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TOTAL DURATION: 1h 20m 5s

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.

To give you a complete understanding of the shot being developed, you will build all the elements from scratch, then simulate the effects. This will help you understand how the simulation nodes work within the wider context of a Houdini scene. In the end, you will render out the shot using the Karma renderer.

The complete Houdini Foundations for Houdini 19.5 is also available as Downloadable PDF and a Print-on-Demand book through the Lulu Ebook company. This 224 page book contains 9 chapters designed to help artists take their first steps into Houdini.

Research for this lesson by Michael Buckley

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

  • sdugaro 1 year, 11 months ago  | 

    Nice one! Thanks.

  • PolyMarvels 1 year, 11 months ago  | 

    Robert, great series as always, thank you.

  • SerjKirchano 1 year, 10 months ago  | 

    Thanks! Clarifies a lot of details indeed

  • bharath453 1 year, 8 months ago  | 

    Hi, i need some help, if i click polybevel in houdini, it shows fatal error and get crash. What is the solution for this problem

    • jjin10688 1 year ago  | 

      It might be because your pc doesn't use high detail if it is not a high-end PC.

  • spyco59 1 year, 8 months ago  | 

    Thanks Robert! Really appreciate having a PDF file to follow along! :)

  • luoyuepo 1 year, 7 months ago  | 

    And there is something wrong with the PDF file.

    On the Page 21, paragraph 2. The expression should be
    “ Set the Prune parameter to
    $F >200. After the expoding_bomb node, add another Prune LOP.
    Set the Prune parameter to $F <199."

    I did just just like the PDF said,and the bomb became invisible all along in the timeline.

    Hope you can fix this soon.And thank you for all the nice tutorials!

    • zengyuanelsie1 1 year, 1 month ago  | 

      I had the same problem and solved it with this:

      prune>primitive pattern>input last modified primitives

      • JoeRan 1 year, 1 month ago  | 

        i had the same problem! thank you!

        • AbhishekDhiman 10 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

          input last modified primitives
          thank you

      • HArrCorr 6 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

        thx, had the same problem,

  • dimitridev 1 year, 6 months ago  | 

    thank you, great lesson!

  • khyathikkrishna1223 1 year, 6 months ago  | 

    it was a very good one, learned a lot. thanks

  • dhuiting 1 year, 2 months ago  | 

    Hi! I noticed the orient along curve works while we are on the construction plane (from 0-142) but at frame 143 when the cap starts rising up toward the bomb, it gets slightly off from the poly wire. It's close but not exactly on. Why is this?

  • JoeRan 1 year, 1 month ago  | 

    Unfortunately I'm stuck in the last step (number 11 - Render pyro fx)
    Despite having 40 GB of RAM on the PC, the computer does not hold up!
    Crash at the exact moment I enter the pyro effect usd.

  • jjin10688 1 year ago  | 

    simple fire ball is not working help

    • rmagee 1 year ago  | 

      Did you change the start frame to 200 and the Frame Range to 200-240? - Part 8 steps 1 and 2

  • Dohesh 11 months, 1 week ago  | 

    my file is exporting in usdnc how can i save in USD

    • shung1021 11 months, 1 week ago  | 

      when you try to bring in the USD in the reference node, there should be a drop down menu on the lower right hand corner that says "*.usd, *usda.... etc.," change that to just "*" and you should be able to see your USDNC files

      • Dohesh 11 months, 1 week ago  | 

        i also tried this method and its showing usdnc files but there is 1 error and the error is
        "Unable to find layer file: 1/Houdini/Destructtion"

      • AbhishekDhiman 10 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

        Thank you

    • shung1021 11 months, 1 week ago  | 

      i assume the NC in USDNC simply means Non Commercial

  • shung1021 11 months, 1 week ago  | 

    Thank you so much for this tutorial Robert! This tutorial helped me so much in getting started in Houdini!

  • jc.kumar.1002 10 months, 4 weeks ago  | 

    can you please help me with this?
    i am not finding Attribute adjust vector

  • fantasio 9 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    Hi, I got an error when selecting Simple Fracture for the bomb. The network nodes are created but there's an error saying:
    "Error: Invalid source/obj/bomb_geo_fracture/rbdmaterialfracture/init_opencl"
    Anybody has an idea what's happening?
    Thanks a lot

  • fantasio 9 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    I've change the Preferences of OpenCL Device from GPU to CPU and it seems to work.

  • taku5842 8 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    Hi, I have a question.
    In part 6, the spark effect is output in the opposite direction (traveling direction), is there a solution?

  • natrianvfx 8 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    Great tutorial. I had a lot of fun following this videos. Fx destruction is really fun!

  • Protozoaire 8 months, 1 week ago  | 

    Where are the tutorial scenes please?

    • rmagee 8 months, 1 week ago  | 

      This lesson is designed to be built from scratch.

