The structure itself suggests you drop them at project level so you will use $JOB/geo and $JOB/renders but $JOB/filename.hip

I don't particularly like it but I see why they have gone in this direction, it is simple and $JOB and $HIP are unified so kind of makes sense.

I do create my own hip folder though.

Houdini brings his own world, vocabulary and way to structure things, properties are great on a hierarchical application with linear history, in the context of Houdini with “non-linear history” and truly procedural approach they simply are too limiting and as any other package, Houdini brings its own approach to how structure your world.

Chances are you will fall in love with string based attributes and how you can literally bend backwards the application to do things totally incredible but of course you will have to embrace the Houdini way, not bad believe me.

Ultimately you will face a few thing you need and that is my daily battle so far;

- Separating Development from Production states on a scene (in Soft this is trivial with the use of Overrides and Passes/Partitions), In Houdini you will have to use objects collecting objects and applying attributes and Bundles to achieve the same-ish.

- Manipulating the object and its history in one single go (object+history), in Houdini you will have to tweak the interface so you can select an object and see the internals without having to dive into it which is extremely annoying for me.

- Grouping as a mean to manipulation in XSI is great, in Houdini just does not make sense to use groups, simple as that. Instead you will start using “collectors” (one new object that has object merges in side and allows you to apply whatever)

- Manipulation in general, something H14 improved massively and H15 apparently further improves, specially manipulating multiple objects at once.

- Materials approach or how to apply them (inside as part of SOPs? or OBJ level?) again this will become the topic of many lunches… you will see there is no one way rules them all like in XSI as these bring their own advantages.

- Material construction apparently in H15 has been improved massively so you will be finally able to do proper material layering easily, build them also easily in VOPs, etc… so this one is meant ti be easy from now on.

These are IMHO all the things I think you need to find your way, the rest is easier and better so it is quite easy to adapt.

Oh, and let go on the whole Freeze thing. ;-)

Use your image as the emission (scattering on it particles) and run a simulation of these with the help of fluids as you see fit.

To direct the particles in a certain direction the common approach I see is to use a mesh normals as your velocity vectors, to make it user friendly if you have two copies of you caligraphy as geometry, one the source size and another scaled up and translated and the normals of the first pointing to the second you have a very easy way to manipulate it.

There are some nice video tutorials of particles in a fluid you surely will find on cmiVFX and the like.

hope it helps
jb

You can't do it in the same way, Houdini has its own approach to things and these are the kind of things that take time to pick up as in each occasion you will want to do in a different way to get the benefits of certain approach.

You could do it using an object merge to “collect” these object and apply your settings, then you render the “collector”.

On some occasions it may be better to simply attach the attributes to the objects and use it as if it were overrides (you can assign a material to all of them and then pick a few of those and override the attribute that points to the material)

In terms of subdivisions you don't have the need to apply multiple levels as Houdini takes care of it but still, that is something I would suggest to handle with an object merge as if it were a collector.

In the guides I wrote there are a few examples on the subject on page 90 onwards that talk about organising overrides and describe these strategies.

Hope it helps.
jb

Phenomenal amount of improvements, well done and thanks so much, look forward to use it in production.

I have tried that and I must confess I feel very embarrassed and it is not as easy as it looks… a good 5 minutes truly need 30-40 minutes trying… just happens…

But I guess you are right, it would be even easier… will think again.

:-)

Is anyone out there exploring using Jetson TK1 for rendering/simulation? looks like a potential cluster approach would be very interesting.

https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded-computing [developer.nvidia.com]

thanks in advance
jb

I wonder if the OpenGL group could actually put pressure on Apple to do the task they are meant to do…

wishful thinking?

It is brilliant to see this moving forward, we at Glassworks are big users of Redshift and the Houdini/Linux combo is the critical piece missing right now.

Thanks and I hope we can help somehow.

