thanks. i tried the cops workflow yesterday.. (the render node is sweet, btw, so useful! )

couldn't figure out how to specify just 4 colors and which ones exactly (tried quantize, colormap, etc). the docs are a bit sparse in that corner…

I'm thinking i will try to code something with python and/or vex… vex cops were… strange looking… just a single text box with no real explanation… just for a one-liner? i guess?

i'm also gonna try doing it in sops. i can just use tiles of a grid like they are pixels. that should be pretty easy, and then i can use a paint cop for touch ups, etc…

WHHHYY IS THERE NO PAINT COP, SIDEFX? Seriously? i want to paint textures right in houdini!

ok, that's one thing that i was thinking of, but i'm not super familiar with the COPs nodes, so i wasn't sure which node to use. Also, how can do i wire the output from mantra into a COP network?

I really would like to automate the process as much as possible. especially for animations such as character walk cycle.

I want to use Houdini to produce sprites for the 8-bit NES. individual sprites on that console are limited to 3 colors + 1 transparent color. 8x8 pixels per sprite.


is there a way that i can force houdini to output only the colors red, green, and blue when rendering?

(so i can replace them with 4 color NES palettes, later)

can i run houdini on a windows computer without actually running the installer? Is it possible/will it work to just copy the installation folder to another computer and run it on the 2nd computer?

Hey, so i have been playing around with the free software versions that Black Magic has available. . When i realized how much you can do with fusion on its own besides for just compositing, i thought, it would be really cool if it were possible to have houdini Engine as a plugin.

Has anybody looked into that at all? I mean, i don't really expect Side FX to write one anytime soon, but maybe somebody could start hacking on it, at least… or maybe it would be possible to get Blackmagic interested in doing a plugin?? I could really see it being nice if you could be editing hda files at the same time you are compositing your video and your fx, or whatever…

I was also thinking it might be kind of cool for making VR games.. I'm not really into this, but i thought it would be funny if somebody made a “full motion VR” game like those old Full motion video games for the sega CD that everyone loves to pick on “Night Trap”, Sewar Shark, etc. … well anyway, i could see how it would be really intuitive to build the framework for that type of thing in Fusion, and it really does seem like it could support houdini engine, just by looking at its capabilites…

ok. meow

thanks y'all, i wasn't aware that the background image could be a sequence. I will give that a shot.

Also, harryabreu, i think i tried more or less what you said, but it seemed to utilize a lot of resources and my computer started going very slowly… i may have set something to a strange value, tho… sometimes that's easey to do in houdini when you try new nodes!

(haven't used much cops)

hey, so, i was recently getting into editing video some, and so i got Davinci Resolve (which i freaking love!!).

Now, i have gotten a wild idea from somewhere that I should make a demo reel and actually try to get a real job or something (in video games).

So, i had some previz (video game) effects that i had already rendered previously and i loaded them into Resolve and composited with a nice background image, no problem…

Then i thought oh, i'm gonna need other elements in this, like titles and what not… So I tried the titles that come with Resolve but then, why would i wanna use some cheesy stock titles when i could make some cool FXy titles in Houdini instead…

So my problem is/was that I couldn't really figure out how i could see the video playing while working on the motion FX in houdini. I ended up just kind of guessing as to what would look good, and it's getting there, but I figure there must be some other way.. people do this type of thing all the time, right?

I even thought, it would be sweet if you could just make houdini transparent and play the video behind it like the way you can do with ZBrush…

If anybody has any thoughts on this, please let me know!

Also, I have no idea if such a thing is possible, but maybe some smart person out there (or sideFX) could one day wrap Houdini Engine into an OFX plugin…? that was my best other thought…

this is a great idea, i'm super down! I want Houdini to be the entire operating system one day…

like it runs a linux kernel or whatever, but the entire interface and file structure and everything would be controlled in Houdini, and other programs would launch inside. and the entire program stack could be its own node network context(PROPs?), so you could pipe outputs from one program (like audio, and video, or whatever) directly into any other program. that would be so sweet

And then they could start making Houdini Engine for other operating systems like OSX and Windows and Houdini will control everything mwahahaha

does any body still have this file? the link is broken, and I'm curious about this topic. thanks

I would like to know about this too. I feel like the licensing scheme has gotten so convoluted in recent years that even some sideFX employees aren't totally sure.

there should really be a webpage that explains the licensing scheme in complete detail! I think that would be good for everyone.

12++

hey, i was wondering if somebody can tell me about heightfield layers when i bring in my heightfield via houdini engine. I'm not converting it or anything, so i believe it comes in as a terrain, but i'm wondering how is the best way to deal with my layers in unreal?

I do a heightfield erode, which gives pretty colors automatically in houdini, but I would like to have those pretty colors automatically show up in unreal. unfortunately, i just get grey or i just get the option to load in a single material…

Also, is there a way to utilize the layers to mask out materials in unreal? like, so i could load up different substances for various layers?

thanks.


12++

Oh, i came across another audio plugin software today that does convolution. It is called Izotope Trash 2. It is mostly geared towards making weird, distorted sounds. i kind of find the distortions to be a bit harsh, but the convolution section sounds nice (i've never heard convolution that doesn't sound nice, tho..). It doesn't have all the features i would like to have though. Like it is awkward to edit the length of the audio file used for the convolution.

