VFXArabia

Houdini paint peeling effect

Peeling a wall hasn't been easier, a more upgraded method where the edges tend to shrink and curl compared to the normal peeling effect.

Tool's features:

- currently working on plane surfaces, while can be applied to organic shapes but still some things are to be developed.

- normal things like defining the mesh resolution and pieces size.

- The edges of the paint are fixed you can choose not to.

- Peeling start position, as many as you want, in addition to a com...

Snow surface cover (Houdini)

A great tool to cover any surface with snow.  

Tool's features: 

- Covering was achieved by using "Mask by feature" you can specify the snow blowing direction and what parts are blocked by the model "in the shadow". 

- A nice cracking pattern through the snow. 

- A layer of randomly scattered snow flakes. 

- Falling snow particle system. 

- Renderer and snow shader: Redshift.

Houdini recursive cloth tearing

Remember the Recursive Fracturing tool, well this is the same but done with vellum.

Features:

- Activation stage, cloth will freeze until it's activated.

- Multiple fracturing stages (two in my scene but you can push it more).

- Activation and fracturing are triggered once the points are inside a group, you can change that and make more complex conditions.

Houdini Cloud Lighting Baker v4 (Redshift version)

The original tool can be found here... 

What's been updated:

- Much faster setup (keep an eye on fps and performance monitor), normally the clouds are static an no shadows need to interact with them, if that's the case then the old setup is enough since you are going to bake it once.

- More lighting details, the previous setup relied on point scatter (100K) and now there is no n...

Houdini uv suction

Update:

- Twisting the uv to create a whirlpool like effect has been added.
- and why no body ever told me that I didnt uploaded the old setup 🤦‍♂️

A simple setup that help you cheat a suction effect performed on the uv channel, features:

- suction center, it has some limitations when it's near the edge of the uv.

- suction direction, but mostly inward.

- suction speed, note the faster it goes to the center the smaller the tiles become.

- noise....

Houdini mask pyro forces by speed and distance

Adding more details to your smoke sometimes can be tricky and a straight forward Turbulence is not the answer, so in an attempt to bring this to the next level I started looking for ways to mask  gas (Turbulence, Confinement, Disturb) to a certain areas based on speed and distance as you can see in the video, and while it's not a Hollywood level but it's a step on the right direction. 

As you can see I managed to measure speed and distance and apply Turbulence accordingly to t...

Houdini Bricks Builder

Bricks builder or as I like to call it "Brickfy" is a new tool that takes advantage of the amazing Chain sop introduced in Houdini 18.5 to convert any object "in theory" into stacked bricks.

Tool's features:

- Automatically divide and prepare any object according to the brick size.

- Distribute bricks "any kind of models" randomly, cycle or by percentage.

- Randomly displace bricks in and out.

- Colors, materials and render "Redshift" are prepared.

Houdini Water Explosion

My take on water explosion, it's heavily inspired by Graham Matthew's setup.

Tool's feature:

- main plash done with flip.

- secondary "dump particles"

- the particles will conform to the water surface once in range.

- Alpha by age and radial range at the base, so we wont see those particles at the edge of the flip container.

Rendered with redshift and GI was enabled, oh boy it took 4 hours on three rtx 2080, you can fake it without GI but you will miss some...

Houdini dirty fluid

In an attempt to mimic how dirt in water behaves, I created this simple setup Using different flip densities, which gave an acceptable results.

If you look closer you can see that the heavier ones are not settled down and they are still fighting (jittering) at the bottom as if there is some kind of boiling happening there.

#mud #muddy_water #multi_density

Houdini Parachute (Vellum)

The anatomy of this setup goes like:

- Box: Sadly still RBD doesn't interact quite well with vellum so I had to fake the rigidity of the box by using Struts constraint with some stiffness, 

- Wires: I went with the hair constraints since I can control the bend.

- Cloth: I had to create a custom force to stop it from collapsing and to give that air resistance feel.

It was a bit tedious to achieve this balance between (size, density, stretch, bend, forces …..)

Houdini Glue

This setup is based on Arnold Song's technique presented in Sidefx Worldwide HUG | Los Angeles. https://youtu.be/eogmUOtSFIQ

I faced a problem with the constraint breakthreshold "glue strands", we can control it by an attribute for sure but once the constraint is created that attribute value is baked in the constraint and if it's high it will not break and the model will stick for ever, so I created a sop solver that w...

Houdini Dirt

Getting my self familiar with grain solver doing some stress and stability tests, I thought it might be helpful to share. As you can see I added some straws but they don't rotate as what you would expect following the stream, instead you'll need to use RBD Grains.

I tried creating the same effect with vellum but failed, the isolated grains keep jumping here and there, and also it doesn't clump beautifully as with grain, once the constraint are broken in vellum they wont comeb...

