Houdini Tutorial | Blooming Flowers | Model, Animate, and Render | Part 4

Support on Patreon: / dannylaursen
Download HIP file for free: dannylrsn.gumroad.com/l/saqioy
In this part of the tutorial series, we will go over the workflow I use to build a flower based on photo reference using the setup that we have created over the past three tutorials.
We will lay out the setup in a way that makes it easier to navigate when moving back and forth between the various parts.
Additionally, we will talk about animation curves and vellum settings.
Finally, we will cache out the simulation and create a material for our petals and set up some lights for rendering in Karma.
Flower Animation Part 1: • Houdini Tutorial | Blo...
Flower Animation Part 2: • Houdini Tutorial | Blo...
Flower Animation Part 3: • Houdini Tutorial | Blo...
Flower Animation Part 3.5: • Houdini Tutorial | Blo...
These methods are a mix of things I have seen from John Kunz on Patreon, Entagma, and some things I figured out together with Simon Reher.
Resources:
Flower Garden | Carl Krause | Paris HIVE 2023
• Flower Garden | Carl K...
Flower Projects | Paul Esteves | MucHUG
• Flower Projects | Paul...
My KineFX notes on Notion:
dannylrsn.notion.site/KineFX-...
My VEX notes on Notion:
dannylrsn.notion.site/VEX-cb3...
Feel free to ask any questions or leave feedback in the comments. Would be happy to see any flowers people create.
Instagram - / danlrsn
Behance - www.behance.net/dannylaursen1
Artstation - www.artstation.com/dannylaursen
Chapters:
00:00 - Overview of Lesson
00:24 - 1. Model Flower from Reference
06:40 - Flower Animation Curve
07:36 - Surface Noise
08:35 - Deintersection
08:54 - 2. Vellum Constraints
09:40 - Post Sim Deformation
10:18 - 3. Solaris Setup
12:05 - 4. Karma Material
14:00 - Displacement
16:25 - 5. Camera in Solaris
16:51 - 6. Render with Karma XPU
17:30 - Final Result

[@ArujiChipps]

Looking forward to part 4.5!!! XD this series is solving so many practical doubts for me. Tutorials of this quality are rare, I'm very happy to have found this channel.

[@philippwelsing9108]

P.S.: I would absolutely love to see a full tutorial on procedural shading in KARMA XPU from you. The practical info this one alone is more than you get anywhere else. PLEASE? 😍

[@DannyLrsn]

That sounds interesting. I'll look into it!

[@philippwelsing9108]

@@DannyLrsn NICE! 😍

[@philippwelsing9108]

Amazing work, Danny! Absolutely art directable and easy to understand setup. Looking forward to shaping with this. Thank you!

[@DannyLrsn]

Thanks Phillip! If you make a flower, feel free to share it with me here or tag me on Instagram or something. I would love to see it!

[@philippwelsing9108]

@@DannyLrsn I will! 🤝

[@simondanaher3390]

Great tutorial Danny, thanks for sharing the scene files. I notice that some things are broken in the scene when using 19.5 rather than 20. The growth attribute is missing at the petal surface noise VOP. Not sure at what point in the graph it get baulked, but H does throw a lot of param errors on opening the scene in 19.5. The flakey backwards compatibily is one of the more frustrating aspects of houdini. I have 20, but I'm sticking with 19.5 atm as it seems more stable.

[@motiondeshahil]

omg, I just want to create a project with the exact flower I need. thanks in millions.

[@DannyLrsn]

That's perfect timing then!

[@vadimandriushchenko5171]

Great! I have been waiting for this tutor so long. Incredible work!

[@DannyLrsn]

Thank you! I'm glad to finally have it out

[@vadimandriushchenko5171]

Could you please say where we can see bonus part 4.5? Or will you post it later?@@DannyLrsn

[@DannyLrsn]

@@vadimandriushchenko5171 It's coming tomorrow!

