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.
Houdini Doodles, Glass Floats
On the Oregon coast you can see a bunch of these glass floats at the antique shops and wanted to take a stab at recreating the glass. Fun to light as well.
Houdini Doodle
Was tinkering around with the concepts from this Entagma tutorial and came up with this variation on it. Pretty straight ahead, but kinda fun.
Point by Point | Simon Fiedler | Houdini HIVE Utrecht
This is a bit older but the vex code is really quite well done and explained. Gonna tinker a bit with it next time I have some time.
Houdini Labs Updates
I dunno how I missed this video, but it’s the Side-Fx folks going over some new stuff in Labs. Lots of cool new nodes to play with. Just kinda messed around with this ugly thing to try out the new rope and edge wear nodes. I also finally updated to the newest Houdini and Redshift so I can start working with ACES colorspace more which is pretty interesting. Textures seem better without as much tweaking now, check out that floor.
I’ll probably be posting more Houdini links in the future so I can use the blog as a reference. My bookmark folder is a mess….
LIke all of 30 seconds went into this lovely image.
More teasers
Just some more teaser images for some stuff coming out soon.
Random Bevel in Houdini
Some things in Houdini are just stupid simple to do, this 1-minute tut from Simon Houdini is just pure gold. His whole channel is pure gold FWIW.
I never knew about the “Exclusions > Ignore Flat Edges” option in the PolyBevel node…. yeesh!
Teaser
Screen shot teaser image from a flip book of a animation I have been working on for a music video. I think it comes out in early September?
Doodles!
Some bends, vdbs and other such things in Houdini.
Abstract Doodle
Messing around with some concepts from a class I am working on.
Basketball still life
Here is the finished render from the sim below that was glitching out. Houdini vellum and Redshift render.
Still Life Study
Way back in September, I talked about doing a lighting study on some of Niall McDiarmid images. Well I finally got around to one of them! Took me long enough….
Built it out in Houdini with a quick Vellum sim for the napkin and towel thingy. The new vellum brush tool is quite handy to use. Lots of fun as well. I did learn how bad Redshifts Sub Surface Scatter is though trying to get the ketchup, mustard bottles and bread to look like anything other then plaster. It took a mix of roughness settings and coating to get it looking close to how I wanted. Using both the Sub-Surface and SS Multiple Scattering was not getting it there. Adding detail like the lipstick and coffee stains was super easy though.
Made a simple markup of the lights as well. Nothing too fancy. The super narrow spotlight for caustics is the only little trick in there. The light in back of the bottles was originally just there to help me work on the SSS, but I liked how it made that highlight on the table. Kinda looks like a window or something.
More Album Artwork
The band that I did the Shatter Bust artwork for liked that one so much they asked for something for a Single. So I blew up a disco ball, as one does.
Houdini Abstract Study
Messing around with the “Connect Adjacent Pieces” SOP in Houdini.
Revisiting some album artwork
A band I did some album artwork awhile back asked me to rework it recently so I took a project that was originally in C4d using the default render engine into Houdini and Redshift. Quite happy with the results. Did a proper glass shatter sim instead of just a Voronoi fracture as well. Here are the Houdini results with the C4d being last.
Houdini hair / fur with Redshift Render Engine
So I spent an insane amount of time last week trying to get hair / fur in Houdini to show up when using Redshift render engine. I was looking at all sorts of tutorials and not one of them mentioned this freaking setting to make it work. You have to toggle the Hair Generation from “Generate Geo in Mantra” to “Use SOP Geo”. BAM, everything works. Took me forever to find it. Hopefully, this saves you the same headache.
Moon Hooch
I keep trying to come up with a better name for this one, but “Moon Hooch” seems to be the one that sticks for some reason, lol! More of the “jar” series I am messing with.
Not a Drop to Think.
Water, water everywhere….
Newest little jar study I worked on over the weekend. Pretty happy with the sand texture I was able to come up with. The water itself works but is a hacky bit of shading held together with duct tape and chewing gum. I did one version where I punched in with a 110mm lens instead of a 90mm like in the first and added some volumetrics to the lights, but It kinda broke it out from the series too much. So now the whole series will have the same lens and light settings. I don’t even think I’ll rotate the jar. Just change up floor textures along with what’s in the jar. Might drop some cloth in the background for some texture and see if that works though. The light rig is basically a room with a slight gap to the “front” and two windows on the side. It’s giving it that nice classic still life look. As always, click the thumbnails to see bigger images.
Pretty happy with this series so far. Next one will be fire.
Been enjoying staying off of social media and my very limited news diet. Highly recommend a news detox to anyone. Also, facebook is mostly made of evil. Check the links on the right for non, “Walled Garden” content. 3 Quarks always has some good long reads to check out.
Lightning in a Bottle
Working with clouds some more and went for a clean still life for this one. The “trace_psd_file” node works a lot better then I thought it would, it’s how I made the lightning. Pretty handy thing. Makes type much more usable in Houdini.