Houdini Fireworks custom shape

Skip to the 20s to see the tool in action and how does it function, it was based on the previous fireworks tool but with custom explosion shapes, so you will expect the same features but with some more:

- Add as much shapes as you want, I included 4 and if you wannna add more you need to have some knowledge to modify the popnet.

- If you shape already has colors then it will use those and wont randomize.

- Explosion can have two looks one that looks spherical and the other w...

Fireworks custom shape (wip)

You asked for it and here it is, coming up next.

Houdini (instancing,proxy,redshift rs....)

The most ultimate guide to redshift proxy, instancing, timeshifting rs sequence, not sure if I covered everything but what happened is that last year I faced a lot of scenarios 

and every time I need to work with instancing and proxies I have to google it and you will find a lot of tutorials and post, so what I did is that I collected all of them in one file, and made sure they are up to date.

What you will find inside is:

- instancing using objects in the same hip file...

Houdini Branching & Roots tool

Update 29-09-20:

In the previous setup I built the curve orientation manually, and I figured out that Houdini introduced a "Orientalongcurve" sop that will calculate that for you "Roll, Pitch, Yaw", so I introduced some controllers since it can be controlled by attributes. I thought of posting it here since it might help someone ;)

Original:

If you've tried the built in Labs Curve Branches tool then you'll know what I'm trying to achieve here, Despite looking so complex but ...

Roots (wip)

Something I'm planning on releasing next month ;), still needs some clean up.

Houdini Painting Flow

I was inspired by David Ferreira work that was featured on Houdini Hive 2020, so I thought of utilizing the flow field I created earlier this month:

https://vimeo.com/434994208

by mixing two methods the gradient and the curve guided fields but in a simpler way. And surprisingly it ended up well, I tried a couple of paintings and as you can see it doesn't work with detailed ones, it's best used with paintings that ...

Houdini Flow Field

I did a small research around vector and flow fields and came across this blog post:

https://houdinigubbins.wordpress.com/2017/05/14/vector-field-decomposition/

so inspiring but didnt mention how exactly it was created, and I dont wanna use the already known random way (Curl Noise) I rather wanted it to be controlled by objects so I ended up with two methods:

<...

Houdini Vellum hair (up res)

A nice trick that will allow you to up res an already simmed vellum hair, in my example I simmed only 350 hairs and boosted them to 5000.

The steps are:

- Generating the low res strands.

- Create the vellum simulation.

- Generate the high res one and use the low res as a guide.

Well it sounds complex but believe me it's a strait forward setup, also it was the first time to use the Redshift hair shader so it's a good practice.

Coming up (Flow Field)

Houdini Vellum balloons (wire cut supported)

I built upon the old balloons setup and added the following:

- string will cut now at a specific threshold and a specific point.

- new shaders (Redshift), also the colors now can be changed after the simulation and caching is done, I made a mistake in the previous setup where it was bake with the simulation.

- new balloon model with a tie now ;)

- added a collider to trigger the cut action, ...

Balloons wip

Remember the old balloon setup, well it got improved:

- string will cut now at a specific threshold.

- new shaders (Redshift).

- new balloon model with a tie now ;)

Still cleaning it, I'd love to blow them up but it's out of my knowledge at this stage, already planned.

Houdini fountain

Update 02/06/2021:

Our friend 小果果 notified me that v08 is a bit confusing, it contains some experimental nodes that doesn't give anything to the final result, so I cleaned all the mess in v09 and added some notes here and there.

Original post:
I tried creating this effect a couple of years ago but "Pop fluid" wasn't added to Houdini yet also the fluid sourcing back then was different, so I rec...

Houdini edge selection to curve

In 3ds max it's a matter of hitting a button, well not in Houdini it had to be difficult, but dont forget that it's procedural so if you mesh is deforming you'll get a deforming line as well ;)

One thing to mention is that this method might produce overlapping curves, so just add a delete sop to clean it out.

Developing a fountain (coming soon)

Be prepared 😉

Houdini Fireworks (Full setup)

I started with the firework shelf tool thinking that it will give me the ultimate solution, but as most of you know it doesn't do much, so I built a new system from the ground up with a couple of explosion shapes (spheres, variable angle cones, circles with uniform distribution ....) I'll add more in future releases.

Basic setup:

- Will feature the variable cone explosion where you will be able to set the random angle limits for the explosion 0 > 360 full sphere.

Houdini Fireworks (Basic setup)

I started with the firework shelf tool thinking that it will give me the ultimate solution, but as most of you know it doesn't do much, so I built a new system from the ground up with a couple of explosion shapes (spheres, variable angle cones, circles with uniform distribution ....) I'll add more in future releases.

Basic setup:

- Will feature the variable cone explosion where you will be able to set the random angle limits for the explosion 0 > 360 full sphere.

Houdini Fireworks (Coming soon)

Anyone interested 😉

Houdini Hologram (animated object upgraded)

Well if you've been following along the updates done for the Image base hologram, then this would be a natural next step, I just added the light lines over the original one here...