This article is way too long, so here’s the Table of Contents: Introduction Boring Math Background The Copy SOP: Varying Transforms The Copy SOP: Shape Variants Varying Animated Sequences Old School Instancing For/Each Loops Varying Materials Solaris (TBD) Wrap-up (and Read more…
The big draw of The Conservatory, other than the very neat rain shader, is the plants. I spent a long time researching different candidate plants that would roughly fit into the same tropical environment, with a decent range of morphologies Read more…
After many months of tinkering after work, The Conservatory is finally “done”. I’m sure there’s more I could do with it, and I might go back and tweak a few things here and there, but to save my own sanity Read more…
I did an old post on this many years ago, and while it was a handy method it A.) required CHOPs and B.) didn’t account for all of the possible non-transform parameters you’d be dealing with on a camera, like Read more…
Those of us unlucky enough to be rendering stills for print are familiar with the idea of rendering tiles in order to allow a render job to be more easily parallelized. Instead of trying to render and save one massive Read more…
I’m trying to push myself a little harder into the promised land of real-time 3D content, and as someone who is used to having at least a few minutes to render each frame, it is a real kick in the Read more…
MOPs Plus Ident from Toadstorm Inc on Vimeo. I’ve finally released MOPs Plus, the commercial add-on to the MOPs toolkit for Houdini. It adds some fancy new toys for typography, modifying packed primitives, greebling, randomizing textures and other string attributes, Read more…
In case you haven’t seen it already, my presentation on MOPs at Houdini Hive Worldwide has been online for about a month now. Here’s the presentation: I’d forgotten to upload the example files I built during the presentation. They’ll be Read more…
This is a sort of sequel to the previous post I made about handling the Houdini.env file, and about configuring environments in general. Houdini 17.5 introduced the concept of “packages”, which are little JSON files (JSON meaning JavaScript Object Notation, Read more…
I’ve been putting off working in ACES for years now, because almost every explanation of the system I’ve tried to read online has been either extraordinarily technical and long-winded, or read like a sales pitch with no useful information about Read more…