You can try playing around with the rest attribute properties in the Vellum Solver, that will allow u to stretch the object, but I'm not sure if that'll give u the effect you want. It'll requrie some trial and error.

@@bubblepins kzbin.info/www/bejne/e6ncqaWdr7aJnMksi=212DNn1RjXr1J09T I am trying to get this kind of effect see how his skin stretching and how it's going back

Thanks so much! Such a lovely comment!

Thanks!

I thought I could mount the head in metahuman and mount the body in place in anril, but I don't understand how

MetaHumans has a sculpting feature, but there is a limitation on how much u can deform the character's head. If u skip to @5:13 in the video I have an example. I sculpt horns on the metahuman, but when I converted my sculpted mesh into a metahuman, the horns are lost. There's a limit of how much u can customize. I have seen other YT videos where they completely replaced the head with extreme sculpting like adding horns, but it's a much more complex process.

THanks!

I do agree with u. I was obsessed before with keeping everything in simulation, like for the most accurate results, but then after much struggle, compositing the layers together looks just as good imo.

@@bubblepins Yeah same! I get it. I had a point when I was obsessed to make everything as realistic as possible thinking ""the right way"", making dumb judgement calls just to make things as accurate as possible but once I started doing more and more commercial/film houdini work I realized I have to take the shortcuts since there is no time for fine tuning.. But its always great to know how to fix these things when they appear out of nowhere!

@@SwipeLess That's so awesome u did commercial work using houdini! Sounds super exciting!

​@@bubblepins Yeah I got lucky after school 8 years ago, managed to get into one studio as a trainee and secured myself enough experience in film/tv projects which really helped me to apply to studios! I'm sure you can pull it off too if youre interested, just pull together a good reel and find a nice small studio! I work in smaller studio too so I do a lot of generalist tasks and compositing aswell

@@SwipeLess Thanks for sharing ur experience! I love hearing about how people get into the VFX industry! I have thought about it, joining a small studio and working my way from there! But as of currently I really really want to try and create a short film and maybe hopefully enter in a film festival. That has been a small goal for me for the past year and so, but I haven't been able to get it off the ground. Hopefully this year!

The project files are for Perk Members that are granted access to the Perk Community Tab where the passwords are posted.

Thanks u for the lovely comment! U just made my day!

Thanks!

That's such a wonderful comment! Thanks so much!

That's fine too! It's good we have choices! I love UE and Blender and zBrush, they are also apps I use a lot. Well I'm still learning UE and zBrush is just sooo relaxing to sculpt, it just relaxes me so much.

@@bubblepins Heh sorry for the inflammatory use of words, I know Houdini is great and all but I'm not a fan of the fact you have to learn programming and its scary node system to use it as well as its more procedural-oriented design, my ape brain can't handle that LMAO (I'm saving my few brain cells to learn Blueprints later cuz it's necessary for games and it's either that or C++.. no thanks), honestly I'm sticking to Maya cuz I find modeling in it more convenient than even in Blender (too many shortcuts to memorize) and the fact it's great for animating, etc. Zbrush is amazing for sculpting but goddamn it, that interface and its pricing! That's why I'm keeping an eye on Blender's sculpting system and currently am focusing on the sculpting skills themselves (modeling human heads currently, so hard lol) before I decide which one to stick to

@@bubblepins sorry, Houdini is cool and hella powerful but I can't handle its requirements (programming, node based system, etc) and procedural-based design lol if we could model the traditional way I'd choose it over Maya for sure

@@wallacesousuke1433 At the beginning Houdini was like that for me too, but over time I learned to love it! I say we use each app for its best feature, I've spent a lot of time trying to make all the 3d apps play well with each other and over recent years, these companies have started to release more tools to help integrate scene between each app. USD & UV's helped a lot. And the latest MaterialX shaders are open source so we'll start to see more compatibility between all the apps! Exciting stuff!

Give Houdini a chance, this is the first year release of APEX in Houdini 20, it's still labelled as experimental in SideFX's docs. Maya's been in this character animation game for decades! Let's give Houdini a chance.

Thanks so much for the lovely comment! This technique came in handy for me a lot when I'm trying to render out flip examples.

rtx 4090 it has 24gb of ram. Sorry if I misunderstood, but I believe ur asking because in the stream I mentioned adding FLIP fluids, but I was worried about memory. The scene as is has particles and the bananas took most of the polygons as well, because I had to convert the crowds into geo to get it rendering in karma. I'm not sure if there's a procedurals available for crowds. Procedurals is Karma's way of optimizing rendering for instances like FLIP, feathers, &stuff like hair. Hope that helps!

