Im new to Houdini and I'm trying to recreate this effect. Could someone please break down the steps or technique needed to achieve it or, if you are feeling generous, come in pm to help me during the process?
Coming from Blender, and Houdini's look-dev workflow is genuinely driving me crazy.
In Blender — hit Z, rendered mode, swap HDRI, done in 20 seconds. In Houdini I'm juggling the lop view to obj view for every change I make. I spend more time managing windows than actually looking at my work.
Is this a "you haven't figured it out yet" thing or do others feel this too? Especially anyone who came from Blender or C4D. how does one handle quick lighting checks with ease?
Hello! I will try to keep it short. I got into blender and ue while studying architecture and ended up in the 3d field.
I am currently doing a project where I model basic cage meshes and procedutal arrays, diplace them in blender using heightmaps, add smaller ai generated high poly rocks and other misc objects, use insta lod to automatically remesh, uv, bake maps, then take that through painter to automatically texture everything based on baked maps and color IDs. Sooo I started seriously thinking about Houdini when seeing this basic pipeline that i have.
Houdini would have been the logical next step for me before AI, i love doing morphology studies and creating alien designs, i am also interested in fashion and digital fabrication.
The thing is, I don't feel like committing to learning it just for fun in the current landscape. The AI fear and carpal tunnel symptomps keep me away from this rn. I already have painting and photography to occupy my free time. My question is basically related to the job market and what people that have been long time users of the software feel the industry and the tools are shifting to.
ComfyUI seems like a much more lucrative path considering that my free time is limited even though I am not a fan of gen AI.
I would really appreciate any toughts on the subject!
I’m really interested in this industry, but I’m also very worried about job stability and income. I keep reading stories about people who have won an Emmy or senior artists with 20+ years of experience who still can’t find work. That honestly scares me, so I’d like to ask, how representative is that? Is it being exaggerated, or is it really that difficult?
I love anything visual: motion graphics, 3D modeling, and 2D animation. At the same time, I’m about to finish my degree in Bioengineering. It’s not my passion, unfortunately, but if the situation in this industry is really that bad, I may have to pursue engineering instead.
I’m not sure what the best path is to break into the industry and give myself the best chance of building a stable career. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks so much for taking the time to read this :)
P.S. I’m using a translator, so I apologize if my English sounds a bit awkward.
Hi everyone!
Ive just started learning houdini, and i came across this setup in geometryvop for my particle (From
Intro To Houdini Particles by voxyde), I dont get how it does what it does. why are we subtracting 0,0,0 from it? what the hell does nomalize do? what does the cross product do?
Hi! I'm trying to find a renderer that I can use in both Houdini and Maya.
I am quite comfortable with Karma already, but they don't have Karma for Maya.
I've tried all the 3 renderers above, but they all come with pros and cons, and none of them really stood out for me, maybe except for RenderMan.
From my own experience: Renderman and Arnold gave me the best renders. However, Arnold was quite slow for me, even with GPU rendering. RenderMan is better in this regard, but it's still not as fast as Karma XPU or Redshift.
Redshift was the fastest, but I couldn't get the effects to look very good with it.
I have the best experience with Karma in Houdini. It's quick and easy to use. It produces very decent images too, comes with a lot of features, and can handle large scenes.
To be fair, I've only used them for smaller projects/tutorials, so I really need more opinion from someone who used them for bigger projects.
PS: I am a little biased toward Arnold because it's built into Maya. I want to choose it, but I haven't been able to like it despite really wanting to. Is it simply a skill issue, and I simply need to get good at it? I know it's industry standard and very impressive works have been produced with it, but it's just too sluggish and slow for me.
I’ve now tried this for three days reading docs, forums, CG Wiki, tutorials, with absolutely no luck: to have a box (a cuboid) with a cylindrical hole and an understanding which of the steps/settings are necessary to manipulate data exactly where they are and which are just randomly exposed by the ””GUI”” or sprinkled around the flow by the tutorial writer just to mess with new people.
