Applying textures to your Crowd (Material Stylesheets) | Crowds in Houdini

Heyyy! My name is Juanjo and I currently work as a Crowd Artist and Department Trainer at MPC Film. In this series of videos, I'll show you how to create your own #Crowd simulations from scratch in #Houdini.
🟠 Houdini 18.5
👥 CROWD Tutorials: • 🚶🏻‍♂️ Crowds in Houdin...
00:00 Intro
00:58 Packed Geometry
02:51 Applying textures to packed geometry
03:29 Material Stylesheets
04:43 Creating a Stylesheet
05:37 Adding Styles
06:36 Agent Shapes
09:06 Applying a Style to a Shape
12:01 Extracting textures from .FBX
13:37 Material Overrides

[@iomatthew]

Best series I’ve seen so far about crowds in Houdini! Good job 👏

[@ToolaRoola]

Oh, my God! It's not easy to do for the first time, but, to be honest, I expected something like this.

[@tariq0513]

Thank you for this tutorial.

[@covrevfx5563]

If you apply just 1 material with udim it works as well.

[@ArdanaMAX]

in the video when we open fbx on 3d software it would automatically extract it , does it also happen for mac os ?

[@ng.yudhna]

Hi Juanjo, First of all , Thanks a lot for this courses . You explain very well, it's very clear. I would like to know how many Episode left ? Rendering step is inclued too ? Because i really hope to know this step And do you think translate in English your playlist Collison Crowd too ? Cuz I really want to know how to make when the Agents cross each other. Gracia :P

Hey, Duy! Thank you so much for your support. «Rendering in Mantra» will be the next video. Then we'll talk about the «Agent Definition Cache», «Agent Edit» and «Agent Transform Groups», and will probably do some example scenes. I'll be translating the Crowd Forces and Ragdoll playlist into English too, so there's a lot to come! 💪🏼

[@sungerbob1786]

juanjo i want to ask you something, why not preparing some texture maps for the characters and distributing them randomly to the agents with a wrangler. this stylesheets stuff seems to me so inconvenient. im i wrong?

Hi, Sunger! Material Stylesheets may look inconvenient at first sight, but it's a very powerful tool when working with packed geometry. Besides applying textures, you can also change a specific material parameter, randomize textures (I'll prepare a tutorial on this soon), use custom VEX scripts and even automate your own Stylesheets using Python and JSON files, so you don't have to do all this process manually. If you are good at texturing and you want to create texture maps for your characters, of course you can do it. It will make things easier for you because you could then apply the textures with just a Material node, but you will lose the advantages and control you have with Stylesheets. Btw, Material Stylesheets only work if you are rendering with Mantra. For any other renderer, you would need a different workflow. It all depends on your personal preference and the type of project you are working on 👌🏻

[@sungerbob1786]

@ thank you so much for the detailed explanation!