+1

If done properly it is quite interesting subject of mine right now…

http://www.roxlu.com/downloads/scholar/004.fluid.fast_hydrolic_erosion_simulation_and_visualisation.pdf [roxlu.com]
http://www.cescg.org/CESCG-2011/papers/TUBudapest-Jako-Balazs.pdf [cescg.org]
https://www.dune-project.org/downloadext.html [dune-project.org]
http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/content/23/12/1107.abstract [geology.geoscienceworld.org]
http://grainflowresearch.mae.cornell.edu/geophysics/dunes/dunes.html [grainflowresearch.mae.cornell.edu]


Hope it helps
jb

You just convert everything to metric. ;-)

This is no ordinary noise, you have to look at Scott-Grey reaction diffusion to generate procedurally that pattern

good luck
jb

My experience with the Nvidia GTX780 was awesome, with the K4000, K5000 and K4200 not so.

My feeling is that you want to have gaming cards with lots of memory (that is the key) and you will be happy.

At Glassworks we use a GPU renderer and it loves the Titans so I would say it is a good bet.

Anyone could confirm?

hope it helps

I am optimistic by nature and hope Apple get their act together with the graphics cards and drivers soon too.

Said that I would like everybody to understand that there are many different types of users and what for you may be heaven, others find hell.

I may be very comfortable with Linux but It does not what I need because I require a ton of extra tools around it and that only happens on Mac OS X, from After Effects, Audition, Photoshop, Sketchup, Keynote, FinalCutProX, Mind Manager, Merlin, etc…

Which leads me to my point, I rather use houdini on my laptop with all the glitches it has right now under OS X while having all these tools around it (specially if I am on a shoot) than going to Linux and having a myriad of holes in my workflow.

hope it makes sense
jb

mtucker

Enivob
I guess that lets the Dev team remove a bunch of bugs from the bug base. Time for margaritas boys!

I wish. The bugs are still there, and they are still getting attention when we can spare it. And we still have our fingers crossed that Apple will be able to address some of these bugs. But the “supported GPU” list is not the list of GPUs we want, hope, or ever will support. It's the list of GPUs that _actually work today_ (to the best of our knowledge). If and when Houdini can be run on other GPUs, we'll add them to the list.

Mark

It is not pointless for all of us that use OS X though.

circusmonkey
Right now it seems pretty pointless even making a OSX release for Houdini . Just yesterday I got the spinning wheel of doom just trying to move some UV's.


Rob

I would suggest you install qLib and use the Camera Plane qL node.

The main reason I say this is because you will be able to have a back plate but by adding a second one you can have a front plate (for example trees in front) and it is very convenient.

hope it helps.

Some example of modern website design HTML5

JUST FOR THE SAKE OF DISCUSSING, DON'T TAKE THEM LITEALLY

http://harlointeractive.com [harlointeractive.com]
http://www.dim.hr/home.htm [dim.hr]
http://www.zippergaleria.com.br/pt/ [zippergaleria.com.br]
http://www.lisher.net [lisher.net]
http://www.piccsy.com/investors/ [piccsy.com]
http://worthwhile.com [worthwhile.com]
https://webflow.com [webflow.com]
http://45royale.com [45royale.com]


Hope they make sense.

Realistic results are the combination of good motion capture and great motion editing, realistic lighting and spend a bit of time describing the behaviour of the crowd.

Houdini crowds are surely in its infancy but I would expect the various issues we are finding right now that make it a bit harder than it should be to be overcomed in the next release.

The point I am trying to make is that you are going to need an specialist artists with crowds as it is not so easy anymore like particles repelling and attracting.

My recommendation if you feel Houdini is not there yet would be to use in the meantime Massive Software instead of Miarmy and plug the results into Houdini rather than inheriting all the horrible things Maya brings to the party and get the most of Houdini instead.

my 2 cents.

I will be putting online on my website soon a little making of with some behind the scenes pictures and all so keep an eye.

:-)
jb