Master Houdini FX: Create Stunning Visual Effects rigs

Just some information about changes SideFx has made to the solver sop.

We will start learning about attribute transfer, how important and powerful it is, and how to use a solver sop to built up values on geometry.

We will see how to manipulate geometry with wrangles and VOPs using out transferred attributes.

We will explore a striped down version of a production rig I created for a TRON video game to create rising walls of columns based on transferred attributes.

We will examine a wrangle node in depth to get a better understanding of how wrangles work and how to use VEX.

We will see the differences of creating geometry attributes and local variables inside a wrangle node and when to use them.

We will explore numerous ways of creating groups that will be used to help control your simulations.

We will explore our extrusion techniques more and see how to control the extrusions with color and apply our technique to various shapes.

The next lecture shows minor interface changes from Houdini 18.0.499 to Houdini 19+

In this lecture we will look at a few of the visual Interface differences between Houdini 18.0.499 and 19+

We will learn how to setup and control emission in various ways and see how POP forces influence particles.

We will setup a snow rig that can be used for snow and rain effects.

We will see how to control our particles more and collide with unique ground planes.

We will see how to create velocity attributes on moving geometry and how particles can use those values.

We will explore a few unique ways to create custom velocity values for our particle emission.

We will create a particle object that uses textures to color our points and trigger their movement with grouping.

We will setup a full project to dissolve an everyday household item using the tricks we have learned.

We will discuss what the Modulus operator does and see visual examples to explain it and its usefulness.

We will setup all our rendering parameters and learn how to create custom Exr channels in our renders.

We will learn how to create a full composition of our rendered elements right inside of Houdini.

We will setup a grains sandbox and burst an object through the ground and use some advanced techniques to control our grains.

We will see how to save your grains simulation to disk and read it back in.

We will see how to manipulate grains to create dynamic ropes that can follow animated geometry.

We will see how to setup grains to behave as cloth and learn some more wrangle tricks to transfer particle simulation data to a static sheet.

We will learn how to create custom velocity on a grains object and create a shrink-wrapping effect on collision geometry.

We will see how to smoothly fade a particles transparency over time using wrangles and particle attributes.

In this video we will see the basics of setting up the wire solver and how to create geometry driven by the wires.

We will adjust our initial setup to span wires between two walls and learn some procedural ways to model wire geometry.

We will create wires on an animated object that utilize built in attributes to make the wires follow, no constraints needed.!

We will see how to setup a basic RBD setup on fractured geometry and learn about the benefits of using Packed RBD’s.

We will learn the right and wrong ways of creating geometry for RBD simulations and how to add UV’s to newly fractured edges.

We will explore creative ways to activate your RBD’s so you have total control over when they start simulating.

We will see how to animate a fractured object and have the pieces of the object become an active RBD over time and fall apart as it moves.

We will setup a fractured wall and launch particles at it that trigger the active state based on distance to destroy the wall in a creative manner.

We will fix our problem of suspended wall chunks with one simple node and some vex tricks.

We will learn tricks to apply stable UV’s to an object after it has already been simulated.

We will see a time saving trick to create a fractured tree object and how to blow it away in the wind.

We will see how to create glue constraints to get control over our fracture patterns and how to do some custom control tricks to influence our glue.

We will start with creating a smoke simulation from scratch and learn the basics of controlling smoke.

We will check out more of the parameters of the smoke related nodes to get a better understanding of what they do.

In this video we will model a cloud out of geometry and VOP’s and convert it into a high resolution VDB.

We will now see how to use our VDB cloud as a source in DOPs to generate density and temperature to drive a smoke sim.

We will check out an advanced system of using animated points from SOP’s to push our dynamic cloud around in DOPs.

We will see ways to automate creating max resize values to contain your smoke and speed up your simulations.

We will see how drastically changing temperature will influence your simulations and see creative ways of creating custom temperature grids.

We will see a very powerful method of bringing in points with various attributes into DOPs that can be used to move your smoke sims.

Some information related to using Houdini 19+ and the examples recorded in these upcoming pyro lectures.

We will examine the setup from the Pyro shelf Explosion tool and see how to work with the Pyro solver.

  In this lecture we will go over recreating what was done in the previous lecture, however we will do it in Houdini 19.5.640 using the more modern sparse solving method. I still recommend watching the previous lecture since the parameters are the same for many areas of the sparse solver and may have additional explanation in the previous lecture that still apply for any version of Houdini you are creating puro in.

We will explore how fuel and temperature work together in the combustion model to create fire and explosions.

In this lecture, we will see how to try to recreate our use of points to inject values into the sparse solver in Houdini 19.5.640. It doesn't work for all fields like in the dense method, so I will show you some work arounds to give similar results when using the sparse method.

We will see two ways of adding in points to use as embers that move with our explosion simulation to add more realism.

In this Updated lecture, we go over the embers creation method using a Sparse Fireball setup. We also show a couple of extra methods for advecting the embers with the vel field of the pyro sim that wasn't covered in the original embers lecture.

We will see how we can use a Pyro explosion to trigger an RBD structure to collapse and be blown apart by the velocity of an explosion.

We will walk through a render setup for our explosion and destroyed building adding an embers pass and seeing how to do a basic comp.

We will create a cloth object to squish between two colliders and explore constraint types.

In this lecture, we will use an animated object to rip through a cloth panel and explore more constraint types.

We will dive into DOPs and see how to dynamically create multiple vellum objects to interact with each other.

We will expand on what we learned before and learn how to trigger tearing by transferring color values.

We will start to explore flip by using a flip tank and creating a large impact splash.

We will expand on the first lecture creating Rest attributes in multiple ways to stick textures to our splashing fluids.

We will create a fluid source from particles and control its direction and motion with velocity and explore viscosity.

Just a few words to conclude our Houdini learning experience.

We will be checking out Houdini's Ripple solver setup and exploring how to apply it to various surfaces.

This is a quick video to show some custom ways of using a wrangle to delete geometry.

This is just to let you know there is an updated setup available for download for the next "extra" lecture.

This lecture will cover how to create chunks of geometry using a voronoi fracture and then show how you can use stamping to select random chunks to copy to points and eventually turn these chunks into an RBD setup.

UPDATE: Check for a v02 .hipnc file that shows an example to fix random bugs that can occur using the npoints vex in this example.

UPDATE: There is a v03 file with an even more streamlined way of setting this up that you should check out.

In this "extra" Lecture we will see how we can flip faces on a per primitive basis based off a start frame using some vex and a very handy node.

In this "Extra" lecture we will look at a technique to create electrical arcs between two conductors, a setup that is used very often in Post.

In this "extra" Lecture, we will see how to re create the soda can comp using Natron, a free compositing application that is very similar to Nuke.

In this "extra" lecture we will see some basics of using a third party GPU render plugin called Redshift.

In this "extra"lecture, I will show you a very useful, stable way for deleting points/particles that have a changing ptnum value.

In this "extra" lecture, I will show some examples of how to use the helpful vex function minpos(). There is a slight audio glitch for a brief time during this recording.

In this "extra" lecture, I will show some tricks to getting more detail and more interesting shapes out of points and particle sims using the handy attributeBlur node.