Strob
It's over now. Did they say when it will be available for download?

This site says it all: https://www.sidefx.com/community/houdini-core-promotion/ [sidefx.com]

“Houdini 16 will be released on February 21, 2017 ”

Marc

@Pixel8d - see above, the “buy” website is updated with the new prices and Indie is still there. Has been discussed above.

> The rigging and character tools have me smiling from ear to ear

… and that around the BACK of the head!

trojanfoe
Is it just me or is the stream being constantly interrupted?

Resist you must. Resist you MUST. You MUST res…

YES.

(I could not resist)

Marc

> Are we keeping the same pricing and feature set for our Indie licenses?

it would seem so. The “buy” website already shows the updated prices and deals: https://sidefx.com/get/buy/ [sidefx.com]

Marc

Moin,

> Is modeling in Houdini as straight-forward and fast as in Lightwave?

No. Although it hurts to say that anything is NOT as “straight forward and fast as Lightwave”: Houdini has made some huge advances in modelling for sure, but it is not yet a “hands-on-free-the-artist's-mind-modeller”.
I would have a look at zBrush and the smaller version Pixologic released to acompany your Houdini license. That, I think, should give you THE FULL package.

> Is it difficult to rig and animate a biped for unity?

No. But keep in mind that for the final game output you will most likely still bake animations. But rigging and animation in Houdini is a blast.

> Is there anything that makes Houdini harder to use than other solution when it comes to game art?

That only you can answer

Marc

Luiz says that Indie is still there. I think the important bits were a) rebranding to “Core” and b) huge price drops

Marc

Moin,

> Is Houdini suitable for vector graphics production?

depends on what you consider “vector graphics production”, since almost everything you do in Houdini *is* vector graphics production.

> I'm mainly interested in SVG, but other formats (such as pdf, eps, gs, etc) are good as well.

Writing a postscript (for EPS or PDF) could be done as a shader, the same goes for SVG. As far as I know there is no “official” export for these formats, though. You could (easily) convert 3d object formats into SVG using an external conversion tool or, as mentioned, write your own exporter/shader.

But I *think* this is not the kind of response you are looking for. In the end, I think, what you need is some kind of render/shader output, not so much something “Houdini-internal”.

Marc

> Where can I get more info reg your tutorial ?

I'll be sure to post on the forum here, once it's done. As things develop currently, I expect it to be an ongoing “class” with a fundamental part (introductions), some technical “snippets” and an ongoing curriculum.

Marc

> We're publishing a pretty big course this month and we're holding onto it because all of the Houdini aspects of it need to be current.

I am in the same position. My course on rigging and animation in Houdini 16 has to wait until Houdini 16 is a) available to the public and b) I can record the specific chapters in the most up to date version.
That's the way it is, though. I really appreciate SideFX fixing bugs till the last minute (and after that) and polishing whatever is polishable - rather this than the rushed, premature releases some other companies are famous for.

Marc

> When exactly is H16 Indie being released for download?

That information is not in our database. :-)


In other words: Houdini 16 is expected to be “released later this month”, no specific date has yet been given.

Marc

Pixel8d
Just out of curiosity…what would make Redshift better than say Thea Render or Octane?

Let's see … there would be:
- speed
- performance
- lack of lag
- faster results
- quicker invoicing thanks to the above
- less waiting
- more time for important things in life

Oh, and it's faster, too, gives more performance and … speed.

Marc

Part 5 - maybe the last in this series, I find Houdini too easy to use to find much more “beginner's topics” without help



Note: This is not an intro into animation, but comparing the basic buttons you have to press for standard muscle memory training …

Marc

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

Hi, Josh,

out of fairness towards modo: I managed to get VDB data from Houdini over to modo 902 (901 crashes while trying anything there). The ENV-variable (H13-compability) mentioned above did the trick, interestingly I had to rebuild the Houdini file. It seems that simply setting the variable and loading the previously created file did not work, but rebuilding the export (convert Houdini volume to VDB, then write out to a file) worked.

In modo I was able to get “something”, but any visually usable volume renders would take incredible long amounts of time. So this is really just trying to be fair to a platform I used to really love.

Marc

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

Moin,

“pipeline” in projects can mean quite a lot, it might help if you could specify a bit what part of pipeline work you are responsible for or what problems you expect to be facing. While knowing some Python is always a good idea, since this desease has spread so far in the 3d/VFX world that you would get infected by using almost any software relevant to “pipelining”, there may be quite a bit more to managing issues than knowing a single programming language.

Marc

Moin, Christopher,

the thread you linked is from 2015, as it seems - are you experiencing the same problems that you already solved in that thread, maybe with a newer version of Houdini?
Otherwise it might make sense if you could post your HIP file, because I am not really getting where your problem lies …

Marc

Moin, Josh,

I didn't see this thread, so maybe you won't even read my response - but anyway:

My guess is that it's modo that isn't behaving for you. VDB in modo seems to be always flaky or outright broken and I didn't get the impression (when I was using modo) that showstopping bugs were considered important to fix.
A colleague who uses modo 9 told me that VDB import in the last release of modo 9 is basically unusable. So I tried modo 901 sp1, which he said would sometimes work. Unfortunately it constantly crashed on me trying to do *anything* with VDB. By that I mean: It did not work *AT* *ALL*.
Obviously I won't even try modo 10 (I did once and it crashed on too many occasions, so I uninstalled it after about 30 minutes), because leaving a product in a fundamentally broken state and then forcing users to pay for an upgrade is a business practise I do not support.

What you *can* try is: Force Houdini to not pack VDBs by putting a line
into your Houdini.env file. My colleague said that this would sometimes let modo 9 read VDB data (if it doesn't crash, which is far more likely). Like I said, modo 902spwhatever didn't do anything with VDB for her or me, so it's possible that modo 10 has the same VDB issues.

However, Octane works with Houdini (Indie and up), so maybe this is an alternative for you - just bypassing the probable cause of frustration in the pipeline alltogether?

Marc

Moin,

please try running the program itself (not the license manager, that one seems to be OK) as a normal user, not as an administrator (although I admit, I am guessing here already).
I just tried to reinstall Indi 15.5 myself here and it works nicely. One thing you could try is to remove all Houdini versions (cleanly) and reinstall. But that's like suggesting “have you tried switching it off and on again”, I guess

If that fails too, please contact support at sideFX. They may have some additional ideas - sorry that I am out of leads here …

Marc