I understand the frustration of convincing others of the power of procedural workflows, but let's try to look at it on the other side. A lot of people went to schools and invest both time and money into their existing education and it makes sense that they trust in that. Houdini's APEX feature has A LOT of potential, but still is a newcomer in this character animation game, I think it will take some time to spread the love. I believe that animators want to produce quality animations and when they start to see projects others can make with APEX, I think they'll give it chance.

Dinosaurs go extinct. Their loss.

I agree with ur points. Maya has been around for decades and the pipeline and features have been polished to a dime. Houdini's APEX is young, we need to give it time to mature. Houdini does have an unique advantage with its HDA and this will allow any studio to customize their pipeline to their exact needs, this may be a game changer maybe? when it comes to APEX? I use the KineFX and create Generators for 3D models that also generate the skeleton rig popping it out of the HDA. It becomes very convenient, but this is only for the long run though.

That was something I was trying to do too. Like with that weird plant rig I experimented on near the end of the stream, where I ported it into UE, that one had a geometry controls attached and I tried to port it into UE, but failed. APEX is still in experimental stage, according to SideFX's docs, so maybe in the next patch release? Fingers crossed. But also UE 5.4 (just released I think last week) has modular Control Rigs, so I donno how Houdini's APEX system fits with that. OR I actually suspect that mayyyyyybe UE 5.4's modular control rig under the hood is powered by APEX? that's just a theory, because the timing of both features came out coincidentally at the same time. And Epics Games has invested money into SideFX.

@@bubblepins Probably the way to do it is to work backwards from the control rig in Unreal and create a python script or HDA that duplicates those 5.4 rigging modules in Houdini (still using FBX to transfer animation between the apps). I'm really hoping we can get a new universal rigging format to replace FBX. Even using Maya there are a lot of gotchas transferring the rigs.

@@JWPanimation That's an interesting solution you have there! I'm not sure UE support Python, too bad UE uses C++ which makes it hard to code. I am terrible at memory management with C++. But that's very interesting, because Houdini has a python server in it that will allow us to send out and talk to other 3d applications.

If you export the smoke from houdini as a vdb and import it into UE as a vdb which is now supported since I think UE 5.2, it's been there for awhile. In UE 5.4, they added a volume sparse material or something I heard from their GDC announcement. Hope that helps!

@@bubblepins yr I am using 5.0

@@3dwithsb yeah give it an update to the latest version & patch it should be compatible with vdb volumes

Good tip! this can also be done in the editing software too.

exactly. I recently switched from cinema 4d to houdini, because I needed to use more powerful software in the company I work for. Your videos have helped me a lot, you explain clearly, I love that. :3

@@vertexiom awesome! That's so great! Thanks for letting me know! I get very happy hearing how this helped u professionally!

Are u trying to use the HoudiniEngine and import curve driven geometry? The curves broke in the engine, you can't modify the UE curves and still get the updated Houdini procedural geometry generated. I haven't checked the latest UE5.4 yet..... Hope that helps!

i’m still very new to houdini so i’m not entirely certain. my ultimate goal is to have vines that grow to form a certain shape and i read that l-system does that best. i’m trying to get that to work in unreal 5 but when it’s in “skeleton” mode all that appears is a 3d model of the houdini logo, and in “tubes” mode the tree does show up, but is bright orange and has little houdini logos floating all around it. i’ve read about curves but i’m not sure what they’re for or how to use them with the l-system.

@@user-dl8yo3wv1t oh if it's a rigged tree then lsystem actually converts it into a mesh, like a plain geometry. Then you can just import it into UE like any rigged character without the need of the HoudiniEngine. Just export the rigged try as an fbx but you need to use the FBX Character ROP node, not just any FBX Rop node. THere will be 3 inputs. The first input is the geometry mesh with BoneCapture point attributes, so double check the Geometry Spreadsheet if that exists before connecting that up. The 2nd input is the skeleton, which should come out of the lsystem node as lines. The 3rd input is for animations, but if u don't have any, just leave it empty. Then click and drop it into UE's content browser and it should create the rig for u. If the size is wrong, you may have to overwrite the scaleinheritance point attribute, that part is a bit tricky, what I usually do is throw down a wrangle and just i@scaleinheritance = 0; or 1, 2, 3, 4. I actually don't know which one is the right one, usually 0 or 1 works fine. I Hope that helps! Maybe I'll showcase this in the next live stream. rigged trees is fun to play around with.

@@bubblepins oh sorry i didn't necessarily mean a tree mesh, but the little skeleton "tree" that shows up when you add an l-system into houdini. when i import the l-system node into unreal via the houdini engine plugin, instead of that little tree it is a 3d model of the houdini logo. however, if i change the l-system to "tubes" within the houdini panel in unreal 5, then that little tree does appear, but it's bright orange and has a few small houdini logos hovering around it. i apologize if i'm not communicating it well, i'm still in my infancy as far as houdini, i'm not even 100% sure that this is the right tool for what i want to do.

