Log into your account to keep track of your progress. You can work through the lessons without logging in but your progress will be lost when you refresh the page.

TOTAL DURATION: 1h 2m 59s

A great way to understand Houdini’s node-based workflow is to explore it in the context of a project. It is important to start learning how to think and work procedurally. 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.

Along the way you will get to use different aspects of Houdini’s workspace. By learning how to use these UI elements together, you will dive deeper into Houdini’s node-based workflow. The lessons will then give you a chance to put your ideas into practice, which is one of the best ways to learn.

This lesson includes a Step by Step PDF document to help guide you.

This is an updated version of this H19.5 Lesson.

CREATED BY

rmagee
ROBERT MAGEE

Robert Magee is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at SideFX who has been working with Houdini for 20 years. He has created lots of learning material and demos designed to help artists understand how going procedural with Houdini can benefit their work.

More from Robert Magee

COMMENTS

  • erasesea 11 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    It's so fast I can't keep up. I can't see anything because it's going too far.

    • erasesea 11 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

      misunderstood after only watching the video. The PDF is so well organized, I like it! I can't delete the reply, so I'll reply instead

  • Immy_Raja 10 months, 4 weeks ago  | 

    task was quite straight forward but after smoooth shading at the end, my nuggin on my brick is not quite circular, it has straight edges, ive repeated the lesson and found the same result.

  • Immy_Raja 10 months, 4 weeks ago  | 

    it seems to happen when i do the last polybevel onto the group :) any help would be great

  • Immy_Raja 10 months, 4 weeks ago  | 

    i figured it out, i missed a step, when beveling make sure you turn off group selection in the parameter plane, before you select include edges box,

  • animatedpaul 10 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    my point light isn't allowing me to manipulate it

    • DanielaLobo 8 months, 1 week ago  | 

      mine either!!!!!

      • hrgiger 7 months, 1 week ago  | 

        Did you switch to shadow mode?

  • leifdux 10 months ago  | 

    Interesting, I know everything is wired correctly because I am able to get both the color from the Color Node as well as the Cd attribute with the rubber toy color.
    But...when I do check Pack and Instance, it does not show any color at all (just the grey color you see in clay).

    Did not check Add Shader in the testgeometry_rubbertoy too... Help please...

    • rmagee 10 months ago  | 

      Did you change your viewport to OpenGL? There were instructions at the beginning of the first video. That might be causing the issue.

      • leifdux 10 months ago  | 

        Thank you for the reply! Yes, not setting viewport to OpenGL was the issue (was set to Vulkan).
        Sorry, I was following the textbook version until I got stuck at this. (I believe the textbook did not mention to set to OpenGL?)

        Is here the best place to reach for Q&As?
        My lego blocks are seemingly too big and is overlapping a lot, I'll follow the video version to troubleshoot.

        • rmagee 10 months ago  | 

          Post to the Houdini Learning Material forum and ping me - be sure to include your hip file. That will make it easier to find where things aren't working.

  • Emil 8 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    Thx Rob for a nice tut. I wanna know why you set the attribvop to Run Over: Vertices and then promote them back to Points, couldn't we just read the Cd from the texture and apply directly to points?

  • Emil 8 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    Hi again Rob, I just gave it a shot by using the Attribute From Map node which works directly on points and it kinda replaced those 2 nodes (attribvop and attribpromote), at least visually looks the same.

  • janisfs 8 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    Hi Rob
    I noticed this - the pegboard has an uneven shadow from the figure. There is a shadow on the base, but the tops of the bricks do not have one.
    How can this be fixed?

  • LuzidVision 4 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    I really dont think explaining the basic UI stuff in every foundation tutorial is useful? Rather annoying?

    • rmagee 4 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

      The reason is that we don't know which of the foundation lessons people will start with. So we make sure to make it accessible to first timers in case this is the lesson they start with.

      • LuzidVision 4 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

        Sounds reasonable, I guessed as much. Still its sometimes a bit frustrating, given how frustrating Houdini can be by itself. When I fight for an hour with a 10 mins segment of a tutorial, starting the next tutorial with repetitive info is somewhat agitating :D

  • LuzidVision 4 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    Otherwise great series

  • LuzidVision 4 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    feels a little odd to have to select the deprecated option for a quite recent tutorial. is there no way to achieve the coloring with vulkan?

  • LuzidVision 4 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    the HDA should be saved with the suffix -deprecated

  • sdeleurere 3 weeks, 3 days ago  | 

    In lesson 2, Houdini would straight up crash when trying to copy the brick to all those points. I checked my RAM usage and it shot up all the way to 64GB. The only way to fix this is to add the copy to points node manually and enable "Pack and Instance" before connecting the rest to it.
    ( I have a 7900x, 4080 and 64GB ram running Linux Mint)

    • rmagee 3 weeks, 1 day ago  | 

      Strange - I have less memory than that on Windows and I wasn't crashing. But that was H20.5 and it sounds like you are in H21.

      The way you set it up sounds like the best option. I should recommend to R&D that Pack and Instance is on by default for this node.

Please log in to leave a comment.