alksndr

Hey guys! I used to be an FX artist with Houdini but made the transition to concept art, however I still have a love for a procedural workflow and am constantly looking for ways to implement Houdini into my art. I won't talk about scattering the snow because I am sure everyone knows how simple and awesome Houdini is for a thing like that! I will just say I createde CSV files for Octane to read in and render and the control is awesome. So I will just briefly talk about the cloth. For this project I wanted to create a MarvelousDesigner in H type of thing, and I have to say Houdini for clothing is amazing. The system that I built means it will auto stitch itself as long as I draw the curves in the same order which is very easy, and the biggest takeaway is that I don't have to struggle to get what I want at all - I can just grab a few points and say these are going to stick here and thats it. In testing this workflow I created clothing for a couple different characters in a matter of minutes. I'm really interested in using Houdini like this for my concepts, which need to be very quick... I think there is a lot of potential in a procedural workflow like this where you don't tweak it to make it perfect, you hack it to just make it good enough to paint over. I am just scratching the surface but clothing is one thing I'll definitely be doing in Houdini from now on. I'm also using VR a lot and have some interesting tests with creating geometry in houdini out of the curves from gravity sketch, but thats for another time if people are interested Thanks for reading Feel free to check out the full project here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/2xYwrK

I haven't been using Houdini for FX for a while so my suggestions will be more oriented to the non simulation aspects- Going fullscreen on the viewport makes a more advanced HUD parameter list pop up - something that we can manually move around and place close to our object. Takes up way less space than a full parameter window and this would mean we can work in fullscreen completely and not worry about nodes. Should be able to MMB twice to constrain movement to an axis, blender does this and its way faster to not have to go and click on the axis handle every time you want to move something. I mean really on the modeling side, just copying blender in every way would be great Presets! I honestly feel like it would not even require payment (although, even better if there's monetary incentive) for the wonderful community sidefx has to get a bunch of artists from here and give them 1-2 months to create all kinds of realistic presets that are all kind of built in a unified logical way. Have a couple of judges and simply implement all these presets into H. I'm talking a nice sparks setup, fire from Cd, fire from moving object, smoke, various transforming effects, various cloth sims, etc etc.

https://i.imgur.com/Q4sBjdg.gifv Of course just after I posted i thought of a solution very easy. I've been trying to implement some of the blender boxcutter stuff, houdini can do all of this it just needs to be built from scratch... I am sure theres a big performance hit not doing it through the C++ stuff but it is what it is.

Default Houdini is on the left, what i want is on the right. As far as I am aware, every other 3d program on the market allows you to do this, so I'm sure its possible in Houdini but I haven't been able to find out how. Please let me know if I'm missing a magic setting or maybe there's some kind of solution. Thank you!

Currently dealing with 2 issues 1. The hud sliders are in the corner (apparently they're on by default, ive never even noticed them) and moving them around to a closer spot doesn't seem to ever save. I've tried making permanent default and locking them and everything else I saw I could try. Surely there has to be a way to make them always be in a different location? 2. I've been able to grow the selection with nodes by converting the input group to points then back to prims and subtracting- all that works great. BUT I don't know how to make it all work in a HDA system. What expression can I put in the group that tells it to read whatever is selected? Maybe the only way around this is to have 2 hotkeys, one to create a group and then the other to activate this stack? Probably delete the groups at the end automatically to be able to run it over and over. growadj.hip

Hey didn't know about this, awesome, looking into it now Yeah it excludes the face, manually deselecting it is fine in that example with 1 face but not if theres 10 long tiny faces especially hidden away if youre making a panel line. Much nicer to extrude a whole ring of faces -> select adjacent -> polysplit 2 lines and get control edges for an inset with 3 clicks. I'm experimenting now with the boolean+groups Awesome!

Sweet, that totally makes sense. I will make some tools for that Sadly no, here's the problem: I make a bevel and in other programs something will pop up on the ui right near my pointer to slide the value. I barely have any hand movement required. Since houdini has all the parms in the window thats going to be on the side, its one of those slow things that is off putting because I have to go to the side change the value then go back to the model. So what I'd like to do is to just have hotkeys for the parameters , like a/s serves to increase value, c will change the type of bevel, etc.

Extrude isn't working for me in 16.0, everything else activates perfectly. Wondering if it is something on my end. Thank you! I think a lot of these tools you've made are incredible.