Maybe I should dust off one of those signals and systems books i have collecting dust and see if i can figure out how to implement some kind of convolution asset in VEX.. because I don't spend enough time making pointless weird things with Houdini!

I mean, if you think about it, it's just signal processing, so why not convolve your favorite music with your favorite artwork? maybe i could code it up so that the amplitude of each sample becomes the intensity of each cell of the convolution kernel.

Or vice versa, maybe try extracting an audio file from a black and white picture?

or maybe you could use the chroma and luma values somehow or just one color channel… or just convolove the Red channel with the blue panel and play it back for the green channel on your hifi?


12++

It's always a good time to start learning houdini!


12++

a little off topic, but has anyone used high sierra with music software like Ableton/Logic? My buddy is a musician, and I was trying to get him to try out that Blackmagic Davinci Resolve for his video editing. only thing is it said that you have to be running version 10.11.6 os (i believe). Now, i remember hearing some very bad things about that version, especially in regards to music production. I was wondering if anyone could comment on if this version is any better about that… seems like Apple has been really dropping the ball lately…

High Sierra is a sweet music festival tho!

TimeMachine COP makes me think of kung fury. I can hack you back in time!

Twod, thanks i will play with those nodes. For some reason my brain has been on 2D effects!

Ani, one time i built a hackintosh osx86 machine and i was using some freeware/abandonware audio editor that allowed me to load up two audio files and convolve them. It also let me draw a graph which would weight between the two files as a function of time.

You could effectively use the technique to morph one sound into another one.

I am no mac guy and unfortunately, i cant remember for the life of me what that program is called, and i never encountered that exact function again. Although i am guessing that the graph was just acting as a crossfader between the two files before they were fed into the convolution algorithm.

Umm anyway, these days you always see realtime convolution reverb plugins. They aren't exactly the same thing but close. (And if u havent tried one for its intended purpose, you should, they sound a billion times better than a typical digital reverb)

There have also been a handful of plugins recently that will interpolate between a number of “impulse responses”. This is cool because it can emulate vintage hardware complete with controls…

Of course, it would prolly be cooler if i just loaded up a bunch of random weird samples and interpolated through those. Haha

Anyhow, the claim to fame of this new crop of plugins is that they can give you very nice copies of analog hardware. So of course they come with jigabytes and jigabytes and cost $300 or so. I am thinking of acustica audio nebula n4 and liquidsonics seventh heaven.


If, like me to you dont really wanna spend that kinda dough at the moment. You can find some freeware convolution reverbs and a number of DAWs come with one…

But what about convolving 2 arbitrary audio files? Well, i found this java program (which i have yet to try)

https://code.google.com/archive/p/convolve-j/ [code.google.com]

Also, you could use matlab or max or csound or puredata or python, etc.

I wonder if there is a way in CHOPs…

I always love to convolve audio files together. not just the typical audio convolution of an impulse response of sistene chapel convolved with my shredding guitar solo(jklol), but I also like to play around with convolution as a sound design tool…

it's so interesting to me to hear one sound get totally grokked with another.

Now, i've always wondered what it would look like if an analogous operation could be performed on video.

I know that image filter blurs and stuff like that use a small convolution kernel to work their magic, but I feel like it's not really the same thing… it isn't really operating in the time domain..

So, i was playing around with COPs today (do COPs play around irl?) and I noticed that there is a convolve COP, and that it lets you specify an image file as the convolution kernel…

What I'm wondering is, how could I set up something that convolves 2 image sequences in the time domain, (would i have to use a foreach (?) and convolve each image of one sequence with each image of the 2nd sequence?)

and also, how would you deal with color channels? would you convolve each channel separately and then just recombine the output? Is there a proper way to extend convolution to multiple dimensions? is a normal blur effect (or whatever) considered a 3 dimensional operation? (i'm thinking the image is 2D and then it has a dimension that is like the intensity(?) of each pixel in the kernel?) Is that how it is really processed, or is the kernel just an single array of values? Is the single intensity(is that the right word?) channel of the convolution kernel applied to each color channel of the image, separately?

does any of this make sense? i have always imagined video convolution being a super trippy effect if I set it up right.

Although, i feel like what i'm talking about would be painfully slow in houdini, unless maybe it was run an a monster cpu with many cores…

I'm guessing houdini does this stuff with the cpu, right?


If anybody can clear the fog from around my head with respect to this topic, i would be stoked! If anybody could help me set something like this up that works and doesn't take a year to compute, I would be super stoked! If it actually looks cool once computed, I would be ultimately stoked.

Until then, i'm just gonna hook a camera to a projector and point them both at the same wall… lol

there are some new rigging tools in Houdini 16, I haven't tried them really, but they look pretty intuitive to use. I think varomix (mix training on youtube) did a video a while back that went over some of the features. If you are rigging humanoid characters, you might want to have a look at www.mixamo.com their website does an amazing job of rigging humanoids, and they have about 1500 animations you can apply right from the website to get started. you can download fbx and put it right into houdini or whatever and edit it to your desire

also, you might wanna check out the perception neuron system if you are looking to do more realistic mocap style motion . it's pretty cheap and gets the job done.

yes, i will use a null like that occasionally too. sometimes give it a special color, so my eye goes right to it in the network.

Ok, I will give all that stuff a try. thanks. you definitely helped me get a better understanding of how this thing works.