Hey everyone!

I have been working in Houdini for about a year and do mainly motion graphics work. Since my motion graphics tend to include some sort of 3D bevel text or vector elements I have been trying to put together a good workflow, but have been struggling for a while.

For some reason, my bevels tended to get horribly screwed up. Now Houdini 18 introducing the collision detection options has made everything better, but I still kept running into issues! Finally, after tons of testing, I feel like I have found a good solution.

I just can't wrap my mind around that I need to work around a SOP Houdini ships with, with a setup like this just to get around some awful glitching. I don't even understand what is happening because until I bevel the geo seems fine. Even using the fuse and facet sop does not help it.

I wanted to share my setup, see if anyone has a better solution or if it's somehow caused by my ignorance or stupidity or help some other folks out there that are running into the same issue!

Link to the files is in the bottom of the post!

Anyway, here we go!


https://imgur.com/a/7WNycfh [imgur.com]
A general overview of my setup!

Here the three solutions:

#1 - Holes sop with fuse and facet sop

#2 - Resample the vector file and then fuse and facet sop

#3 - Extrude Main Geo and Holes seperately and then boolean - subtract the holes from the main geo.

Finally I bevel the whole deal. I am only beveling the front and back faces, am using the collision detection and ignoring flat edges.

Here the vector I am working with:


https://imgur.com/a/dtYFYKw [imgur.com]


#1 - Holes SOP only (+fuse and facet): The first setup is what in theory should do the trick but it creates a bunch of issues:




https://imgur.com/a/4rN9Jlh [imgur.com]
Here a wide view on the result


https://imgur.com/a/9FpnAcf [imgur.com]
Major glitch on the “W”


https://imgur.com/a/5JSfNp7 [imgur.com]
It's not super obvious but the tip of the hole on the A has an overlapping face issue.

#2 - Resample & Holes SOP: Setup number 2 did not cause any direct glitches in this case, but cause changed the shape of certain corners even at high sample rates (so tiny divisions) and caused unnecessarily heavy geometry.




https://imgur.com/a/txNHjBn [imgur.com]
Here a wide view on the result


https://imgur.com/a/IBmpOZM [imgur.com]
Look at all those unnecessary divisions and the crooked bevel at the middle inside tip of the “W”


https://imgur.com/a/45OsfXO [imgur.com]
Note the crooked top corner of the “A”

#3 - Extrude and Boolean Subtract: This is the setup that seemed to cause little to no issues and produced the cleanest topology while I find it to be unnecessarily complex.


https://imgur.com/a/fdGqw6k [imgur.com]
Here a wide view on the result


https://imgur.com/a/tAq2a5J [imgur.com]
Pretty perfect toplogy


https://imgur.com/a/BsPmX2x [imgur.com]
This is what the top of the A should be looking like!

Please let me know if you have a better workflow, have an idea to improve on this or if this helped you out! I would love to see SideFX fix or improve the holes SOP to where it can actually be used properly!

For now, this is what I will be working with and while it's not perfect it does seem to work!

Some things to note:
- Making your vector file dimensions pretty big seems to solve some general issues that I encountered even with this solution. I have my artboard in illustrator set to 5000px x 5000px.
- This solution could get a little complicated if working with multilayered objects. That being said I feel like that would be the case even if the holes sop worked properly so my suggestion here would be to save out each layer to a separate file. Otherwise, you can always hand separate them in Houdini, but that could get quite messy, especially with more intricate vectors!
- Good clean vectors are a must when working with them in Houdini. Go clean up unused points and simplify your vectors as much as possible. If you don't need a bevel or are okay with using a rounded edge shader you can probably get away with a lot more though!

If you want to check out the Houdini file and the .AI file I used in the example the files are attached!


Thanks for your time!

without looking too much in details, the first observation I have is, I wouldn't use the SAME bevel for a HUGE font AND a little font…this would be hard to control, separate them out for finer controls.

I doubt that this will solve your problem, but it's worth a try. In 17.5 I recently had problems beveling a curve, and sorting the points beforehand solved it.

So try this: Afer your hole SOP, put down a Sort SOP. And on the Sort, set point sorting to “By vertex order”.

maybe it's important by some reason to work with .ai text or i missed smth obvious a bit not sure why don't you use the font sop :?
maybe you've tried it, but as one more way vdb can be used, though it gives a lot of primitives
Round Edge Shader funny feature
nice notes