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TOTAL DURATION: 1h 8m 32s

Take your first steps into Houdini as you model a coffee cup then use dynamics to simulate a collection of gumballs falling into it. You will apply textures and materials, add lights and a camera then render out the finished sequence. By touching all aspects of this shot, you will begin learning how to navigate your way through Houdini and its node-based workflow.

This lesson includes a step-by-step PDF which you can use to follow along the lesson supported by video tutorials.

CREATED BY

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

  • adizepl 4 months, 1 week ago  | 

    Amazing tutorial for everyone wanting to start with Houdini!

  • chris7c0 3 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    2| In my Houdini 21 Apprentice, the shortcut to view the shape palette in the network view is Z

  • leviathan1339 3 months ago  | 

    nice

  • Shibadatt_Mohapatra 3 months ago  | 

    Amazing Teacher whos has super power which is teaching

    • rmagee 3 months ago  | 

      What a nice comment to start the new year. Glad that you enjoyed the lesson!

  • Ishaksaidumohammad 3 months ago  | 

    Great videos. I really wonder how these short videos have more knowledge than many other lengthy videos I saw in YouTube. thank you sir, are a great teacher.

  • CarlosCarvajal183 2 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    Great videos, Im really enjoying the learning process.

    Im using the Apprentice version and when I reach the moment to use de reference node I cant see the gumballs for some reason, any advice?

    • jasper.m.rynhart 2 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

      For users in Apprentice, when using the reference node, navigate to the file explorer as shown in the video. Then look to the bottom right of the window where it says "*.usd, *.usda "...etc. Here, you will need to edit it so it says "*.usdnc". This stands for non-commercial, and doing this should make your files show up (I had the same problem and that fixed it)

  • zko99309 2 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    Hello Sir,

    In this project, I follow and study step by step. In texture the grouond video,when I change UV scale to 5, 5 or 15, 15, the texture of ground is not change. How to solve it. I am using Houdini 21.0.440.

    • rmagee 2 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

      Did you try to restart the renderer from the menu on the viewport?

      • zko99309 2 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

        Yes, I tried to restart the renderer from the menu on the viewport.

      • zko99309 2 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

        And I tried this in other computer, but I cann't solve it.

        • archimage3d 1 month, 4 weeks ago  | 

          I had similar issues with that build, but the latest build seem to work a treat.
          It might have been Graphics driver related.

    • Exogenetic 1 month ago  | 

      A fix I found was to right click the UV scale in the ground_mat and "Copy Parameter". You can right click the other scale text field and "Paste Relative References" so you keep the scale uniform. Then double click into the ground SOP network and paste the relative references into the uvproject node's scale values. It's 100 by default, so if you change the value to "100/<pasted relative reference>" it should be driven by, and act the same as the uv scale in the ground_mat.

      • Exogenetic 1 month ago  | 

        This is just in the event you have .440. I wouldn't recommend taking this fix into another version of Houdini.

  • Parav 2 months, 1 week ago  | 

    When i am exporting the USD File to get gumballs ready to add material and render its not exporting????

    • rmagee 2 months ago  | 

      Are you using Apprentice? You need to export to .usdnc for this to work in Apprentice.

  • MahdiNowruziani 2 months ago  | 

    Hi Robert ,this was a great tutorial for me and who wants to start learning houdini , tnx any way
    in the episode 4 i have not the <quick surface material> node in solaris
    i'm using houdini 19.5.4

  • Ishaksaidumohammad 2 months ago  | 

    I cannot Go through the chapter By clicking next or clicking on the specific chapter. :(

    • Brunken 2 months ago  | 

      me too

  • Brunken 2 months ago  | 

    Hi, I'm having trouble watching the classes. Yesterday I was able to watch normally, but now I want to watch lesson 2 and I can't click on it. I'm really enjoying the teaching method.

    • rmagee 2 months ago  | 

      We are looking to fix this as soon as possible. You can use the Youtube playlist in the mean time:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiTvubECc4w&list=PLXNFA1EysfYmdgiVC1Ua6fCLd5GXuGYFS

      • Brunken 2 months ago  | 

        I didn't know it was on YouTube, I even forgot to look for it haha. Thank you! The platform is working again.

  • LuxMax 2 months ago  | 

    I really like this tutorial, it is packed with extra useful info in very manageable short chapters.

    • rmagee 2 months ago  | 

      Glad to hear you liked it!

  • Brunken 2 months ago  | 

    When I try to render the final version, my computer is running into an error. It restarts and displays: "Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart. Stop code, system thread exception not handled (0x7E). What failed: dxgmms2.sys"

    I looked into it and it seems to be a driver update issue, but mine is up to date... I have a computer with an RTX 3080, i9 12900K, and 32 GB of RAM.

    • Brunken 2 months ago  | 

      I switched to the Nvidia Studio driver and it worked! It seems the latest version has some kind of bug.

      • Brunken 2 months ago  | 

        It's happening again :/

  • LuxMax 1 month, 4 weeks ago  | 

    I have a question, I heard that Houdini units are meters. So the cup we have is likely 1 meter and a half tall?
    I tried to re-create the entire scene keeping the actual size of a cup, so around 0.1 tall and radius of 0.03 and 0.05.
    In order to make the simulation work I had to reduce the Collision Padding quite a bit (0.01).
    I can get it that in this kind of project is unnecessary, but is it a correct approach or am I missing something?

  • Ntwadumela 1 month, 3 weeks ago  | 

    I got through it. Some changes since I last used it with release 19, I think. Most of the really great courses and tuts are gonna be unfollowable now, though. I just looked at a simple cloud tutorial on YT the other day, but couldn't get past the first few minutes since the cloud node has disappeared. Painful.

  • Data5age 1 month, 2 weeks ago  | 

    If your trying to figure out why you cant reference the .usd file when you look for it. Check the filter at the bottom if your using the Non - Commercial version you need to change the .usd to .usdnc. Hope this helps someone took me a bit to figure this out.

  • Mteves 1 month, 2 weeks ago  | 

    Hi great lessons. Is there a video that goes more in depth about nodes?

    • Mteves 1 month, 2 weeks ago  | 

      I'm trying to wrap my head around them

    • TheLazyIndianTechie 4 weeks ago  | 

      Is this something you are struggling with conceptually or specific nodes? I think it helps to think of them as linear building blocks like legos. If you've ever done Photoshop, also like Layers.

  • prozolexx 1 month ago  | 

    Hi Robert,
    thank you for a great lesson.

    One moment i want to ask about is: I was struggling with assigning materials as i did step by step the same to tutorials but [in Geometry Tree] Creating 2 Geo and few versions of cup, ground and gumballs and I couldn't understand is it a Houdini error. On your video it was clean and one option for each.
    Maybe you can give me a help with it?

    Thank you

  • TheLazyIndianTechie 4 weeks ago  | 

    This was an excellent series. Thank you so much. I love how modular Houdini is. Learning a lot. Looking forward to the other tutorials.
    Just wanted to say, Robert, you're a great tutor and thank you for making this accessible to us!

  • pads3d 3 weeks, 1 day ago  | 

    Can this be completed with Apprentice please?

    Thanks

    • rmagee 3 weeks ago  | 

      It can - you just need to add nc to your various file names when loading then .hipnc, .usdnc - the lesson is designed to work in Apprentice.

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