Thomas Helzle

Organics: "Spin" A multidimensional spider, when dancing, is leaving behind a cloud of intricate structures... Houdini 17.5, Redshift 3.0.5, Luminar Cheers, Tom

"Be a tree" Let the breeze blow gently through your leaves. Let the sun nourish and warm you. Give birds and squirrels a home. Drink deep from the ground. And when the storm comes, give it your all. Blender with "The Grove" plugin for the tree, Houdini making it into strands and create pseudo-leaves, Redshift for rendering, Luminar to make it cheesy ;-) And a "dry" version: Cheers, Tom

"The Book of Tom" All you are is a system of memories Houdini, Redshift. Cheers, Tom

"Bloom" Revisiting an old design based on differential growth: Houdini, Redshift, Luminar. Cheers, Tom

@jayhem & @btangonan: So I dug out this old file from 2016 and updated it to Houdini 17.5. Download it here: Coral_Growth_2019.hiplc As was said in above post, the rendering wasn't Mantra but Thea Render. Cheers, Tom

Organics: "Lace" The queen decided that for her 3389th birthday, she would wear nothing but the most intricate laces. Thousands of trained silk worms were worked to exhaustion. But the result was worth it... This one needed to be rendered as Redshift hair instead of cylindrical strands that I use normally, since my 64 GB RAM did not suffice for the conversion... Cheers, Tom

Organics: "Cocoon" Today he would leave his cocoon forever It had kept him alive and safe for years But it had also defined his boundaries It was a frightful thing to leave them behind... GO! Houdini, Redshift, Luminar 2018 Cheers, Tom

Organics: "The Grid" The Grid was very, very regular. And very very dead. Humans were very fond of it. Right angles everywhere! Then life intervened. Made things interesting again. Thank you! :-) Cheers, Tom

Organics: "Wound Torus" Houdini, Redshift and Luminar 2018... Cheers, Tom

Rigid-Body-Explosion Playing with rigid bodies. Normally not my world, but trying to do something with dynamics every now and then anyway... Cheers, Tom

Organics: "Alien Tribal Runes" This one is based on a directional growth solver as the basis. Cheers, Tom

I found VEX very simple to learn, but I come from C which it's rather close to. How much previous knowledge with programming do you have? Processing is a rather specialised environment with peculiar rules, so I'm not sure if it isn't more useful if you dive into VEX directly? The good thing IMO is, that you always get visual feedback, so VEX is very brain-friendly to learn if you allow yourself to "play". I would actually use Houdini to teach kids math and programming in school. ;-) I gave one workshop to students of architecture who had no prior knowledge of programming and within the four days we had, they groked at least the basics and that it's nothing to be afraid of... (one of the most important things IMO). And yes, "Joy of VEX" from Matt (and everything else on tokeru) is super helpful, there are also video tutorials and of course, there is always Entagma. Especially if you start with their oldest videos, they go into much more detail when they use VEX than they do nowadays. Good luck! Cheers, Tom

I recently looked into it again and found a workaround that works for my uses: I render a Z-Depth AOV set to mimimal distance with my image. This allows to pick the Z-Depth in the Redshift viewers sidebar. I then enter the value by hand in the camera. Still hoping for a direct option at one point though. The other things I looked at either didn't update at all without a manual refresh or triggered a full scene reload. Maybe we should bug Juanjo once more... :-) Cheers, Tom

"Hybrid" Another one in the Organics series, this time from a layered structure with strong DOF in Redshift and "Power" at 100 for that special look... Cheers, Tom

Cool it works for you! I wanted to apply a FFT to the audio to be able to extract frequencies and the phase etc. but haven't been able to find an OpenCL (or other) solution for that so far (other than the strange CHOP-stuff which works up to a point but not how I'd like it to)... Cheers, Tom