Toms "Learning Houdini" Gallery

[Thomas Helzle]

"X"

Another one in the series with 16 levels:

Again rendered with Redshift using rather strong DOF for the depth blur.

Cheers,

Tom

[Thomas Helzle]

Then I thought I should take it to the third dimension and came up with a funny solution:

This is about 12 divisions from a cube.

My idea was, that I would pack the initial cube, check the boundingbox in primitive mode in my loop and if it contained at least one point, "subdivide" it by scaling it down by 0.5, unpack it and place one still packed downscaled cube on each point of the resulting unpacked cube with copy to points. If the cube contains no points, it would not be in the "do" group so I would not scale or unpack it and place only one packed cube at the centroid point - redundant but works compiled where a merge does not. 

I guess there are better algorithms out there, but I enjoyed the compact simplicity of this one.
Compiled it's still rather fast, although no longer realtime as the 2D one.

Cheers,

Tom

[Thomas Helzle]

"Cubicles"

Same structure as above but rendered semi-opaque in Redshift:

 

And a detail view:

 

Cheers,

Tom

 

[dyei nightmare]

really inspiring, im really inspired by this to do art like this, ive been so technicall latelly, ill get more artistic, thanks

Edited October 18, 2017 by dyei nightmare

[Thomas Helzle]

"Feathers"

Working on building a feather-designing tool from scratch...

Rendered in Redshift.

Cheers,

Tom

[Thomas Helzle]

"Shells of Light"

My second piece with extreme DOF in Redshift. 
The basis is a shell made of wires.
There are no lights other than a HDRI environment in the scene and no post effects are used other than color correction in Luminar2018 & Photoshop.
All the structures are the result of the very shallow  depth of field.
Rendered at 10000 pixels square for high res printing. Took about 9 hours with a GTX 980 TI and a GTX 1080 TI at 32768 samples per pixel max.

Prints: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/shells-of-light-thomas-helzle.html

[Thomas Helzle]

"Lantern"

A test image for organic spatial subdivision rendered in Redshift:

Cheers,

Tom

[Thomas Helzle]

"Contours"

Experimenting with contours on a terrain mesh. Rendered in Redshift and post-processed in Lightroom:

And with different post in Luminar 2018:

Cheers,

Tom

[Thomas Helzle]

"Brushed"

I'm currently working on my first VR-Art-project with "Invisible Room" in Berlin and was exploring 3D-brushes from - in this case Tiltbrush - and Quill in our R&D.

Here the result was exported as Alembic, procedurally coloured in Houdini and rendered with Redshift over a scanned-in rice-paper-texture:

Interesting times... :-)

Cheers,

Tom

[Thomas Helzle]

"The Tree"

Another R&D image from the above VR project:

The idea for the VR-experience was triggered by a TV-show on how trees communicate with each other in a forest through their roots, through the air and with the help of fungi in the soil, how they actually "feed" their young and sometimes their elderly brethren, how they warn each other of bugs and other adversaries (for instance acacia trees warn each other of giraffes and then produce stuff giraffes don't like in their leaves...) and how they are actually able to do things like produce substances that attract animals that feed on the bugs that irritate them. They even seem to "scream" when they are thirsty...

(I strongly recommend this (german) book: https://www.amazon.de/Das-geheime-Leben-Bäume-kommunizieren/dp/3453280679/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1529064057&sr=8-1&keywords=wie+bäume+kommunizieren )

It's really unbelievable how little we know about these beings.

So we were looking to create a forest in an abstract style (pseudo-real game-engine stuff somehow doesn't really cut it IMO) that was reminiscent of something like a three dimensional painting through which you could walk. In the centre of the room, there was a real tree trunk that you were able to touch. This trunk was also scanned in and formed the basis of the central tree in the VR forest.

Originally the idea was, that you would touch the tree (hands were tracked with a Leap Motion controller) and this would "load up" the touched area and the tree would start to become transparent and alive and you would be able to look inside and see the veins that transport all that information and distribute the minerals, sugar and water the plant needs. From there the energy and information would flow out to the other trees in the forest, "activate" them too and show how the "Wood Wide Web" connected everything.

Also, your hands touching the tree would get loaded up as well and you would be able to send that energy through the air (like the pheromones the trees use) and "activate" the trees it touched.

