Thomas Helzle

Hahahah - funny. Just checked your thread and it seems we indeed had some similar ideas. :-) I don't share files of released artwork, but if you need help implementing the audio import code I linked to in my post, I'm happy to help. Although be warned: as I wrote it was my first ever python code, only works for 24Bit/48KHz wave files and it turned out quite slow being singlethreaded. I never liked chops so thought I should at least give it a try - and at least it was simpler than the C++ API... ;-) Still looking for a good OpenCL FFT, all I found on the web was embedded in C++ and I'm not good enough a programmer to extract it... I'm travelling right now but I can get back to you next week if you want. Cheers, Tom

Organics: "Seed" Organics: "Bud" Organics: "Leaf" These were all rendered in Redshift at very high resolutions (10800 square/14400x9600) for printing: https://www.artstation.com/thomashelzle/prints Love it! :-) Cheers, Tom

"Where is She?" Lurking down there, somewhere, maybe? In the unrendered depths of virtual nothingness. Hiding until some unguarded Bit or Byte comes along, Never to see the light of day again... This one and the one above are both based on the same ideas but instead of flat fill space... Rendered in Redshift, post in Alienskin ExposureX4. Cheers, Tom

"Being Eternal" And as the sky opened upon her She stood, collecting stardust Microfilament vibrating Nanocircuits alert Her whole being exposed to the universe As it always had been As it always would be Cheers, Tom

Dove some more into those organic structures: The above one is based on a shortest-path structure I posted here some pages back - amazing what this treatment brings out! :-) The below started out as a disc with a hole, got shortest-pathed and tweaked: Bot rendered in Redshift. Cheers, Tom

And something completely different. I currently test a LG 75" TV as a monitor (75UK6500PLA). On the photo it looks much smaller as it feels in reality ~1.7m wide and 1m high, about 1.5m away from me. My table is 2m wide and 1m deep, the top is 1.1m from the floor. It is unbelievable how for instance the ART animation a couple of posts above looks in 4k at this size. A totally different impression from my old 30" Dell monitor. Instant gallery-feel :-) What's also cool is the fact, that suddenly the table has much more space on top and because of the distance to the monitor, it feels much less crowded. Image quality feels very good so far, the pixels of course are relatively large at this scale, but I totally love working in Houdini this way. Many other applications can be kept smaller and distributed over the screen - I didn't scale windows itself. Screen brightness is quite even, with a slight darkening towards the edges, but nothing that would worry me. Of course, because of the size and being relative close, one has to move the head and so also looks at the screen surface at different angles, but again, none of that feels problematic so far. At first I was quite worried since the mouse/wacom was lagging a lot, but then found that the "game mode" takes care of that. I'm also disabling all image "enhancement stuff", dynamic brightness etc. of course. It's connected via HDMI to my GeForce GTX 1080 TI. I haven't tried it as a TV so can't comment on that (stopped watching TV almost 20 years ago ;-) ). Cheers, Tom

Thanks Matt! Means a lot coming from you! Your wiki helped me a lot getting into Houdini. Cheers, Tom

Yeah, not using your files or systems (cool work there btw.!) but based on a system of shortest path growth. Also inspired by Serjan Burlaks work... Love it... :-) Cheers, Tom ‏

"Organics" Houdini 17.5 & Redshift Cheers, Tom

Thanks jmarko :-) And I certainly agree about Houdini - it helps us grow as artists OpenGL rendered from the viewport... Cheers, Tom

Wacom in Mouse mode is pretty bad imo, worse than a mouse because of the limited area. The main advantage of the whole tablet/pen system is, that it's an absolute position, so you can directly move to a location on the screen without "walking the distance". Wacom has pretty bad drivers, if yours don't work right, try updating or downdating to older ones, trashing the settings, uninstall/reinstall and I think they have an explicit uninstaller that checks for left-behinds. (not sure if I remember that correctly). Considering that they are the number one high-end tablet maker, it's quite embarrassing how crappy their drivers are (and how flimsy the pens have become). On Windows 95 with the serial tablet, the pointer was totally nailed to the pen, no latency or lag at all. But since Windows NT, the driver is much less close to the hardware and so there always is a bit of a latency involved. Not much anymore (at least if Windows Ink is disabled) but still it's not as direct as it used to be 25 years ago. When Windows Ink came out with W8, I went crazy with up to several seconds lag when trying to move a scrollbar and stuff like that. Thankfully they listened to the users after some months and implemented the way to disable it in the driver. I never tried it, but there also is the airbrush-pen. It has a wheel IIRC but I'm not sure if it works like a mousewheel ... May be worth a try. But with the Houdini value ladders, I don't miss it at all. And yes, the upper button for MM is a pretty good setting. Using the side buttons with the index finger here - can't even remember if it ever was a problem :-) But a mouse, now THAT is clumsy as hell and middle clicking with the wheel drives me bonkers ;-) Cheers, Tom

I use a wacom pen since the Windows 3.1/95 days when the tablet (called a "digitizer" back then) was huge (UD 1212 I think it was called, 12" x 12"), thick and clumsy as hell, the serial port a pita to set up and the driver was able to grind everything else to a halt when one moved it around quickly enough on those early PCs... ;-) These days I have an Intuos 4 Medium. But yeah, no wrist or other problems at all, the pen really makes a difference and is much more natural and agile. With the middle click on the second side button of the pen, I am using the mouse almost never, only in some weird software that doesn't deal well with the pen and shoots parameters through the roof when dragging a slider etc.. Not so many around of those anymore though. For me using the pen never was an issue and it came naturally. But I know that for some people it does not click. I think it partly has to do with the pasture, I hold the pen relatively upright with the index finger on the sidebutton. This way, when clicking with the tip, the pen does not slide. I also have the tablet in front of me and the keyboard behind it, which works very well for me. One also has to get comfortable with zooming with the available shortcuts instead of the mouse wheel, since reaching for that scroll-wheel thingy on the tablet is cumbersome. And yeah, some things don't work so well, depending on the software. Like I always use the Tab key to open the node menu instead of the right mouseclick, since Houdini is overly sensitive to the slightest movement while clicking and one always moves a tiny bit when using the side button. But that doesn't really bother me, I find a mouse much more clumsy in many other ways. Especially the direct positioning of the pointer to an absolute position is so much more muscle-memory friendly than the mouse shuffling. Those alternative monster-mouse things didn't really convince me, even if they are supposed to be better for the hand - it's still moving around a brick... ;-) I highly recommend finding solutions for the things that bother you with the pen, different settings, different pasture, different pens, tablet keys on the left or right, a different size tablet even. It's really worth it IMO. Cheers, Tom Edit: And make sure you disable the frigging "Windows Ink" crap in the wacom driver, otherwise everything reacts like goo... ;-)

I finally uploaded an excerpt of the Reaction-Diffusion kernel from "Ready" I ported to Houdini OpenCL a while ago: 750,000 points and it runs almost in realtime on a GTX 1080 TI. This is an OpenGL render that shows exactly how it looks in the viewport - the mesh is so dense that it vanishes... :-) Cheers, Tom

"Escheresque" Exploring geometric structures again... Be sure to look at it on a large monitor in full size :-) And a detail render in high-rez: Houdini 17 & Redshift Cheers, Tom

And the original coloured version: