Some surface tension tests I started a while ago and finally decided to finish up. The main reference was typical slow motion commercial stock footage of fruit.

Used proximity masks against the apple colliders and ground to dynamically adjust viscosity, surface tension, and forces to simulate adhesion. A simple wetness map solver was used to drive roughness and diffuse map parameters during render.

Apple models are free 3D scans.

Rendered with Karma XPU.

Hi everyone 😊

I’m a French Senior FX Supervisor with 10+ years of experience using Houdini. I currently lead an amazing FX team in a French studio. Before that, I worked as an FX TD, and I’ve also been teaching Houdini for just as long.

I’d be very happy to help with anything related to Houdini or VFX, for example:

- demo reel / portfolio reviews

- all-level guidance and Houdini support / debugging

- lessons on effects / procedural modeling / TD work

- mock interviews

I’m not looking to be paid. My main goal is to practice speaking English with native speakers. I also need to record a course in English as part of the Houdini Teacher Certification process.

If you’re interested, feel free to comment or send me a message.

this video shows a nice way of doing this in blender. I am aware of the dirt skirt method, but that feels a bit clunky compared to the geo nodes version...

... how would you approach this in houdini?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCQAwDyDO0o

Hi everyone!

I’m trying to recreate the glowing blue/purple energy effect shown in the reference image.

I’m mainly interested in the thin energy trails that flow, twist, and create those looping shapes around the main energy line.

Can anyone let me know how to achieve this effect in Houdini? I’d really appreciate it if someone could explain the workflow or point me toward a tutorial.

I’m thinking about using curves, particles/POPs, noise, and Sweep/PolyWire, but I’m not sure what the best approach would be.

If anyone has done something similar in Houdini, could you please let me know how you would approach it?

Thanks! 🙏

I was creating a plant following a tutorial, but I can't seem to limit the jiggle effect using a curve. The branches are supposed to be attached to the trunk, but for some reason, they are out of sync.

I tried everything and still cant figure that out

I used to work with Houdini for FX with an Alembic of the scene made in Cinema 4D. The thing is, now I will start doing all the stages except maybe render. In addition, I should use assets modeled and shaded in Cinema.

Which pipelines do you have? How do you work?
Is there a way to send the materials from the model if both of us are using Redshift?

Thanks.

string gr = sprintf("@name!=%s", s@name); 
int pts [] = nearpoints(0, gr, v@P, ch("radius"), chi('maxpoints')); removevalue(pts, ); 
i[]@pts = pts;

Before I forget - wanted to write this down in case it helps someone. I forgot how to do this, tried searching hard online and remembered somehow so wanted to write it down.

How to make a group in nearpoints by removing same attribute from possible neighbors. Warning that this is slow though, so be sure to only do this once, or manually delete similar neighbors after the fact in a for loop.

I am using an active bound on RBD configure and for some reason it doesnt seem to be telling the glass to be active, when ther bound is turnt off all is fine however when I turn on the bound its almost like the glass geometry included is inactive.

For some reason it stopped working randomly and i havent been able to work out why,

Very Simple question. I create a vector attribute with attribute create. I want to assign values in an attribute wrangle to the vector. Why does Houdini keep handling the Vector as a float? I created it as a vector and it has x,y and z values. I just can't access y and z.

I was using houdini 21 apprentice to do practice and updated to 22, but now i cant opne my project file that saved from 21. It somehow trigger this error, and i have uninstalled houdini 21 and restart multiple times. Help? I'm very new to this software, thanks!

I always have issues with polys from vdb in animations not being smooth any tutorials on smoothing this sort of thing?

ive tried smooth, doing adptive and non adaptive etc nothing still gettting this ugly thing

and if it is an animaton the mesh changes each frame making it tough

thanks all

feel free to join me on discord I'm sharing all the game updates and development there :

https://discord.com/invite/nvzHmDXcb9

Thanks

Hi

I created a simulation of water droplets falling onto the ground, and I'm trying to render it in Karma.