Hey! Target welding is implemented very well in the direct modeling tool, 100 bucks but at least there is some way to do it. Here is an image of what I mean by select adjacent. This is incredibly useful, I will have to figure out some ideas on how to make my own version of this. So you have the yellow face selected and it will get the red faces. This works for points and edges too. I believe XSI is the only program that does this out of the box - I guess what I'm looking for over extract is to just be able to copy and paste polygons, it seems like houdini just simply doesn't do that. This may be the only program that copying pasting polygons is not available! Getting around with this simple blast->del opposite on the original branche->merge hda is simple though Will look into the merge node, haven't done much python but seems simple enough. A lot of the problems have been solved, im very very close to feeling like modeling in here is great. Another thing I'm trying to figure out is how to add a hotkey to switch parameter in a tool. IE: I press f for polybevel which ive set to default round, but now I want to press c to switch it to chamfer and want to brackets to change the divisions. Thank you!

Hey guys, I've recently taken a big interest in modeling in Houdini with some of the latest features- the pie menus bring speed and the boolean -> group border edges -> chamfer workflow is by far the fastest in houdini, no other software can do this so quickly. I understand it may never be quite as fast as modo/xsi but I'm okay with taking a small hit there since there are plenty of other benefits of keeping things within Houdini. With that said, after taking a day or so to mess around, there are a few glaring things that I want to discuss and seek out advice. Some of these could be missing features, some could be things I just don't know how to do. I'm also going to take a look at the Direct Modeling plugin by Alexey to see how much of this has been covered. Some of these are pretty easy to make and so I'll do that if there is no magic checkbox i'm missing, but some are not. Please let me know if you know how to do any of these things So here goes! Geo creation - Most programs have a construction plane thing now where we can make a box on the ground or the x/z plane. That would be ideal but I am also having trouble just moving a box to be flat on the ground in a quick way. I've tried all snapping options, am I missing something? Will anything snap the bottom of the box to the grid so its perfectly standing on the ground? Target weld Solved by Alexey DM HDA - I'm currently snappoing points with edit mode then using fuse. Would like to just be able to select one point then another point and have those merge Select adjacent - Selects adjecent points/polygons/edges. So useful for subd. Insert Multiple Edge Loops - The polysplit edge loop when set to >1 divisions seem to only be even spaced, the workaround is to use the scale tool to push them towards the edges so you get a harder edge when sub'd. Would like an option to just place the 2nd edge the same % distance from the border as the 1st. Soft Transform - This tool is frustrating because it seems you need to activate it first THEN make the selection. It doesn't have the very cool slide on surface feature but you can ray the result back on to the original, seems like a totally fine way to go about it to me. Pivot Solved by Alexey DM HDA - Would like to be able to visually move the pivot if I say make a selection and want to rotate from some random area that I decide Mirror & Subdivide preview - I've combined these because I like how the subdivide preview works with the + key, its global. But I want to have a control of the setting, I'd like to change the preview to 2 subdiv levels. It also seems to turn on really slow. I want mirror to work the same way, just a little preview that I don't have to worry about getting lost in the node graph and when I'm done I can go and put down the real one and merge the verts. the result of subdiv preview on a boolean mesh and placing the subdivide node down is different. Whats going on with that? Extract - This doesn't seem to work at all. What can I do to take a face from one box and remove it to start modeling a new thing? Merge - It's too slow to create a new primitive, go to node graph, place merge node, connect 2 lines to begin working. How can it be setup so that simply selecting 2 objects in viewport and hitting a hotkey can create a merge node? Saving Prefs - For quick modeling in houdini I think there are a couple necessary settings to turn on. 1. Tool options > create in context and 2. the final node of every "branch" should have the purple selectable tab on

Wanted to update Since my last post there have been multiple additions to the team that are thriving and doing great but we are still seeking additional houdini FX artists!! Never enough houdini people more experience is preferred but all are welcome to apply, there are 2 very simple well thought out "fx tests" for an applicant to set up. Feel free to contact me or jobs@ingenuitystudios.com to get the ball rolling. Thank you!!

Since its been a while I wanted to update, the position is still available! If you are in the US and are looking to work full time in Los Angeles, just send me a PM or email. Tons of cool projects coming up, lots of room to grow as an artist technically and creatively. All it takes is a link to your demo reel. Thanks!

Can you compare the velocity of each piece vs the whole? So if the velocity is different then we know something must have changed and it broke off. I guess it would also need to then remove that piece from the "whole" calculation. Was messing around with it but I haven't used non packed stuff in forever, don't see a v attribute. Failed at the first step smh. Connect adjacent sounds better though, think thats the right way to go.

Awesome, thank you!