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Showing posts from March, 2018

Houdini - Object Packing

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Today I took a look into 'Object Packing', which is where you birth geometry onto surfaces without any geo overlapping eachother. Going by this cool mini-tutorial HERE , this effect could be used to create Ferrofluids . Now this concept is a little advanced for me at this stage but after seeing the term 'object packing' get brought up in various places, I wanted to take a quick look into it to see what it actually implies and the sort of things you can create. Here was my finished product: Kinda looks like a spreading virus, a pretty cool effect that can be achieved farely quickly. There was a lot of nodes used in this process that I am not overly familiar with yet so I'm not going to try and go over them here. This tutorial was obviously intended for people that already had a good idea about what a lot of these things did. I will however be going into some of the other videos on this channel ( FX Hive ) as I think they have some longer, and more indepth

Houdini - Rigid Body Sim Test

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Today I built a little destruction test using rigid bodies! Here are the different tools I used while following along with THIS SideFX tutorial. Shatter (shelf tool) & Exploded View (geo node) First I used one of the test geometry objects  and applied the Shatter shelf tool to it. This cuts the geometry up into seperate pieces. To see all these different pieces/chunks you put down a geometry node called Exploded View , forcing the chunks to break apart. To up the number of chunks created just go into the chunkcenters scatter node and up the Force Total Count. RBD Objects (shelf tool) Making sure the object is above the ground so we can drop and smash it, then we need to actually turn this into a rigid body. To do this you have to go to the Rigid Bodies tab, then use RBD objects to turn a selected object (our test geo) into a rigid body object. This will create the AutoDopNetwork that contains our Rigid Body Solver , turning our geo into a rigid body. The solver allo

Learning Houdini's 'Surface Operators' (SOPs)

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So after 3 weeks of Uni and not getting back into my 3D study, I am finally forcing myself to learn some things. It's a friday night and I have forced myself to, instead of playing games or generally lounge around, actually start doing some Houdini stuff. I have decided to dive into the basics of SOPs. SOPs networks are responsible for creating and modifying Houdini geometry. Some interesting nodes I found Some of the operators you can use on geometry are polybevel, normal, polyreduce, polywire. I found the polywire node particularly cool, as it lets you create a wireframe of your object: A lot of these were very familiar looking operations to me since I have seen a lot of these things when using Maya, however seeing it used as a node network is very interesting. Especially the speed in which complex shapes can be created. The delete node is something I hadn't seen before. Being able to delete stuff based on rules, such as deleteing any face that is facing a certa