Woop I just made a matcap GLSL shader for the Houdini viewport! Will be sharing the shader with some info & explanations soon when I have time.

Woop I just made a matcap GLSL shader for the Houdini viewport! Will be sharing the shader with some info & explanations soon when I have time.

Woop I just made a matcap GLSL shader for the Houdini viewport! Will be sharing the shader with some info & explanations soon when I have time.

Would be nice to take this concept further to a DrawShape asset that supports workplanes (best fit plane from input selection as collision), drawing 3D shapes [width x depth then height] (a la Maya interactive create) and different primitives (spheres, tubes etc). I'll be trying it out.

Needed to group points inside camera frustum in SOPs (to remove instances not seen by camera), googled, ended up here. Found that Volume SOP ('From Camera') ---> Volume Bound SOP is an easy way to get a lightweight polygon version of the camera frustum. Used it as a bounding object (Peak SOP to enlarge a bit to include nearby instances for bounce light) in a Group SOP and voila, job done. TLDR: +1 for Volume SOP ---> Volume Bound

My proposed solution wasn't very good. Tried it out and ultimately had better luck with: Head mesh --> PolyReduce (paint an attribute before to Retain Density in some parts) --> Divide with Compute Dual on --> some extrudes & peaks & vdb and back and such to get a nice solid shape. or Head mesh --> Scatter (paint density before) --> Voronoi Fracture (Create Inside Surface off) --> some extrudes & peaks & vdb and back and such to get a nice solid shape. Quite far from the refs, I headed a different direction due to needing similar stuff for a project.

Starting from a human bust model: Paint density using Paint SOP --> Scatter (enable Density Attribute) --> copy spheres on scattered points (Sphere SOP, Primitive Type: Polygon or Polygon Mesh). On another branch PolyExtrude char surface so it has thickness (enable Output Back). Boolean (Operation: Subtract) with extruded char on left input, spheres on right. You can jitter the spheres' P (Point Jitter with a small scale, maybe 0.05 as a starting point) and randomize an orient on the points (Attribute Randomize, Attribute Name: 'orient', Dimensions: 4) before Copy To Points for a bit of randomness. And/or after Copy To Points use an Attrib VOP with e.g. Unified Noise added to @P, which will possibly give a nicer-looking randomness. For nicer edges after Boolean enable Output Edge Groups: 'abseams' on the Boolean and use PolyBevel with Group: 'abseams'. Maybe helps you get started, try it out. If you get stuck, ask again, I'm sure I'm missing some details

This should help you with the GLSL setup/boilerplate (point the material parm to the .prog file, vertex shader is basically a passtrough shader copied from somewhere in Houdini files). I've no answer for creating & rendering 100mil points on the GPU though, I haven't tried to create points in the vertex shader. Would be cool if Houdini had some intuitive ways of working with & displaying GPU data (something like a more wrangle-like OpenCL SOP with a direct hook/endpoint in the viewport so that the data doesn't have to come back to the CPU before being displayed). I included a test file using instancing as well, that approach seems to start to break down around 1-10mil points here. hou-glsl-instancing-example.zip

Not sure what you're trying to do, more details please. If what you need is simple enough, it could maybe be achieved by turning off the lights? (See picture, use the selected/orange icon under lock in top-right of viewport) I've got a super simple GLSL shader working as well, can post an example later.

A couple of the more prolific artists/designers doing this type of looks nowadays: Gustavo Torres/Kidmograph, James White/Signalnoise. They seem to create their own stuff, not sure where they draw their insp from, probably partially from the stuff already discussed in this thread.

In Houdini 16 I have not been having any problems with Wacom & mouse mode & multiple monitors, working butter smooth here now!

Gaahhh you're getting some crazy cool looks out of the fractals! Dope!

Heyo, Houdini newbie here. I'm working primarily with a Wacom tablet (Intuos M, mouse mode) on Windows 10 machines. The tablet driver does this very annoying thing where when I open Houdini it will move the cursor very glitchily when navigating the viewport and a lot of the UI buttons cannot be clicked. I found out that if I stop & start the Wacom Professional Service after opening Houdini the problems go away for that session. I'll be submitting a bug report to SESI right after this post. Wonder if anyone else has encountered the same problem and has a protip to avoid resorting to this workaround?