Welcome to the first “KineFX inspired” episode of this course! Chris was not happy with the hackability of Motion Clips, so he decided to build his own. Which then turned out to be a very powerful tool to bend time in Houdini!
2022-03-10 10:25:33 +0000 UTC View Post
We still have a few areas of KineFX that we need to cover in this course and the next topic on our list is motionclips. The new way of dealing with and manipulating motion on rigs.
This won’t be your standard deep dive, as with skeletons or constraints, because there’s not that much to say about them. On one hand because they are doing the tasks they were built for extremely well and intuitively. On the other hand because there aren’t alot of uses for them beyond that. More on tha...
2022-02-24 08:34:37 +0000 UTC View Post
As promised in our latest free tutorial, here's one way of melting an object using Vellum fluids instead of FLIP.
A bit of trickery is needed to get the initial object not to collapse, but with the help of a few constraints, we manage to arrive at a decent result.
2022-02-17 12:09:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Not everything we may want to animate using a rig can be moved inside SOPs. For example cameras and lights. So, can we still use KineFX in those cases? The answer of course is “Yes”, but it’s really easy to miss, when looking through the documentation. So this is the reason for this video.
And because this on it’s own would be a very, very short video, we’ll also use it to build a camera rig, that will always fit some piece of geometry in it’s frame entirely, which might be ...
2022-02-10 08:45:45 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the endlessly fascinating topics that come up when talking about KineFX is Procedural Animation: Hand animating just a few, if any, bones and letting some kind of algorithm breathe life into this creature you built. In this video we’ll take a first short dive into this field by building a small spider-ish rig that is able to crawl along a surface.
Here are some other great examples to get inspired by:
2022-01-27 11:50:29 +0000 UTC View Post
UPDATE: For our bit on on installing 3rd party python libraries, have a look at this tutorial:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/52326791
Again Mo resorts to using python libraries to solve an optimization problem, this time the quite innocent task of connection two point clouds with equal point counts in a globally optimal way. As usual it escalates quickly.
Libraries used:
POT:<...
2022-01-20 17:43:59 +0000 UTC View PostWe're continuing our journey into constraints inside KineFX. In this video we'll take a look at the "Build-Your-Own-Constraint-Toolset" inside Houdini, the Rig Attrib VOP, and use it to build a little follow-path-tool using two guide curves.
2022-01-13 10:25:54 +0000 UTC View PostFinally we put our Poisson solver to work – by designing a glass object that refracts light so that the caustics it generates form an image. In this example one of Albert Einstein.
The method used is from this paper and described in gorgeous detail on his blog by Matt Ferraro.
If...
2022-01-06 10:28:20 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s the last episode of KineFX 101 in 2021. And since things tend to get a bit hectic at the end of the year, Chris just shares a quick tutorial on how to stack and balance some pebbles to create the teaser animation of the last episode.
2021-12-30 12:07:01 +0000 UTC View Post
In this video we'll complete our Poisson solver by implementing yet another updating scheme and Von Neumann boundaries. With that we're finally ready to use our solver to build what Mo considers a quite intriguing setup in the upcoming premium tutorial.
2021-12-23 10:55:17 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s time for us to move on to our next big section of videos: Constraints! And we’re starting our with a super deep dive into maybe the most interesting one, Inverse Kinematics. We’ll cover different ways of creating IKs, how to deal with jitter or lackluster accuracy, how to configure joints, targets and mappings in between and finally build that fun balancing setup from past KineFX demos.
One note on the next episode: Like every year, christmas is approaching far more rapidly t...
2021-12-16 11:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
After we wrapped our heads around what Laplace’s and Poisson’s equation translate to, we implement a few tricks helping us solving them even faster. Be warned – this one contains OpenCL!
This one is based on Matt Ferraro’s genius article on Poisson’s equation and how to solve it numerically.
2021-12-09 08:30:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Toggle cinema mode
It’s finally time for us to build some actual skeletons. And because this is houdini, we’ll build them procedurally with hundreds of bones and animate them with code! Still, building procedural skeletons like this isn’t all that hard and we’ll take a look at a general procedure that you can tweak to fit your needs.
Guiding the Shortest Path SOP with a cost attribute by Konsta...
2021-12-02 10:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Let’s start tackling the bigger math (and physics and compsci) problems! In this video we’re gonna start building towards a decently fast Poisson solver which we can later use to not only generate minimal surfaces, turn normals into a heightmap or calculate how heat flows through material, but also to design caustics.
This one is based on Matt Ferraro’s genius article on Poisson’s equation an...
2021-11-25 08:08:29 +0000 UTC View Post
We start this course at the most central part of KineFX: The skeleton! In this video we’ll take a very detailed look at how skeletons work, what attribs they need, what nodes you should use and finally how you can create and animate them.