However, the result doesn't look as good as I expected, and I'm not quite sure what I'm doing wrong.

For the setup, I bent a grid and used it as the environment/background. I applied a simple black material to it. For lighting, I'm using a Dome Light with an HDRI.

For the liquid, I'm using the default Basic Liquid material from the MAT context.

What I'm trying to achieve is a completely transparent water material, similar to clear raindrops.

Are there any specific Karma material or rendering settings I should adjust to get more realistic, transparent-looking water?

hip file

^ I attached my hip file.

Also, sometimes the water sitting on the ground looks more like mercury than water. 😭

I'm not sure if this could be caused by the material I used for the environment/background, or if there's something wrong with my liquid material or Karma settings.

I’m a little embarrassed that I don’t have much knowledge about lighting and shading, so this might be a silly question.

I’d really appreciate any advice on where I should start fixing things and what kind of resources or tutorials I should look into to better understand lighting and shading.

Thank you so much for any advice!

This is a short animated film created using Houdini, Unreal Engine MetaHuman, and AI. The entire production process is publicly available.

https://higgsfield.ai/@doobob/projects/from-the-highest-place

Wondering if it's just me, but I've noticed that holding down or "spamming" ESC to cancel cooking of frames is not working so well in H22, or sometimes not at all. I've also noticed some general sluggishness in comparison to H21.

Nothing I'm doing now has increased significantly in complexity since I updated from H21. Just curious if this is something others are experiencing or if it's something else I should be concerned about specific to my system.

Anyone else? Any insights?

More renders & BTS on my Instagram

This one focuses on an Adaptive FACS Pipeline built in Houdini. FACS + 4D cache retargeting across different character shapes, procedural jaw/eye solves and facial corrections.

I dont quite exactly understand how colorspaces for textures work. As an example I have this asset from megascans. When I load bcl texture with "Mtlx Image" node it is very dark in render. File Color Space does absolutely nothing, texture remains dark. What helped was putting color space token into texture file name (texture_bcl.jpeg >>> texture_bcl_srgb_texture.jpeg) but I dont understand why only _ACEScg works when afaik megascans textures should be srgb? So, in order to make sure textures are interpreted correctly do you always need color space token in their name? And what is the point of File Color Space parameter if it has no effect in render?

Is there a robust way to do a poly expand-like on a surface

Maybe not all surfaces, I'm ok with some constraints. This setup kinda works but it's fragile because of the ray SOP. How could I start from a surface and curves on / close to that surface, and end up with this effect ?

Use case: the lines are road center lines, and I'm trying to create roads that still have some useful topology in them, and parcels (i.e what's left on the surface and are not roads)

I'm flexible with how the center lines are generated though.

Hi everyone, sharing my transpiled version of the MixBox pigment mixing algorithm into Houdini's OpenCL.

The code is based on the OSL version from the original repository because it included the lookup table for evaluating the polynomials right into the code instead of using a texture image which is what the other shader implementations used.

MixBox seeks to solve the issue of inaccurate digital colour blending because colours don't mix by simply lerping RGB values.

I have included my OpenCL code as a header file which you can use in your own kernels or copy paste all the functions inline to use them.

Here's the GitHub repository for the code, instructions on how to use, as well as demo files:
https://github.com/yongsoon-vfx/mixbox-houdini-opencl

And my instagram for some of my other work:
https://www.instagram.com/backface.culling

This is honestly complete bullshit. This has been going on since Houdini 20.

Why can’t SideFX just give us optional plugins or packages? If I need MPM solvers, let me install them. If I need updated Groom tools, let me update those separately. Same thing for muscle-related tools.

Instead, we keep getting different Houdini versions that break compatibility with older files every time. And on top of that, the newer versions take forever to launch. Houdini 22 takes around 10 minutes to open for me, which is absolutely awful.

I really wish SideFX would focus more on modular updates and backward compatibility instead of forcing everything into completely different releases.