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 HIP file, and cats) Introduction Ugh, this instancing thing again. 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…
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…
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 included in the examples directory in the next Experimental release 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, filling a similar role as XML or YAML) that define Read more…
I continually run into confusion from Houdini users about how the Houdini.env is supposed to work, what the syntax is supposed to be, or even what it does in the first place. It’s easy if you’ve been trapped in pipeline land (like me) to think that environment configuration is even Read more…
Another year, another very very short side project. This was meant to be both an exploration of Vellum (and an attempt to see if I could force Vellum to work in 2D), and a neat little intro video for a new demo reel. This project is considerably less complicated than Read more…
I meant to write a post about this a long while ago, but couldn’t be arsed to do it, apparently. Sorry! Something that artists take for granted in render engines like VRay and Arnold is the ability to reflect and refract AOVs / render elements / render passes, depending on Read more…
Update: Imre Tuske from Weta pointed out that there’s a simpler method… it turns out that you can force expressions to evaluate inside a Wrangle by wrapping them up in backticks. So if you have a channel called “do_vexpressions” to enable or disable VEXpressions, and another channel called “vexpression” that Read more…