I have been using Houdini for everything, a lot of previz and in particular my question is about having a consistent, good looking "recipe" so the output looks as good and consistent as possible.

For example, I struggle using Redshift and having OGL materials together with many lights and making it render well while at the same time having a good OGL viewport display that is illustrative and well, I am wondering what are your thoughts and if any of you have a suggestion I would love to test.

Basically, I want to have a better looking viewport, in particular when using Redshift, any tricks? suggestions?

thanks a lot

ROHTAU STUDIO

We are a fully independent studio of like-minded artists doing high-end work for advertising, installations, and special projects and soon will be also doing TV and Film work. Our environment is a friendly one with top-notch infrastructure and a phenomenal artist-friendly pipeline.

We work exclusively on the cloud so we can hire great people, our team is fantastic so please DM me or email me directly to chat, we have a few things lined up and will certainly need help.


Job Position: Houdini Generalist / Houdini Lighting TD

Render engine: Redshift

Location: Remote

Description: 30sec commercial, full CGI hyper-realistic look.

Start: ASAP

Duration: Minimum of 6 weeks, probably a lot more.

Contact: jordi@rohtau.com

You can certainly render out and feed that back into the system using a variety of methods (I would go for COPs for example), and then render the scene again with the texture applied.

You can structure this process in ROPs quite easily and with these dependencies in place, make it a one button thing.

I hope it helps

Get into KineFX, rigging in Houdini is going to explode and there is simply no freelancers able to rig other than a handful so if you apply yourself we will certainly be interested.

Study anatomy and explore current rigging techniques and how to translate them in Houdini, well, that is more up to you but it is not super hard either.

Also, learn about Motion capture processing, a bit of Motion builder will help you a lot on what is expected from you and I am sure you will get work pretty quickly.

Let me know if you need any other pointers, we can keep in touch as we will sure need KineFX riggers pretty soon.

good luck.

Indeed these are interesting... it would be amazing to have those under Houdini's roof

VSENSE_2020

edward
Did you try the Erik character? https://www.sidefx.com/contentlibrary/erik-rig/ [www.sidefx.com]

At first I thought it was just because it wasn't a watertight mesh. But it still didn't work after I fixed this. I've attached my attempt at it.

Thanks for checking it out. The current version doesn't work with the t-pose or the character that have their arms raised high like Erik. There are also these two papers from this year SIGGRAPH that are very interesting.

RigNet: Neural Rigging for Articulated Characters
https://zhan-xu.github.io/rig-net/ [zhan-xu.github.io]

Skeleton-Aware Networks for Deep Motion Retargeting
https://deepmotionediting.github.io/retargeting [deepmotionediting.github.io]

As long as Kim has a majority stake, I am happy.

Every method has its strengths and weaknesses, the key is that you simply *can't* represent non-linear workflows (think deformers branching and mixing), the kind only Houdini can do, on a purely hierarchical manner, therefore, although strange at first, imho Houdini's approach is vastly superior.

True, visually is odd and sometimes uncomfortable but you will soon enough change your approach when using Houdini to manipulate those objects in a more effective way. For example, you may change from node view to tree based view when needed, or encapsulating things in subnetworks, or using bundles…

Furthermore, with the latest versions of Houdini you can add images to your networks to help group visually very complex things and when used in conjunction with groups, managing data is very very efficient.

Perhaps the question would be to bring a better node arrangements, clever extracts and other appraoches to make it easier?

It may look strange at first, but don't bee fooled, Houdini's is a highly effective method.

If on top of all that you look at Solaris, things get even more interesting.

my 2 cents.
jb

wanglifu
Houdini's node-based nature is great for vfx,but it really sucks on scene/object management,especially painful when you importing complicated models(eg.CAD models or kitbash) .

Blender or C4D's layer-based object system is great for organizing thounds of objects.That's why most of us choose to do the whole shot(eg.scene building and shading)in other DCC,only open houdini for some hard vfx work.

That's really a pity,we should complete a shot/scene in houdini,but it's really painful to do this.Can we have a new solution for this? By the way,C4D R23's node system is closly connected to the original layer system.

I was wondering if someone has succesfully used a broadcast monitor with Houdini.

Believe it or not, I am about to do a live session with a client (as if it was a Flame) and I would love to get the video signal of the linux box to our broadcast monitor.

thanks in advance

tamte
it has been mentioned that Sesi is planning to implement Hengine as a Dynamic Payload, in which case I can imagine you can still use HDAs as porcedural generators of USD subgraphs, that will be created during USD scene composition rather than having to be saved as .usd to disk for every variation of your HDA parameters

That would be fantastic… thanks

After some initial confusion, I believe USD makes a lot of sense, but yes, we have to grasp some concepts and name changes but once over that, I am confident it will be just fine.

The advantages for a medium to a large studio are obvious, for a one-band-studio much less but I would imagine it is what you will be able to do now that you can't do now and hopefully makes it worth it.

- Perhaps you will be able to scale up like never before.
- Perhaps the abstraction layer built between animation/lighting will make you a lot more efficient.
- Perhaps your line of work (for example medical viz) will benefit massively from increased reusability.
- More flexibility in your rendering choices surely may be useful.
- Using modern techniques to do overrides will perhaps allow you to explore with your client in a better way.

And surely more that I can't even think of.

That said, I do wonder what will be the impact with regards to OTLs as assets as right now they are little bundles of self-contained everything and from what I know about USD, it may not be the best approach with this new methods.

Perhaps we have to rethink the role of OTLs in our workflow, rather than assets more like factories…

Just thinking out loud.

I was wondering if someone has managed to do precisely that… considering 6 years later perhaps is viable now?

Thanks in advance

Finally, I am allowed to talk about this project we did 2 years ago… the text is lame but I am afraid is the only one we have been allowed to use so hopefully is ok.

The interesting bit, tons of Houdini everywhere.. some Massive, some Cinema4D, quite a bit of Maya…

https://www.jordibares.com/post/2018-07-07/champions-league-rebrand/ [www.jordibares.com]

Enjoy

Very nice… is it something we could test?
thx

Sorry to arrive so late to the party… using a wrangle to create the point and transfer the normal, just 5 nodes in total… I hope this helps understand a different approach.

BTW, your circle + add method is nice but this is faster and easier I think.

cheers
jb

Thanks Richard, and it is free. :-)

Finally after two years of full stagnation I found the energy to fully revamp it using HUGO (which is freaking cool) and update with the very latest projects.

Unfortunately 2 projects I have been working I am not allowed to share (yet)… one of them was 8 months of my life so I am pretty gutted but hopefully soon will be ok to say we did it.

https://jordibares.com [jordibares.com]

Most of it now is Houdini of course… :-)

Nice idea the Palette gear thing… I wonder cost wise how is relative to professional audio equipment.

I am interested in doing pure html based drag and drop of assets from the web page to houdini, a bit like in the documentation.

I was wondering if any of you have done this recently (without using python, just pure html) and if you have some pointers.

thanks
jb

I use Midi in to control light rigs for example, but I am afraid the default procedure is Windows based and it does not work on mac (vanilla installation)

Meaning, Midi In does not allow to listen to devices, just open midi files.. which is a shame as controlling stuff with a hardware device makes the whole experience so much more rewarding.

If you are trying to hack it using Python MIDI i would love to hear about it.

Good luck
jb

I imagine you could define the material as an asset, version it and all these instances will use the master definition with its own values.