  • enzo.nhr 7 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    My popnet create particules in the wrong direction, as if the particules were created inside the sphere, not outside, which cause the soot trail to go the opposite direction it supposed to be :(

    • Kucheryat 6 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

      you should try change scale-time in popnet node to about 0.20. that helped me

    • Crazy_Chintu 3 months ago  | 

      thank you.
      It helped.....

  • LukeP 7 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    Overall comments about this book and this training. I think it's a good example of how things should not be written and examplifies problems with Houdini documentation. For me at least. I'm sure others' opinion will be different. That doesn't mean that it wasn't useful. You can still learn Houdini from it, but it's supposed to be a Foundations book, right? Meaning that the focus should be on explaining core concepts. Something that MOEEN SAYED does really really well. Lets take tutorials in this book. There's very little explaination. Do this, set this, type this, without explainations is not helpful. Neither is going from basic concepts to some advanced ones. Again, perfect example of what needs to change wrt to Houdini documentation.

    • rmagee 7 months ago  | 

      Thanks for the feedback. The goal of this book/tutorial series was to help artists build muscle memory and learn how to accomplish day-to-day tasks as they get through their first few projects in Houdini - this will lead to questions that they can begin to explore using other learning materials. In fact, we commission Mooen to make tutorials for us to add that other layer. So in the case of this book, Foundation means getting comfortable with the software and touch as much of it as possible rather than diving into core concepts.

  • Kucheryat 6 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    Hi, i need help on step 5. Problem started after adding attribute transfer. Particles are not going in direction of the fuse. All steps before are working correctly. What should i do?

    • Kucheryat 6 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

      oh, sorry, i found the problem

  • Peps 4 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    hola buen dia, tengo un problema en la leccion 11
    dice asi
    576 fatal error Segmentacion faul crash log saved to
    C /Users/Usuario/Appdata/ Local/ Temp /houdini_temp/crash.destruction_11a.usuario_576_log.txt

    alguien podria ayudarme, gracias

  • dhruvthole2609 3 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    Hi, I need help. When I used simple Fracture, the bomb just rolls over the ground instead of blasting.

  • lowrid3r7 3 months ago  | 

    Hi! I had the same problem. In the rbdmaterialfracture node delete the Glue from Glue Constraint Name.

  • planimation 3 months ago  | 

    On Video 5) at 6:20 I put in the code $F >199 but my partials don't die after frame 199 anyone know what the issue is, cheers!

    • planimation 3 months ago  | 

      Solve it! i forgot to click Enable in the V Expression

  • planimation 3 months ago  | 

    anyone know why my sparks are going through the floor? video 06?

    • planimation 3 months ago  | 

      ah found it, it's because I name my attrbadjustfloat1 to LIFE to life.

  • planimation 2 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    currently on video 11, around 3:05 once a add the prune node i put $F>200 but it doesn't work, is this because i'm using a UK keyboard not sure how to fix this please help cheers!

    • planimation 2 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

      so i solve this by creating the node again

  • planimation 2 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    I got a new problem, currently on the last video and I don't see the pyro render only the dust.... what do you think happen?

  • ktjk1 2 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    I've been working my way through the Houdini basics course, but I'm stuck. When I finally render, the material library node is applying a pyro shader to the material VOP input field, but all other geomatry's materials disappear and I can't recover them. I've followed this process at least 10 times and studied the information, but I can't get it to work. Houdini is a good program, yes, but it's too unstable and finicky. It's a program that doesn't give me the same result even if I follow it exactly without missing a single moment. I don't think it's a good program in that sense. I need to find another good program.

  • Harry__243 2 months, 1 week ago  | 

    I´ve a question. Working on Part 10, my Prune Notes don´t work (both). Does anyone has an Idea? I killed my presets, using the default but the Problem is still there.
    My Workaround, using the time-expression directly in the Primitive Count of the Reference Note works fine and delivers the expected results... but this doesn´t fix my prune issue. Does anyone has an idea (using Houdini 20.0.590 on Windows).

    • Harry__243 2 months, 1 week ago  | 

      I´ve found the issue... the prune note defaults have been changed. In Target Primitives under Primitive Pattern I had to choose `lopinputprims(' . ' , 0)`

  • m.colonnelli 2 months ago  | 

    Fantastic tutorial. At the moment, I only have one problem that I don't know how to solve: when I switch to render view (Karma), all materials look good except for the "Soot" where the particles turn into very large spheres. Do you know how I can solve it?

  • carlosvega 1 month, 3 weeks ago  | 

    Hi, i have a problem, i'm in the part 7, and when apply the simple fracture and set up the fracture solver, delete the glue, and run the simulation, the bomb rolls instead of break, like all the pieces are glued. Can anyone know how to solve it?

    • MTU1500 5 days, 17 hours ago  | 

      I had the same problem. I solved it to put the strenght on 0 in Advanced ==> Glue ==> strength.

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