Houdini in 5 Minutes

In this first video we’re talking about the underlying structure of contexts that make up Houdini. It is in many ways similar to an operating system where individual apps for individual tasks are strung together.

Let’s get cracking and build our very first setup!

What on earth did we just do?! Let’s talk a bit more about one of Houdini’s fundamental building blocks: Attributes.

What is geometry worth if we can’t generate an image out of it? Let’s do this by setting up Mantra, Houdini’s built in render engine.

A bit of depth of field can never harm! Learn how to tweak your render settings in Mantra for final rendering.

How about we start art directing our scattered spheres and rebuild our setup so we can paint where we want our objects to go? Look no further!

Let’s get things moving and build procedural animations using our scatter setup. And while we’re at it why not talk a bit about more or less clever ways to set this up…

A few words on how to get our animated geo out into other tools. And more importantly a few thoughts about helping yourself when stuck in Houdini.

Apart from attributes, loops and iterative techniques are maybe the most useful concept when building your procedural geometry inside Houdini. With very efficient node trees we can cook up pretty intricate effects.

The very first (and still imho the most fun) way to dive into simulation territory is Houdini’s SOP solver: It allows you to execute a node tree on a previous frame’s data. This gives you the ability to create evolving shapes, hand built particle systems and even full dynamics systems (if you want to fully build them yourself). In this tutorial we’ll go over a basic setup using the SOP solver to build a growing organic… um… thingy.

Ever wanted to take your meshes apart and work on their individual polygons? No? Doesn’t matter – here’s the foreach loop which allows you to do exactly that!

This video will give you a brief introduction on how to set up your very first particle system using Houdini’s POPs (Particle Operators). Houdini isn’t just a great tool for procedural geometry creation – it’s also the single most powerful particle system we’ve seen to this day. Plus: The particles are deeply integrated into Houdini’s functionality, so you can combine them with virtually any tool Houdini has to offer.

With version 17, Houdini introduced a new simulation framework called vellum. It is based on position based dynamics and thus offers a relatively fast way to simulate a multitude of effects. In our case we’re gonna use it to set up a bunch of grains which we’re then going to texture to display our logo once they’ve fallen to the ground.

After we’re done setting up our simulation, let’s render it! This time using Redshift, one of our favorite engines when it comes to working and rendering in Houdini. Yes it doesn’t come with Houdini. Yes it’s a third party addon. Yes it costs money. However we think that currently a third party engine (no matter if it’s Redshift, Octane, Vray, Arnold, Renderman, 3Delight or whatever you prefer) is about the only chance a small studio / freelancer has when it comes to rendering out sequences without using a render farm. So let’s get rendering!

Let’s dive into our last bunch of videos in this first sprint of “Houdini in five minutes” with a seemingly dry topics: Packed Primitives / Instances. Although slightly technical, it’s a powerful concept that enables Houdini to work on massive scenes.

Let’s put our newfound knowledge of packed primitives and the MOPs toolkit to use and build a straightforward mechanical display!

In our final project for this first sprint of “Houdini in five minutes” we’re gonna build a tactical shooter style isocontour map with a bunch of moving particles. We’re gonna be using Houdini’s built in SOPs, a bit of MOPs and Redshift. In this first part we’re building the map itself using Houdini’s Boolean SOP.

In our final project for this first sprint of “Houdini in five minutes” we’re gonna build a tactical shooter style isocontour map with a bunch of moving particles. We’re gonna be using Houdini’s built in SOPs, a bit of MOPs and Redshift. In this second part we’re setting up moving particles using MOPs.

In our final project for this first sprint of “Houdini in five minutes” we’re gonna build a tactical shooter style isocontour map with a bunch of moving particles. We’re gonna be using Houdini’s built in SOPs, a bit of MOPs and Redshift. In this third part we’re setting up our scene for rendering in Redshift.