Patreon Specials

A few setups covered in this category: Dual Sculptures, moving geometry along a curve and importing MRI scanning data into Houdini.

About This Category

Patreon specials are bits and pieces of information that at the time of their creation didn’t fit into any other course or category. Scroll through them to find some nuggets of knowledge that are unspecific to the other, more complete courses. Yet useful nevertheless.

Patreon Special: Dual Sculptures

Hi Patrons, today we present our first video of the new “Patreon Special” series. These are singleton quick tips that are accessible starting with the “Render Swag” tier.

Using the dual graph of a triangle mesh and some mesh splitting by areas of similar curvature, Manuel guides you through the process of creating beautiful remeshings. A basic Redshift3D rendering setup is explained as well.

The setup uses the “Barcelona Rooftop” HDR that you can download for free from HDRLabs.

Importing an MRI Scan as VDB Volume

Volumes are versatile and can be used for some nice effects. So I got excited when I found the sliced data of a very high resolution MRI scan online. That can be turned into a VDB I thought and sat down to come up with a simple setup that imports the data. The .hip relies on standard nodes with a lille Hscript to do the job. Although the SOP loop I use is a little slow, it’s not too bad as it only has to run once.

Move Geometry Along a Curve

Rigging in Houdini is a misterious topic. Even simple rigging like this. Whenever you want to move one object along a curve you’re probably using CHOPs based constraints on the scene level. But what if you want to do this on geo level? In this tutorial Manuel shows you how to rig objects to move along a curve with VEX. We’ll do position and orientation, too. This setup can be turned into a digital asset as it covers a basic functionality used often.