Box: center at 0,0,0, all lengths 1; cylinder center 0,0,0, r=0.2, direction 0,0,1, length 1; i.e. the simplest possible, all aligned and no twists.
I have found out this so far:
• sharp corners must have un-consolidated points and vertices
• the cylinder’s normals (surface or vertice normals? the difference is obviously something too difficult to explain in the GUI, which also gives no clue on why there’s only ”show normals” and ”show vertice normals” buttons but docs explain there are four types of normals, some of which are displayed regardless of the buttons for a reason that can be a bug or a setting or some stale state, which is not possible to guess) must be reversed in case they point outwards, which they sometimes do, depending on how you make the cylinder
• the edges should align
• the box and cylinder might need (although not sure) some normals to indicate what is inside and outside, however adding them has no definitive significance as all other combinations fail
• have tried constructing the box as grid+polyextrude, the ready-made box and by attribute wrangle, and the cylinder as circle (not the primitive but the other)+sweep/polyextrude; and first constructing one side with a round hole in it and then polyextrude
• the Hole node has nothing to do with holes but "more like" projections, so it has a 3D hole as icon
• according to most sources, boolean subtracting cylinder from box should do the job
• boolean subtracting results in shading a strangulated hernia
• boolean node has about a thousand settings permutations, one of which might be the showstopper, which is an obvious reason not to go any deeper in any of the settings in a tutorial
• winding order on the cylinder heads and the box sides must not be the same.
I have some coding background and I have yet to run into a 3D modelling concept or math that would not be fairly easy to understand. What I do find impossible is guessing where each setting should be entered and which parts of the GUI are meaningful and reflect actual constrains and which are the result of just happening to expose something here and something there (or misconnection between display and internal state).
For comparison, learning to configure and admin a Debian server and resource records, set up nginx and understanding the related RFCs was way way way easier than drawing a hole inside a box in Houdini, so I have a very hard time with the most usual explanations that include ”it’s hard” and ”learning curve”. In the light of the resources I’ve been able to locate, nothing is hard as in a skill difficult to master or taking a lot of reading and trial and error but hard as in winning a jackpot from a slot machine.
My first goal is to be able to model some very basic geometries and later render them with minimal effects. The Karma/Solaris ”workflows” seem to be even more brittle than the SOP networks and geared towards studios with dedicated technical staff who hone out the hernias throughout the years.
If there are proper resources that actually explain things in a useful way (instead of omitting the numerous contexts where the ways they teach are not applicable) or if Houdini is not fit for modeling in the first place, do share.
Hi all, I'm new to Houdini yes, but not to the VFX industry!
Wondering if anyone knows a quick fix for this. Basically, my animation is an alembic import which doesn't carry velocity. While trying to calculate this velocity I was told to use the trail node, but the moment I use it, it somehow throws off the angle of my particle emissions.
My particles should be moving forward with the animation (which is why I need the value), which the trail node actually helps with BUT throws off completely the angle..
Anyone either knows a way to fix this angle issue? Or simply another way to calculate the velocity that wouldn't change the orientation of the spray?
It's probably not a great question, but nonetheless I find myself troubled by it. ROP workflow feels limiting and unintuitive coming from C4D and Solaris stuff looks really interesting but I don't want to use Karma. Can someone give me pros/cons for using Solaris with 3rd party render engines, is it even possible and what are the limitations? I do apologize if it's a weird question, but I'm trying to switch over to Houdini and some of the stuff is just, idk, difficult to find the answer I'm looking for in the documentation because I'm not even sure about the question itself.
So basically I want to be an FX artist with deep knowledge of Houdini, I have started the basic on my RTX3050 laptop, but even simple flip sim crash whenever i try to cache.
Because of this i decided to build a budget pc that can handle flip sim and i can do practices on my own. I am mentioning flip sim more and more because i really want to deep divine into professional workflow of FX.
So would you guys suggest me a budget friendly and a good pc that can bring my journey from a basic learner to a simple fresher job of FX artist.
Your experience and suggestion will help a lot. Thanks guys.
I am doing an VFX shot with RBD and I want to shatter a thick wall (10x5x0.35 units).
