, etc. Now I want to build a forest of unique trees by scattering it around a terrain, I end up having to do the scattering and tree generation in the same network. I cannot make a ‘black box’ random tree generator, that then gets used by another node to place instances around the terrain.

Alright, time to end my rambling. Hopefully someone can address some of my frustrations and show how to approach the program better.