Houdini Doodle: Water and Wax

Was messing around with water and cutting it up into different groups for some abstract stuff here. Working with Poly to VDB and back, groupings, and the new SSS in Redshift, which I am really liking. So much easier to work with since the update to random walk.

Wheee!

Tinkering with some FLIP stuff with help from a tut. Thought I just throw thi sup here cause it’s fun. Hopefully will develop it a bit further.

Some R&D that died

Was working up some stuff with the ripple solver that missed the mark, but it’s kinda interesting. The tricky bit with water and glass is that it is defined by it’s reflections. Anyways, onward…

Houdini Doodle- Cloth study

I am trying to do a deeper dive into vellum in Houdini when I catch a break between jobs and today I did a quick study on some cloth shapes that is kinda interesting. And purple. Very purple.

Houdini Hive

Was watching these in the background while working on the doodles yesterday. Good place to bookmark these things I guess, lol!

There is also one on USD lighting up a robot bar scene I need to watch. I keep bouncing off of USD and Karma every time I try it. I can see all the benefits, especially with LOPs and Solaris. But good lord, I can just whip something out with Redshift and when I have to import to the stage and convert, then is it Karma or Material X? It just sorts spins out and I bounce. Anyways, it's something to work towards.

Here is Rich Lord giving his talk on creepy things. So many useful bits in here.

Jakub Spacek makes these amazing particle / liquid sims that are really beautiful.

And here is the USD / Karma thing I wanna watch tonight after work.

Houdini Doodles

Messing around with some Houdini stuff today. Starts off with something abstract and simple and slowly worked up an idea.

Not MIA, just a busy start to the year

Been abnormally busy so any free time I have has been spent away from screens and in meatspace doing things with my actual hands, lol! Here are some Houdini tests I did a month or so ago though. Hoping to carve out more time for blogging and getting new portfolio pieces up before the end of the month? Maybe?

Houdini Doodle: Cloudscape

Todays Cloudscape doodle was a lot of back and forth with different settings for clouds. More info below the doodle.

I started with this tut, “Create the Beautiful Cloudscape and Render it with Karma XPU – Getting Started With Houdini ep. 8” using the newer Cloud SOP and Karma render but started to deviate pretty quickly. Couple of issues that I had. Karma kept hard crashing to the desktop, which was a bummer I have been trying to get more into it as a Redshift replacement but it's just too unstable. The Camera Focal Length in Karma was set to something like 50000 which is not real-world numbers so I have no idea what lens I am using. Very odd.

An issue with the tut itself, his use of the Cloud Noise SOP was heavy handed with the Element Size kind of blowing the shape apart. He also did not get into the Scatter Shapes or Flatten tabs on the Cloud SOP which are really cool. I also doubled the Uniform Sampling to get a higher resolution on the clouds. Could possibly double it again I think. Also, I did move the whole project into Redshift as well. (I can’t embed the video for some reason, it kicks back an error. Sorry about that.)

I used a lot of techniques from this tut on making a cloud generator, but interesting enough, most of what he covers is now baked into the Cloud SOP itself which is nice. Flatten, scatter etc…

And here is a screencap showing the difference between 350 and 700 Uniform Sampling.

Houdini UV Flatten - Rectify to Quads

What a great new node in Houdini for dealing with UVs.

“I'll show how to use a handy feature of the UV Layout SOP to quickly arrange quad groups to perfectly straight islands. I also go over a few features of the Curve SOP that are new to Houdini 19.5”

Houdini Doodle: Beer O'Clock

Was enjoying playing around with glass the other day so I started messing with some beer glasses and a sandblasted looking texture on it. The pattern does interesting things as you zoom in and out and it becomes more abstract.

Houdini Doodle

I saw this piece in Portland Monthly shot by Mike Novak and wanted to take a swing at something similar in Houdini. First image is the inspiration, second is my interpretation.