Free Houdini Tutorial: Particle Life in Houdini POPs

Particle Life is a new(ish), super popular autonomous agent system that is able to produce very organic, microorganism-like patterns with particles. So of course we had to build our own version in Houdini, right? In this video we'll cover the basic ideas of Particle Life and build it as a POP force, which works both in 2D and 3D.
Links mentioned in the video:
www.ventrella.com/Clusters/
• How Particle Life emer...
Download Project Files
entagma.com/downloads/Freetut...
Timecodes:
00:00 Intro and Theory
07:14 Houdini Prep
12:19 Coding the Algorithm
19:26 Playing with the Algorithm

[@gorantrpkov446]

Gave myself a challenge and tried to reproduce the same set up with pop vop instead of a wrangle. Took a while because "for each" loops with vops are the bane of me. I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to do the acc += dir (or to accumulate the accelerations for all the neighbors), but once I figured it out I started kicking myself for how simple it was. Plus some wrangle functions like "nearpoints" don't exist in vops, instead you need to use "pc find" which works pretty much in the same way. Anyways went a step further and defined a circular boundary of points that have sero acceleration at all time and all the Alive points are strongly repelled by them, so the effect is the petri dish on the thumbnail on this video. Thanks for this video, was a lot of fun and I learnt a bunch!

[@wallasaurus]

This was amazing - I tried it out and added some extras like loading the weights matrix from a texture using vex which was new for me, and therefore being simple to have 10 or more "types" - it got me starting to think about how to so this with a shader somehow - I am excited to see huge pool of digital primordial ooze form itself into things dynamically!

[@jan-xyz]

Oh man! This is gold! Can’t wait to loose my mind tweaking those parameters! Cheers

[@GhoulSoulToll]

I’m pogged like crazy. Thanks bro

[@nobody-u-know]

Wow, thanks so much!

[@TheInfinites]

Amazing!

[@pb-fo9rt]

beautiful!

[@nataliarebrova8449]

Thank you!

[@Cheezburges]

Im pogged thanks Christopher

[@yonlaycabrera4431]

And now for the next 5 years we will have many clients over and over again asking for a cell-like behavior using this tutorial as a reference 😂.

[@jimjimjim5995]

Very nice

[@jannesopanen8032]

Hey! Thank you for very informative and cool tutorial. May I ask what values did you use for the behaviour matrix in the intro video ? Or were those the same you represetend in the beginning while explaining how things work ?

[@KevRyanCG]

Fantastic tutorial, though right at the end I accidentally wrote force =+ acc and it didn't break at all, it just made for some weird circular behaviour.

[@psykoj]

Any idea why my simulation stops at frame 2400? My timeline is set to 5000 frames. I can't find where the limit is specified. (Is it a Houdini apprentice limitation?)

[@M4rt1nX]

Blender when? I love your explanation anyways. Great insights.

[@user-wc6fk7ve5q]

blender may not have the same capabilities I quited blender for these things anyway I hope there will be one for blender too good luck

[@gakugoto]

maybe this video help Houdini to make a icrease user 🥰

[@value_exe]

Another amazing tutorial. I was just asking myself if this could also be implemented in openCL for faster and bigger sims. After this video i came accross Tom Mohr's implementation of the algorithm and it's super fast: kzbin.info/www/bejne/pmW8mqV7h7mJfJI . It would be really amazing to have this kind of speed in Houdini, since there are so many more possibilities with this in H. Thanks for your amazing content !:)