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KineFX 101 – Pt.17: No VEX Procedural Walkers

Chris has been watching lots of gamedev videos lately and in one of them stumbled on a very neat solution for a procedural walking system. One that’s a lot easier to build than the last setup in this course. So it’s time for a revisit and rebuild of this setup. And this time even without touching any VEX!

See the amazing (and a bit mathy) tutorial by t3ssel8r that inspired this setup here:

Geometry Nodes Ep16 – Psyche Transform – Spherical Falloff

The first step to create the procedural psyche transform animation is to  create a weight value for all of the surface points based on their  proximity to a helper object.

Geometry Nodes Ep15 – Real World Project 1 – Psyche Transform Effect

So far we talked about many important concepts of Geometry Nodes. With  all the foundational knowledge in place, we can now look into more  advanced setups. The upcoming videos will deal with our first real world  setup example and explain to you how to build the psyche surface  transform effect you see in the videos artwork.

KineFX 101 – Pt.16: Rigging An IK Robot Arm

You know what’s cool? Robots are cool! So today we are rigging a robot arm that can be driven by an inverse kinematic solver. This way we only need to animate one bone and all mechanical joints will move into position perfectly.

Advanced Setups 18 – Implementing Monte Carlo Geometry Processing in VEX

One of the most enlightening papers Mo read in the past years must have been Sawhney’s and Crane’s Monte Carlo Geometry Processing

It elegantly bridges the gap between techniques traditionally used to solve rendering problems and the evaluation of geometry.

In this tutorial we’ll implement a very simple example of the technique, based on an algorithm calle...

KineFX 101 – Pt.15: KineFX & Vellum 2: Building a Balloon Character

This week we’re taking a second look at vellum. And this time we don’t even need to worry about matrices or linear algebra, just some good old mograph fun applying vellum effects onto a kinefx character. So let’s grab some Mixamo animation and create a balloon character!

KineFX 101 – Pt.14: Capturing B: Building A DIY Bone Deform SOP

Do you like weight painting? No, we neither! So in this weeks episodes, we’ll take a look at procedural ways of modifying capture data inside kinefx.

This is the second and maybe less sensible video of this two part episode. We’ll just write our own darn bone deform SOP. So grab your transform matrices, your linear algebra and let’s go!

KineFX 101 – Pt.14: Capturing A: Procedurally Creating And Modifying Weights

Do you like weight painting? No, we neither! So in this weeks episodes, we’ll take a look at procedural ways of modifying capture data inside kinefx.

This is the first and more sensible video of this two part episode. We’ll take a look at the official kinefx way of modifyfing weights with vex.

Geometry Nodes Ep14 – Create the Procedural Low Poly Rocks Shader

Now we build the procedural shader for the low poly rocks from last time. The shader again makes heavy use of noises and color ramps with some sampled colors form reference pictures.

Geometry Nodes Ep13 – Create the Procedural Low Poly Rocks Geometry

In this video Manuel shows you how to create a procedural rock generator with Geometry Nodes inside of Blender. Procedural low poly rocks are perfect for populating your game level or creating some stylized landscape scenes. We put the knowledge we acquired so far to good use here and introduce new concepts like working with volumes and voronoi noise.

Geometry Nodes Ep13 and Ep14

Dear Patrons, two new episodes have been released to extend the Geometry Nodes course. Unfortunately Patreon is currently having issues with embedding vimeo content. That's why the videos are only posted to entagma.com at the moment. We will post them here as soon as it is possible again. 

In the meantime log in to entagma.com with your patreon credentials to watch the videos there. 

https://entagma.com/

Advanced Setups 17 – Jeroen Claus: Solving The Traveling Salesperson Problem in Python

Thrilled to have Jeroen Claus back for a python tutorial on solving the infamous traveling salesperson problem in Houdini by using this neat python library.

KineFX 101 – Pt.13: Combining Vellum with KineFX

We’re back to the fun business of misusing tools in Houdini for tasks they really weren’t built for! In this case letting vellum animate our KineFX rigs! There are some really novel uses for this though, like physically accurate secondary motion or a FBIK solver, that won’t run into jitter issues.

Geometry Nodes Ep12 – Displace and Shade a Torus by Noise

Now we apply the noise displacement to a 3D surface and pass the noise  value on as an attribute to be able to use it in shading. Building an  attribute driven shader we learn how to connect the worlds of geometry  nodes and shading to achieve more sophisticated results.

Geometry Nodes Ep11 – Create Noise Driven Displacement

Displacing geometry is a nice use case for fields. In this episode we’ll  create an alien terrain by diplacing a grid using noise. While doing so  we’ll dive into the principles of perlin noise and how to shape it in  an artistic fashion.