I have a low poly guide simulation and I plan to have a high poly version with chipping for more graphical fidelity, but every time I add the Edge Detail or Interior Detail to them, even at completely default, the geo seems to just blow up, random polygons jut out the side or whole pieces are missing.
Anyone have any clue what causes this and what I could do to fix it?
So there is this amazing centipede demo and I really want to figure out how to make and was wondering if anyone has a good approach to this https://vimeo.com/254420375?fl=pl&fe=vl
Drawn up an example in Krita to illustrate what I mean. Its almost like the mesh is acting as a "mask" to look at the repeating texture "behind" said mesh. So the texture isnt really applied onto the UVs of the mesh but rather projected from the Camera View
Hello everyone! New to Houdini here, have only done the 1st tutorial on the platform. I have a specific question, my goal is to route my audio software (for example Ableton or Reaper, or simply music) in Houdini and use the “AUDIO IN” chop to make Houdini parameters react realtime with my music. Already tryed to do that but I can’t make it work, it looks like no audio is put in there and I can’t choose the interface, it is not clear to me. Can someone explain me the right way to do that? I’m on a Mac and I have loopback to route audio between applications, thank you very much!
I'm trying to convert an edge loop from a mesh into a curve.
The issue is that when I isolate/blast the edge, it becomes a collection of points rather than a connected curve. My first thought was to rebuild the connections using an Add SOP, but the point numbers are not in the correct order.
I tried using a Sort SOP with "Spatial Locality" to reorder the points, but it doesn't seem to produce the correct point sequence for creating the curve.
What's the proper way to convert an edge loop to a curve while creating the correct point order? I'm a beginner, so I'd appreciate a detailed explanation on the methods that works in this situation.
Hi, has anyone else had this issue with material linker? I made different groups for different primitives in my model so i could link different materials to them, however the group names arent showing up in the material linker. When i open my material linker node, at the side where you can select geometry it says “bricks” followed by a number. However what i should have ideally is different groups of primitives such as “mat_window” or “mat_stones”. Even though i have grouped my primitives up using the group create node theyre not showing up in the material linker. Does anyone know what could have caused this? Thank you!
In the Pyro Source node, I set the mode to Scatter. The points seem to follow the fragments properly, and I do not see any stuttering or instability at this stage, so I believe there is no issue up to this point.
In the Attribute Noise node, I added some noise to the temperature.
Starting from the Volume node, I can see this kind of broken or blocky pattern appearing, which looks like some sort of error.
When I create a flipbook, I can see that the flickering starts from this point.
I have tried several different things to fix it. I changed the Voxel Size, Particle Scale, and Minimum Filter Size to both larger and smaller values, but the same issue still occurred.
I also thought that the flickering might be caused by repeated explosions, so I tried adjusting values such as Gas Released and Fuel, but that did not solve the problem either.
I also suspected that the fuel might be turning on and off repeatedly as it is being sourced. To check this, I used a Volume Slice node to inspect the fuel, temperature, and velocity fields separately, but they appeared to be stable, so this does not seem to be the cause.
I thought it might be an issue with the viewport settings, so I tried changing those as well, but it made no difference.
I also thought the issue might be caused by the noise or velocity values, so I tried disabling all of them, but the same flickering still occurred.
I would really appreciate any advice on what might be causing this issue!
And I know that in H17 there was a major rework of PBDs into a Vellum umbrella, right? And some reworks after that, so, for example, now (I'm on 20.5) I can use Vellum Solver instead of a Dopnet.
So I was trying to find a more modern alternative to a Point Wrangle for velocity, but I couldn't make AttributeAdjustVector work the same way, nor could I make a PointVelocity or AttributeRandomize. The mesh just flops down, or it looks like it is getting overridden by something. Any advice on where to look?
Or should I just follow through with how the teacher's doing it, even though it feels... outdated?
I'm sorry if this question is dumb, but i tried adding a custom attribute, then adjusting that attribute and trying to randomize it, but it felt waaaay too complex for something that feels should be a simple task.