@@user-dl8yo3wv1t The Lsystem generates a skeleton that can be rigged to the tree mesh, just throw down a rig pose node and you can start animating right away. And it can also generate mesh, like polygons, the tubes that ur talking about, I believe their curves, but you need to understand UE I dont think support that. If you import the geometry as a static mesh (there are different ways of importing), then UE converts the geometry to triangles anyways. I'm sure if it'll even be able to read the tubes, but if u export as a mesh that should be fine as a UE static mesh. If you export like how as described above as a rig, then you'll be able to animate it like a character rig in UE sequencer. If you're looking for something like a procedural growth thing, like I said the UE curves support in the HoudiniENgine seem to be broken, I haven't tested UE5.4 yet. I mean I guess you could always write something in Houdini just generates geometry in compile time which will get triggered when you pop your HDA into UE. But then ... you might as well just import it as a static mesh. The only advantage I see is the speed I guess, cuz the UE import times are extremely slow in UE5.3, I ahven't used 5.4 yet.

That's an interesting question! I never thought of that! But now that you mention this, this would make for an excellent avatar-like scene fire vs water bending! I think there are ways to do this, but I'll have to do some testing to see which way would get the best results. Here's what I'm thinking on top of my head. pyro is based on volumes, so we got vdb, we can convert this to a mesh or advect the flip particles via volume, I donno how accurate each would be. There is also a newer vellum fluid, but that's for small water scenes. The Vellum Fluid is made for colliding with vellum objects, so u can collide with soft body & grains. I'll have to get back to u on this one. It might be a topic in a live stream, because if this works out, I believe it will produce some very interesting results!

@@bubblepins wait wait let me explane my scene I have a crowd of birds which are attacking to a man and that man has a flamethrower he is burning birds using flamethrower the birds are burning and fall down I tried to convert fire into polygons and collide with that birds particles but it isn't giving good result?

@@3dwithsb I'm assuming the birds are crowds, and when they overlap with the pyro, they fall down. The pyro can still be volume, still it's not a brick wall, where you hit something and it bounces off. You'll just need to use the pyro emit to emit from the birds that have entered this pyro volume zone. This is a rather complex scene. You'll have a few different simulations running. First pyro, where is the fire started. Then Crowds, detect which birds enter the fire zone (enters the volume) then play the falling animation. Then feed that into another pyro sim that emits fire from the falling birds. Hope that helps!

@@bubblepinsI'll try thanks

Thanks so much! Love u all back! It's awesome to know that I have viewers watching from India!

Karma is the built-in render engine of Houdini, Houdini's famous for proceduralism.

@@bubblepins yes - a know but is Karma procedural?

@@nonenone2748 yeah it's as procedural as it gets!

Thanks! This video was fun to work on!

Thanks for watching!

awwww And Ur Awesome!

Ur right! I just rewatched a part of the video, I think it's my bandwidth... it's not the greatest and it was raining pretty badly that day to make things worse.

Edit: The crackle seemed to happen even when xpu was idle so this probably isn't related, but just in case it ever helps, xpu can stop other apps using the gpu from functioning properly, images can become blocky etc in windows default video viewer, I wonder if it is maxed out, and if you're using audio noise reduction that's using the gpu? Also maybe limiting max threads in houdini config if there are ever crackles during simulations while recording. Might have nothing to do with this of course :-)

@@robinbrinkler Thanks for sharing the tip! I think ur right! I did have a chrome window open up on the other monitor for my live stream notes, that could have taken up some of the gpu ram. Chrome is a ram eater lol. After the stream, I tried the project again and with the PC restarted and all, but the problem persisted, but I later on tried CPU, it got me a little further... but occassionally crashed, but much better. I came up with a more optimized way with the glowing eyes and even made halo lighting out of it underwater! images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cb50c0dca525b5f7c4b4841/464a2ff8-c93c-401d-a230-5555aa7fb8cc/Chicken+Glowing+Eyes+underwater+CPU+v3+1080p.jpg?format=1500w

I've been doing some live streams! But I'll have a new long form video soon, I'm still working on it.

Thank U for watching!! 😎

Thanks so much for the awesome comment! I think it's hard, because the 3D apps are launching multiple releases during the year with upgraded features and that doesn't even include the new 3D apps that get released during the same time, I think professors may find it hard to keep up. By the time they finish the course with a 3D app, it may already be outdated. The industry just goes so fast!

Double check if the name attribute is on the primitives, Solaris only understands primitive attributes. Hope that helps!

