AHTYA – Adding Houdini To Your Arsenal

This course uses only one preview artwork. For twelve individual videos. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

About This Course

Adding Houdini To Your Arsenal (AHTYA) is a beginners guide to procedural techniques in Houdini, covering the essentials to get you started in node based generative techniques.

Recommended Prerequisites

• Basic understanding of 3D space
• Experience in other 3D DCC (Recommended, but not essential)
• Willingness to work with nodes

AHTYA00 Adding Houdini To Your Arsenal

Dear Patrons, “Adding Houdini To Your Arsenal” is our next premium course. It addresses 3D artists that are proficient with another 3D tool and want to learn to use Houdini in companion to their main tool or exclusively. The course requires good general 3D knowledge, but no prior Houdini knowledge. It’s designed to help you learn the most important parts of Houdini as fast as possible, to be able to use the software in your next production. The course starts next week and will run in parallel to Moritz’ VEX course. The course includes, but is not limited to, the following topics. The node graph and different views on your data Houdini contexts The scene level SOPs The attribute system Introduction to VEX and VOPs Working with Splines Working with Polygons and UVs Procedural modeling – a procedural cloner setup Working with Volumes (the title graphic setup) Introduction to DOPs Particle systems in Houdini The Bullet solver Cloth with PBD Rendering with Redshift3D I’d love to see you next week. cheers Manuel

AHTYA01 – Intro To The UI And Basic Concepts

Dear Patrons, so today the Houdini introduction for 3D artists starts, with a basic episode outlining the functions of the different parts of the UI and some of the important concepts of Houdini. I discuss the Scene and Geometry level of the Network editor and tell you about the differences of object and geometry nodes. Along the way I point out some specialty UI elements of Houdini. This lesson is quite basic to give you a cozy start. I’m looking forward on hearing your opinion about pace and content of this video. Best Manuel

AHTYA02 – About Geometry And Attributes

Dear Patrons, here’s part two of “Adding Houdini To Your Arsenal”. In this episode I explain Houdinis geometry format in quite some detail. The relationship between points, primitives and vertices is shown and we create some geo from scratch. I introduce you to the attribute system. Houdini allows for storing any information on geometric entities. Using this system, any value can be varied per point, per primitive or per vertex, which lays the foundation for Houdinis procedural power. This is the second basic lesson to make you familiar with Houdinis concepts. Next time it’ll be about building our first real world setup, using the ideas we learned so far. Best Manuel

AHTYA03 – Noisy VOPs

Hi there, here’s the next AHTYA episode. Besides a plethora of inbuilt compiled operators Houdini offers the possibility to develop your own operators, using the VEX programming language. As coding is not for everyone, Houdini has a visual, node based coding environment, too, called VOPs. Short for Vex OPeratorS. This time I introduce you to VOPs. As a practical example of using VOPs we work with noise. After explaining the priciples of Perlin noise, we build a VOP network that allows for shaping noise in many different ways. A foundation for the usage of noise in your setups.

AHTYA04 – Working With Clones Part 1

3D packages other than Houdini often offer a dedicated system to control and animate lots of clones. Be it Mash in Maya, MoGraph in Cinema4D or Animation Nodes in Blender. In Houdini you have to build such a system yourself, if you want to quickly and easily animate clone effects. In todays episode of AHTYA I’ll show you how to code a cloning system with falloffs and effectors. We’ll dive deeper into VOPs this time and create interfaces for our operators. This video is the foundation for the next video to come in 2 weeks that will explore clone setups in more detail.

AHTYA05 – Working With Clones Part 2

This time we implement a linear falloff to extend the setup from last time. The linear falloff makes use of the vector dot product. This video has a detailed introduction to dot products, what they are, how to calculate them and gives you the geometric intuiton for dot products. Then we create arbitary falloffs using Houdini volumes.

AHTYA06 – Procedural Modeling: AHTYA Title Graphics

Houdinis procedural workflow is perfect for modeling. In this episode I’ll introduce you to modeling using volumes to create the basis model, for the title graphics of this course. In the process we’ll have a look at SOP loops with feedback and touch on VEX in wrangles for the first time. After following this tutorial you’ll have a good understanding how to create a procedural model in SOPs. We’ll take it from there in the next episode to refine the model and render it using Redshift3D.

AHTYA07 – Finishing The Title Graphics Model

Before we dive into rendering the volumetric sculpture with Redshift3D in one of the next episodes, today we finish the model. To create a final scene some attention to little details has to be payed. We’ll vary the gaps between onion skins, color the model by using an attribute, create caps and polsih the model to prepare it for shading.

AHTYA08 – Introduction To Redshift3D

Now that we built and optimized the procedural model it’s time to look into rendering. Redshift is a 3rd party GPU render engine for Houdini that combines fast iteration times with a good amount of control over your render. In this video I’ll give you a walkthrough of how to use RS in Houdini and the rendering related contexts “Mat” and “Out”. You can find the HDR I used here: http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html It’s called “Old Industrial Hall”

AHTYA09 – Shading in Redshift 3D

This time it’s about shading the procedural sculpture in Redshift3D using its point color. After revising the color creation we’ll import Cd to the Mat context to be used by Redshift. Instead of defining the final colors in the geo context, though, we’ll do this inside of the material, as Redshift has a less difficult time, updating only the shaders on the GPU. We develop a proper material network to define the objects final appearance. The texture used in this tutorial is unfortunately not available as it comes from textures.com and may not be redistributet, but any concrete texture you find online will do.

AHTYA10 – Pathtracing and Adaptive Sampling in Redshift 3D

Here comes the last video about Redshift in the AHTYA series. This time we have a look at pathtracing. After some theory about primary and secondary rays, we dive into Redshift to setup the adaptive sampler. While Redshift can be set up easily by just increasing the number of primary rays, it’s often beneficial to spend some time, tweaking the secondary ray settings. That leads to faster render times.

AHTYA11 – Intro To DOPs: The SOP Solver

Let’s start diving into dynamic simulations in Houdini by looking at the basics – what is it that sets a simulation apart from your bread and butter animation? By taking a look at the SOP solver we start moving into the territory of all things simulation. We slowly start moving towards DOPs.