Rigid Body Dynamics (RBDs) in Houdini have gone through a lot of changes in the last decade, and one side effect of all that rapid development is that there’s a lot of confusing legacy stuff left over in both Houdini and in outdated educational materials that I keep seeing new Read more…
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…
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 The old article is a bit outdated now, and it doesn’t touch on some important stuff about varying instances, especially material properties, so I’m writing an update.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…
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…