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.

Quixel Bridge fix for Houdini/Redshift (Update)

New update to make Quixel behave better with Houdini and RedShift was just released on Denes Dankhazi's Blogfolio. Gotta love anyone with “dank” in their name you know. Get the RedShift fix Here.

Basically, Quixles textures come in wrong, especially the displacement and this fixes that. Wrong might be the incorrect way as it’s fine in Unreal, just a RedShift implementation in Houdini is odd I guess?

“The Quixel Bridge fix for Houdini/Redshift.
For Houdini, I changed the 3D Asset, the 3D Plants and the Surfaces part.

How to use it:

  • Install the latest update (4.5) for Houdini in Quixel Bridge
    The plugin path is something like this: Megascans\Library\support\plugins\houdini\4.5\MSLiveLink\scripts\python\MSPlugin

  • Download the files and replace the original ones: download

    • ImportSurface.py goes to the AssetImporters folder

    • Import3D.py goes to the AssetImporters folder

    • ImportPlant.py goes to the AssetImporters folder

    • Redshift.py goes to the MaterialsSetup folder

  • The changes are significant

    • Subdiv settings

    • Shader settings

    • and most importantly Color Management settings for the RS Texture nodes
      Without this you can’t render correctly anything.
      Now the colors are using sRGB and everything else is linear as it should be.

  • You still have to fix the Displacement EXR textures thou.

    • Open in Photoshop (for example)

    • You’ll see there is data only in the red channel

    • Copy that as an the RGB layer and merge (Ctrl+E)

    • Sometimes you still have to linearize the data, use the exposure adjustment layer with gamma 0.454

Cheers, D”

Houdini Macro Fluid Sims Using Vellum Fluids.

Was doing a bunch of R&D into close up fluid sims and discovered some pretty cool stuff. I Started with FLIP sims but could not get the detail I wanted, so I started trying out Vellum Fluids. Started getting some interesting results that let me punch in pretty close and they hold up. I went down to 0.007 on the particle size but with some Vellum Post Process it cleans up pretty well.

Cloth Sim study with Sub-D experiments.

The Chair study from the other day had a cloth sim on camera right that I made in DOPs, which is what made me want to mess a bit more with some cloth sims and this is the result of that study. This time though, I just made it directly in a vellum SOP with some pinned points. It’s a much simpler workflow for sure. Used good old JSplacement for the textures and displacement and subdivided the cloth mesh with a poly reduce to get the “webbing” stuff.

Lighting Studies

Worked up another lighting study today for practice. Quick cloth sim thrown in to keep that stuff fresh in my head as well.