@@bubblepins I just changed it to primitives and I'm still seeing "mesh0." Basically, I have three pieces of geo into a merge, and then the wrangle with your s@name = chs("name"); code in it, then a null going out. I even tried doing an attribute create node on each piece of geo and adding a string name for each under the name attribute and that didn't work either, so I found my own work around for now, which was to just do 3 different SOP imports in the lopnet and then merge them. Should work the same, yes?

@@DanielHuiting Yeah that should work, I use to do that when I was started out with Solaris, but using the name attribute does make things cleaner. Can u do one more test for me? Try putting down a clean node and clean out all the attributes except for the name. In the clean node of the primitives parameter put something like * ^name The asterisk means everything and the hat symbol means except, so it reads everything except the name attribute delete. This is just a hunch, I think there's another attribute that's overwriting the name. I'm not sure.

@@bubblepins Firstly, thanks so much for taking time to respond! I tried the clean node and it didn't work. But what's weird is, when I bypassed the wrangle node with the s@name = chs("name"); code into it, all of a sudden it worked! That node was overwriting the name attributes on each piece of geo I put earlier in the chain. But you still helped me because you got me looking at the geometry spreadsheet for the name attribute and looking for the node where it was getting overwritten, and it turns out the wrangle was the culprit. Thanks! Your channel is amazing btw. You explain things in such a simple and helpful way and make Houdini less scary. :)

@@DanielHuiting Thanks for the lovely comment! I appreciate it. Houdini can be a little overwhelming at first, it's because Houdini can do a lot of different things and I had the same feeling when I first started Houdini! I'm happy you got ur issue solved!

THat's a hard question. Houdini is HUGE, if you were to pick a topic and focus on that it shouldn't be too long. But that also depends on what u focus on. Some of the simulations have been improved and made SO MUCH easier today by SideFX and it's easier to use overall. For example FLIP SOP tools have been it significantly easier, if u wanted to be an expert on that and u put in a fair amount of hours everyday, I think u can become an intermediate in a few months with ease. But again it's putting in something everyday, which is the hardest part because we all have a life and stuff happens.

I'm not an expert at Blender Geo nodes, I played around with it for a bit to get a feel for it. I do know that Blender geo nodes is started to introduce some simulation nodes into their system so that's exciting! As to how it compares with Houdini, I would still put my bet on Houdini because Houdini has been famous for vfx simulations. I do think that Blender excels at simple scenes like if u have a one off scene that u need to for a particular part. The best example I can think of is in the movie Everything Everywhere all at once, the donut scene was shot with Blender. The vfx person that did that shot even gave a shout out to Blender Guru's donut tutorial.

Thanks for watching! It was fun to try playing around with pyro!

Sorry the project files are for Perk Members-Only.

There's a POP node for flocking, u can stick that into a crowd dopnet, or now Houdini has the newer SOP Crowd Solver tools, so u can put it in there and setup the wings animation as a crowd layer as I show in the next concept videos of this Crowd series. Hope that helps!

@@bubblepins what is the name of that node?

@@3dwithsbPOP Flock, it's within the dopnet, used for the solvers. It's not a SOP node, do u need to put down a dopnet node, double click it and put down a POP Flock node.

@@bubblepins thankuu ❤️

Yeah I hear u! Houdini is a bit different from other 3D apps, but the advantages of Houdini r sometimes invaluable in projects especially large projects!

Yeah, I've been a Maya user for about a decade and I really wanted Bifrost to take off as a worthy rival to Houdini mainly so I could also stay in the Maya environment, but I think Bifrost is still just a pet project at Autodesk as it has virtually zero online presense in terms of help forums and tutorials compared to Houdini. It reminds me of how Maya's sculpting tools is child's play compared to ZBrush. Oh well, time to learn a another beast of a program and hope I don't forget my Maya skills.

@@danmurdoc It's TOUGH! I see myself learning a new 3D app after another one and another one and the list just keeps going on, I think 3D animation is just complicated. It's hard. There's just this never ending list of things, it's only now after learning non-stop for a few years that I can say I think I can finally create a story driven animation, maybe. I've been struggling to find the time for it though. But I hear u and I can relate!

Agent from Rig converts a KineFX rig that you made in Houdini, like you made the character and rig and did all the bone capture (aka weights) in Houdini and now you want to convert it into an Agent that can be used in a Crowd system, I would use Agent from Rig node. I demo how to use the agent from rig node in this live that I did many many years ago. I think its this video, either in this Part 1 or Part 2 video. kzbin.info74NebPgDxR8 The Agent node, I just use that to convert the built-in characters in Houdini into Agents or into skeletons. I hope that helps

@@bubblepins ty for the fast reply bubble, it was insightful for me.

Thanks! In this video stream, I demonstrated some labs nodes that are pretty efficient and should run nicely on your pc, give them a try. Try out the Tree Rig I did 2:15 , it's so fun, but I'm biased because I love rigging

Thanks! This live stream was really fun!