Foundations 19.5

This overview chapter contains general information about Houdini that will help you get started with important concepts and ideas. While at first, you might not understand what it all means, this chapter will be a valuable reference point as you work through the foundation tutorials and build up your knowledge.

In this lesson you will start from scratch to model, render, animate, and simulate a soccer ball, also known as a football in many parts of the world. You will create a classic bouncing ball animation using the principles of squash and stretch, apply textures and materials, add lights and cameras, and explore the use of dynamics to simulate a group of soccer balls.

In this lesson, you will learn how to create your own custom brickify tool using procedural nodes and networks to define its function and interface

In this Houdini Foundations lesson, you will smash a wine glass then slow down time to hold onto the big splash. This effect involves both an RBD simulation for the shattered glass and a fluid simulation for the wine.

One of the things that makes visual effects fun is that you get to blow things up without causing any real damage. In this lesson, you will light a fuse using particle sparks then explode a cartoon bomb using rigid body dynamics for the shell of the bomb and Pyro FX for the fire and smoke. This lesson will teach you how to set up dynamic simulations using a variety of shelf tools and network nodes.

In this lesson, you will create a landscape using the Heightfield tools in Houdini and bring it into Unreal

Learn how to rig, animate and add fur to a two legged character named Fur Dude. Starting with existing geometry, draw the skeleton, capture the geometry then build rig controls for an animation rig. Next keyframe a walk cycle and add fur to the surface of the creature.

To create game assets using Houdini’s node-based workflow, it is important to start learning how to think and work procedurally. In this lesson, you will learn how to create game assets using procedural nodes and networks then deploy them directly into Unreal using the Houdini Engine.

In this lesson, you will use TOP nodes to take a city map, create buildings for each city block and then grow this system to handle more complex buildings and larger city maps. Houdini artists will probably know how to do this in SOPs, but by using TOPs, you can learn the PDG workflow while creating a system that can be easily scaled to distribute multiple tasks to an external compute farm to process in parallel.

Houdini Foundations is for artists who want to learn how to use Houdini and its node-based procedural workflow to create 3D computer graphics for film, TV projects or video games. Learn about the tools and techniques you will use as a Houdini artist, then run through multiple lessons that teach you how to build simple projects from scratch. You will also learn how to work with the nodes and networks in Houdini and then how to bring the results into the UE4 game engine.