Thomas Helzle

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

After a request from @srletak I post my python audio import HDA here. This is the original post this was used for: Multiple qualifiers apply: - This was my first python script and I somehow do not really agree with this funny language so far (was raised on C...) so it's really hacked together without me knowing what I do. - I didn't know where to put the library I used for import so I copied the relevant part into the script directly. - This is the library: https://github.com/mgeier/python-audio/blob/master/audio-files/audio-files-with-wave.ipynb - I only wanted to load 24Bit, 48KHz, Stereo Wave files, so that's the only thing it deals with - one small sample .wav is included. - I didn't understand how to make python read a spare parameter so you have to go into the code of the HDA and set the path to the audio file manually (I marked the line in the script). - Since geometry generation with python turned out to be abysmally slow, I removed the code for that and only import the points and some file info (see the detail attributes). - There is one group for the left channel to help separate left and right. The included .hip file does nothing but load the HDA. You can then go into the code (rightclick the node -> Type Properties -> Code) and enter the (absolute) path to where you put the audio file. This gives you every sample of the wave file as a point in space for further mangling. I'm sure a real Python wiz can do a much better job, so if you improve the script, feel free to post it here or do with it whatever you want. This was created in Houdini Core 16.5. Cheers, Tom AudioImport.zip

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. Edit: Now posted here: 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