New Houdini Tutorial

[MIguel P]

Hello everyone. I've made my first Houdini tutorial!

It is about creating a meteor using sprite rendering, smoke procedural shader and deep shadows. I hope you like it.

You can see it on my web page (tutorials section): http://www.miguelperezsenent.com/

Edited April 11, 2007 by MIguel P

[Lukich]

Great tutorial, Miguel, keep them coming.

[old school]

Very good Miguel!

[Overload]

Awesome Miguel!! I'll go through this tonight, looks really cool

[altbighead]

great tutorials ..

Can you do a tutorial on integrating live action and cg on next tutorial.

I am interested more on work flow of setting up in houdini than lighting/rendering side.

[MADjestic]

Great tutorial, Miguel!

I really liked the dust sprites in your 'road breaking' shot and thought it would be nice to see the way you've dealt with sprites shading and here goes your tutorial. You are reading my thoughts - please keep it going =)

[MIguel P]

Great tutorial, Miguel!

I really liked the dust sprites in your 'road breaking' shot and thought it would be nice to see the way you've dealt with sprites shading and here goes your tutorial. You are reading my thoughts - please keep it going =)

Hehe.

Thank you.

I'm reading the tutorial again and there is a floattovector vop that does nothing in the shader...

[jeenyus]

Hey Miguel!

Looking nice! Its very appreciate. Ill play with it later at home.

Thnx for sharing it, and thnx for your time.

[Allegro]

This would have been handy a week ago when I was figuring out this type of effect

Ah well, thems the breaks.

[grasshopper]

Very useful indeed. Thanks for sharing and hope to see more.

One thing that bothered me though is the way the smoke trail stops still at the back. It really ought to be spreading out and drifting away a little. You can achieve that by adding a force with some turbulant noise based on AGE in to the POP network. Fading it out a little would probably help too.

[chunkified]

awesome thank you for the tutorial

[sanostol]

Hey Miguel, great!

Thanks for Your effort.

Edited April 12, 2007 by sanostol

[Andz]

Pro-Stuff Miguel, I can't wait to try it out this weekend.

Man, I foresee a great future for you in this field! Keep on rockin'

[sanchez]

Thank you Miguel.

You rocks.

[T-bat]

Hey, that looks great.

Thank you Miguel

[Bernard]

Hello Miguel,

I did your great 'Meteor' tutorial, but I can't get the procedural shader to work.

I only get a black grid in the VEX editor.

Is it possible to post the VEX smoke shader, so I can test what I did wrong ?

many thanks,

bern

Edited April 13, 2007 by Bernard

[MIguel P]

Than you everyone, I'm glad you like it

Hello Miguel,

I did your great 'Meteor' tutorial, but I can't get the procedural shader to work.

I only get a black grid in the VEX editor.

Is it possible to post the VEX smoke shader, so I can test what I did wrong ?

many thanks,

bern

Here is the otl with the shader.

SpriteSmokeShader.otl

spritevops.hip

Edited June 2, 2007 by MIguel P

[ygalula]

Thanks MIguel, cool tutorial!

I have one question:

This setup links between the camera's position to the light's position (since the sprites always face the camera). However, I'd like to be able to put the light someplace else - to get nice shadows. Also, if I'll move the camera, the colors will change...

So, I tried to create a shader with constant lighting, but with shadows. I think I need to use the luminance loop for that, with the shadow operator, but I cant seem to make even a simple diffuse shader with the luminance loop, let alone add shadow to it.

Is there an example of such a thing somewhere?

Thanks,

Yaron

[MIguel P]

This setup links between the camera's position to the light's position (since the sprites always face the camera). However, I'd like to be able to put the light someplace else - to get nice shadows. Also, if I'll move the camera, the colors will change...

So, I tried to create a shader with constant lighting, but with shadows. I think I need to use the luminance loop for that, with the shadow operator, but I cant seem to make even a simple diffuse shader with the luminance loop, let alone add shadow to it.

Is there an example of such a thing somewhere?

Thanks,

Yaron

Good idea! But I never tried that. I will try it.

[srgb]

Hey Miguel, firstly a 'thank you' for posting the tutorial, its always a great help. I'm having a little trouble with the Meteor Tutorial in that whenever I get to the end of this section:

"5- Connect another Color POP and in the Alpha tab choose "Ramp". Write $LIFE in the Lookup

parameter. Put 3 keys and set the Alpha parameter to: Key1-> 0, Key2-> 1 and Key3-> 1. Put the

keys like in the following image.

6- Connect a Sprite POP to the color2 node, turn on the toggle for the parameter Scale and write in

both scale fields 0.5*($CA/2+0.5). This will make the particles increase their size using Alpha

attribute.

7- Press "d" to open the Display Options window and in the Particles tab, choose Display particles

as "Sprites". In frame 50 in your viewport you should see this:"

...I don't see the nice ramp colour on my sprites... I just see a constant yellow.

I was wondering if there is a step missing in the tutorial before this point, or if there is something that I should be doing in houdini to enable myself to see the nice yellow/orange/gray colour ramp on the sprites?

Thank you for your time, and the help.

Regards,

Sean