2021-11-18 16:38:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Woohoo! A new course! This time all about SideFX' new animation darling: KineFX.
In this very first episode Chris gives a short overview over the topics we will cover, as well as a small introduction into the different parts and subsystems of KineFX.
For scene file link please look into KineFX101 - Pt.1
2021-11-18 16:36:45 +0000 UTC View Post
You guys clearly wanted a follow up! And somehow even more vex! So here we are: More growth fx! More Coding! More Video! This will be a fun one!
This is a follow up to Vellum 101 pt 38. If you haven’t done so already, please watch this first.
We also use Half Edges a lot in this video. If you need a primer there, 2021-11-04 09:27:56 +0000 UTC View Post
While discussing the topic of venation patterns with my students, we stumbled upon one weird graph, called the Urquhart Graph – a type of relative neighbourhood graph. It happens to give the impression of craquelage or dried desert floor after the rainy season, so I decided to implement it. Here’s that bit of VEX :)
2021-10-28 07:52:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Let’s grow some geo, like it’s 2016! Only this time using Vellum and all its fancy constraints! In this tutorial Chris shows you how to build a very basic differential growth setup in vellum and what its advantages and limitations are.
2021-10-21 16:28:11 +0000 UTC View Post
As promised in this week’s free tutorial, here’s another – more VEX centered -method of modeling surfaces using another geometry’s winding number. To Build this setup, we’ll dive a bit into spherical trigonometry and go over two different formulas of how to calculate a winding number using a volume and a few triangles.
2021-10-07 09:43:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Sometimes old Algorithms wash up in our feeds, emails and DMs. No clue what’s been going on with this one but we received quite a few questions on how to pull it off. Turns out it is an adaptation of a technique from 2010, called “Electrostatic Halftoning”. It’s not fast but it can generate intricating dot patterns which form an image. The good thing about the algorithm is that it is time consistent, meaning we don’t get all jittered dots when using it on video.
In this tutori...
2021-09-30 13:07:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Chris is back with another niche topic more people should know about! In this video we’ll learn how to import one of the most common filetypes (XML) into Houdini using Python. And along the way we’ll process GPS tracking data and match it to an Open Street Map file.
The GPS Track was created using Komoot
2021-09-23 19:46:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Chris is back with the final (regularly scheduled) episode of PDG101! And this seasons finale is all about the Top Geometry SOP. A node that gives you quick access to top nodes inside SOPs and that can be really handy, if you’re handing setups to other, less PDG-savvy people.
2021-09-09 14:49:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Preface: Originally I planned on something different for today, but recording the theory of that one takes way longer than anticipated, so here's another setup I quite like...
Stumbled upon a tweet by Keenan Crane and had to try this: Yarn Art using Metropolis-Hastings sampling. It's one of those algorithms whose name sounds so intimidating it must be a super complex technique... Turns out it is easier than expected!
In this tutorial we'll build a setup to tu...
2021-09-02 13:34:09 +0000 UTC View Post
EDIT: Added render setup.
This week Chris from our PDG course takes over advanced setups to show you one of those neat little techniques that can save you hours of time, once you need it: Half Edges! We’ll learn how to create knots on top of a mesh and how to speed up and simplify vex code that creates or analyzes geometry.
Stumbled upon On and On’s fantastic insta account. and was asking myself how I’d set up one of their pieces in Vellum. Turns out it can be done by simply combining glue and hair constraints. However the devil (as always) is in the details…
2021-08-19 08:14:06 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s finally time to tackle that big buzzword topic that is machine learning. In this video Chris shows you maybe the easiest and fastest way to get functional neural nets. By downloading a prebuilt model and training it with your own data.
2021-08-05 15:22:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Stumbled upon a new type of constraint which I didn't know - turns out it is rather new and really helpful for setting up decent rigid bodies in Vellum!
Please have a look at the provided scene file as that is set up slightly more performant and includes damping unwanted motion after the rigid pieces have landed.
2021-07-22 13:34:34 +0000 UTC View Post
How 70s should the next episode be? - Yes.
While looking through more niche PDG nodes, Chris stumbled upon the Tops For Loop. And in this episode he shows you how to use it and how to create the classic camera-screen-feedback-loop effect inside Houdini.
2021-07-08 13:32:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Remember the reaction diffusion craze of 2015/2016? We covered the technique back then ( https://entagma.com/houdini-true-3d-reaction-diffusion/ ), but one thing that annoyed us was the lack of art directability.
However with a simple modification to the standard setup based on an idea by Houdini Gubbins ( 2021-07-01 12:47:39 +0000 UTC View Post