A fairly common problem I see motion graphics artists struggling to figure out in Houdini is how to animate objects procedurally, but have them collide realistically while moving. They want to be able to art direct the animation of objects using broad strokes, a pretty common pattern for mograph, but Read more…
I wanted to make a post about a really common misconception regarding Houdini’s geometry context (SOPs) versus its dynamics context (DOPs). Houdini’s documentation does explain a bit of basic information about DOPs, but not necessarily in the most readable way for Houdini newcomers who are first introduced to the software Read more…
Casey Hupke asked an interesting question today: “how can I get a Color SOP to automatically update its node color to match the picked color?” This reminded me of some other pipeline work I’d done in the past to customize existing nodes in Houdini; for example, adding a few spare Read more…
This article is way too long, so here’s the Table of Contents: Introduction Ugh, this instancing thing again. The old article is a bit outdated now, and it doesn’t touch on some important stuff about varying instances, especially material properties, so I’m writing an update. I wrote the last guide 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 that would help fill out the space. That meant a 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 I probably need to just put it down and take 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 the focal length. I’ve been writing up some handy buttons 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 20k square image to disk from a single machine, bucket 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 crotch to have to get things rendering at around 90 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, and more. It also extends MOPs into DOPs so you Read more…