[@DannyLrsn]

@@vadimandriushchenko5171 A little update: I want to make sure the quality of part 4.5 is as high as the rest of the series, so I will not post it today anyway. It will come soon! It's essentially just about color management, though, so it doesn't exactly add anything to the flower setup.

[@bharat5194]

Hey Danny, Thanks for Sharing!

[@DannyLrsn]

You're welcome!

[@MagnusMllerart]

Brilliant, thanks for sharing Danny!

[@DannyLrsn]

Thank you, Magnus!

[@frigbychilwether]

Hi, great tutorial. Well explained and the results are outstanding. Thanks.

[@DannyLrsn]

Thank you! I'm glad it was useful!

[@romuk3092]

thanks for the tutorial

[@DannyLrsn]

You're welcome. Hope it was useful!

[@xyyrma7713]

Thank you bro, I wanted to learn how to make beautiful flowers, only you could teach me how to do that

[@DannyLrsn]

Thank you for your comment. If you make a flower, I would love to see it!

[@fluffypoochie11]

Thank you for making this 4th part super fast!! Question for you, I'm trying to make a lotus flower which is a very stiff flower but I find that causes a lot of clipping especially on the inside of the flower. any tips for how to fix that?

[@DannyLrsn]

When I made my lotus, I increased the bend stiffness on the cloth constraint quite a lot. The intersections show up because the pin constraint wins against the collision check. You can decrease the stretch stiffness of the pin constraint. You can also increase the collision iterations in the solver to help the collision solve take priority over the constraints solve. Hope that helps!

[@deepocean6356]

hey ! incredible work ! how could you do to put this flwer on a stem and fix it ? thanks !

[@DannyLrsn]

Hi! The simplest way is just a copy to points onto the tip of the stem

[@MrLinvalT]

Hello Danny ! Great tutorials and super versatile set up, i'm having a lot of fun with it ! If i have a flower with 4 petals and i want them all to bloom at once, how do i stop the growth attribute to go one point after another ?

[@MrLinvalT]

oh well i guess i found out, i just changed the line of code in the "growth animation" node from "float mask = fit(map, p, p + t, 0, 1);" to "float mask = chf("mask");" and i'm animating the slider to get my transition.

[@DannyLrsn]

@@MrLinvalT Hey thank you for the kind words! Yes, that seems like a solid solution. If you still want a little variation in the growth, increasing the "Transition Width" can make the transition even more uniform. Would love to see your results when you get there :)

[@MrLinvalT]

@@DannyLrsn Absolutely i'll send them to you once i finished my killer set up hehe !

[@fluffypoochie11]

Heydo! I got a question during the karma material step. The way karma is reading the uvs is square by square instead of Individual petals. Do u know what attribute caused this or how to fix it?

[@DannyLrsn]

Hey. I don't really know what you mean by reading the uvs square by square. In SOPs, you can hold spacebar over the viewport and press 5 to switch to UV view to verify that your UVs look as expected. Otherwise, download my project file and check the uv and uv2 vertex attributes. Compare that to your own project to see if there might be something you missed. Hope that helps!

[@fluffypoochie11]

@@DannyLrsn I got it to work, had to rewatch 3.5 and I magically changed. now I'm having some trouble with the displacement using unlit as a preview doesn't let me preview. I compared to your file and nothing changed. Could this error be because I have the education version?

[@DannyLrsn]

@@fluffypoochie11 I really doubt that your license has any say in whether displacement works. In terms of using the unlit surface node to preview, remember to take the output of that and plug it into the shader where the standard surface is by default. Maybe watch the part where I explain it again and pay attention to which outputs go to which inputs. If displacement doesn't seem to work, try to increase the displacement scale by 10x to verify that nothing happens. Then check that you actually have values going into displacement by using the surface unlit. Hope that helps

[@fluffypoochie11]

@@DannyLrsn go it! Had to update Houdini. ty for the tips

[@coraldoyle9652]

*Promosm*