For this, I created trees and roots etc. in a style like the above picture where all the "strokes" were lines. This worked really great as an NPR style since the strokes were there in space and not just painted on top of some 3D geometry.

Since Unity does not really import lines, Sascha from Invisible Room created a Json exporter for Houdini and a Json Importer for unity to get the lines and their attributes across. In Unity, he then created the polyline geometry on the fly by extrusion, using the Houdini generated attributes for colour, thickness etc.

To keep the point count down, I developed an optimiser in Houdini that would reduce the geometry as much as possible, remove very short lines etc.

In Unity, one important thing was, to find a way to antialias the lines which initially flickered like crazy - Sascha did a great job there and the image became really calm and stable.

I also created plants, hands, rocks etc. in a fitting style.

The team at Invisible Room took over from there and did the Unity part.

The final result was shown with a Vive Pro with attached Leap Motion Controller fed by a backpack-computer.

I was rather adverse to VR before this project, but I now think that it actually is possible to create very calm, beautiful and intimate experiences with it that have the power to really touch people on a personal level.

Interesting times :-)

Cheers,

Tom

Edited June 15, 2018 by Thomas Helzle

[Thomas Helzle]

"Circular Paths"

Embraced by the universe we try to get our roots, our feelers, our nerve endings into it's substance to feel more connected with it, with each other, with ourselves, with life and love...

Created in Houdini
Rendered in Redshift
Post in Luminar

Cheers,

Tom

[Thomas Helzle]

"And so we shine, silently"

 

Created in sidefx Houdini 16.5
Rendered in Redshift
Post in Luminar 2018 & Exposure X4

Cheers,

Tom

[HM_2020]

Amazing work mate!

 

[Thomas Helzle]

10 hours ago, HowardM said:

Amazing work mate!

 

Thanks Howard! :-)

Cheers,

Tom

[marcoF]

Hello!
Really nice to follow ure Work.
I especially like ure lines advected by pyro. 
How did u manage to resample the splines at every advection step? Or did u just start with a really high sampling resolution of the lines at the beginning?
I am working on a similar setup and cant get the resampling done properly.  

Cheers, Marco
 

[Thomas Helzle]

Hey marcoF,

the advection is done in a solver and so yes, I resample at each step IIRC. Starting with a very finely subdivided line would not work, since you still would have your resolution distributed wrongly.

Cheers,

Tom

[Thomas Helzle]

I started this thread on September 22, 2016, which was basically when I finally got into Houdini after doing 3D for more than 20 years with other software.

Yesterday I returned from London, where I gave my first ever Houdini Workshop at "The Bartlett School of Architecture" to a group of 8 students from all over the world. They had started using Houdini only a couple of weeks before and none of them had done any real programming ever.
Over the course of last week, I introduced them to many aspects of Houdini and VEX, the central design topic was the Shortest Path algorithm and truncated Octahedrons.
My main goal was, to give them an introduction to programming and generative design and take away their fear of code as something "hard and alien".
(I actually used ordering beer in a pub for explaining the command structure of VEX, if, else, for and for each loops etc. ;-) ).

This worked out very well, they all catched on fast and created their own beautiful results based on my examples.
Richard, my host at the UCL was very supportive and the whole thing was a lot of fun and very rewarding.

I can see Houdini being used in design more and more, since software like Rhinos Grasshopper doesn't really cut it for complex work.
So after SideFX being originally mostly used in movie SFX, then Motion Graphics, then recently going into Games, now this could become another mainstay for their business since Computational Design is growing more and more important and nobody does generative and complexity better.

Thanks to the whole Houdini community, without you I couldn't have catched up as fast!

Cheers,

Tom

[Thomas Helzle]

"Math Flower"

Created in SideFX Houdini Core 16.5
Rendered in Redshift
Post in Luminar 2018

[Thomas Helzle]

"Weaving"

 

Created in SideFX Houdini 16.5, rendered with Redshift and post done in Luminar 2018.

Cheers,

Tom

[Thomas Helzle]

"Folded Paper Flow"

Before heading for London (see above post) I went to a local art shop and found a book about the paper-art of Richard Sweeney. I was totally fascinated by the flow and forms he creates just from folded paper. Today I finally got to do some initial experiments with similar approaches in Houdini:

Created in Houdini 17, rendered in Redshift (Brute Force GI this time) and post in Luminar 2018.

Cheers,

Tom