Geometry Nodes Ep10 – Fields

Geometry node-trees are executed in a loop. Your algorithm is applied to  all the geometric components of your object in sequence. For this to  make sense, we need the ability to set individual values to ports that  differ in each iteration. To make this happen Geometry Nodes has a  concept called fields. In this video we’ll get some intuition on how  fields work as understanding them is crucial to build more complex  setups.

KineFX 101 – Pt.12: KFX Potpourri: Capturing, Secondary Motion And Fixing Skeletons

This episode is all about small, but helpful features of KineFX. We’ll precedurally generate and fix up some rigs, deform our main mesh using biharmonic capturing and enhance animations using secondary motion.

Thanks, Nelson for the comment that inspired this episode. You can watch the original tutorial for C4D here

Geometry Nodes Ep09 – Visualize Vector Addition

Now that the vector visualizer component is finished, let’s use it to  create a vector addition setup. This teaches you how to work with custom  components and at the same time gives you a intuitive understanding of  how vector addition works.

Geometry Nodes Ep08 – Make the Visualizer into a reusable Node Group

In this video we’ll explore a very powerful feature of Geometry Nodes:  Node Groups. With groups we can turn any network into a custom node that  can be reused later. We’ll take the vector component we finished last  time and create a reusable node from it.

Geometry Nodes Ep07 – Refine the Vector Visualizer

In this video we enhance the vector component. We shorten the line to  make room for the tip and align the tip to the vector. And we even look  into the pythagorean theorem to understand how to calculate the length  of a vector.

Geometry Nodes Ep06 – Creating a Vector Visualizer

Now that we understand the theory of vectors and vector addition it is a  good exercise to create a vector component inside of Geometry Nodes.  This introduces us to using curves and at the same time provides a nice  tool to visualize vectors, when needed while developing more complex  setups.

Geometry Nodes Ep 05 - What are Vectors

One side of learning Geometry Nodes is understanding the concepts of  visual programming and getting to know the individual nodes. The other side is some foundational vector math knowledge. As we progress to slightly more advanced topics it is probably a good idea to review vectors and vector addition. That is what this theory video provides.

Geometry Nodes Ep04 – Node Properties

Nodes can not only be used to alter geometry. You can use them to change the properies of other nodes, too. In this lesson we’ll animate the setup by changing some node parameters over time.

To follow the lessons you’ll need at least Blender 3.1. You can download the software here: Download Blender

Geometry Nodes Ep03 – Working with Attributes

There are different node types in Geometry Nodes. So far we used nodes that altered the polygonal description of the model, the vertices and polygons. In this episode we look a little closer on nodes that change attributes of geometric elements, like the Set Shade Smooth Node or the Set Material Node.

To follow the lessons you’ll need at least Blender 3.1. You can download the software here: Download Blender

Geometry Nodes Ep02 – Working with Geometry

Now it’s time to get our hands dirty with Geometry Nodes. Let’s create our first procedural setup, that turns a triangulated model into an alien mesh structure. In this lesson you’ll learn how to use Geometry nodes to modify existing geometry and how to branch off new geometry streams inside of the node tree to create complex models.

Download Project Files

To follow the lessons you’ll ...

Geometry Nodes Ep01 – Intro to Geometry Nodes

In this episode we’ll look into how geometry is stored inside of Blender, how polygons define the connectivity of vertices and how Geometry Nodes is just another modifier, but one that can be customized without limits.

To follow the lessons you’ll need at least Blender 3.1. You can download the software here: Download Blender

Geometry Nodes Ep00 – Overview

Blender rencently added a brand new procedural system to its feature set: Geometry Nodes. While being quite powerful it’s not necessarily easily accessible, especially if you are new to procedural workflows. So we decided to cover this system in depth with a new patreon course. In this course Manuel starts from the very beginning and explains how Geometry Nodes ties into Blender, how it handles geometric data and how the different classes of nodes work. Join Manuel on this journey and learn...

KineFX 101 – Pt.11: Enhancing Growth-Sims With KineFX

In this weeks episode we finally get back to our regular schedule of using KineFX for things that have nothing to do with character animation! In this case enhancing the look of some growth solvers by adding little animations to tiny pieces and overall creating a much smoother and organic looking sim!

Mo’s original tut on Diffusion Limited Aggregation...

Advanced Setups 16 – Multithreading Python

In this follow up to our optimal transport tutorial, Mo covers multithreading Python code in Houdini. Make sure to use at Least H19.0.541 as in previous versions there’s a bug which prevents this technique from functioning correctly.

Libraries used:

POT:
https://pythonot....

KineFX 101 – Pt.10: The Non-Animator Character Animation Pipeline

The day you’ve feared has finally come. You’ve ended up with a character animation job. All your pleas that this really isn’t part of your job description as a technical artist were unheard. All your recommendations for freelancers that would be way more qualified were ignored.

So, can we cheese our way out of this situation? Can we get a somewhat decent character animation without … you know … animating any characters? Well, KineFX has made our odds a bit better. Let’s take...