Instancing Variation and The Solaris Instancer: Instancing Part 2 - Handy Houdini Tips

In this part we are looking at the attributes required for instancing and copying with a focus on variation. For this we are starting with the basics of using attribute noises and then going more in depth with indexing attributes and Solaris instancing.
00:00 Intro
01:00 Setup
03:00 Point Scattering
04:45 Basic Attribute Variation
09:30 Solaris Instancer Basics
13:05 Index/Species Attributes
18:43 Solaris Collections and Indexed Instancing
22:28 Overview of Indexed Instancing
24:12 Practical Example - Xiaomi Project
24:45 Outro

[@NineBetween]

Here's the link to the file download: bit.ly/HHT_Instancing_p2 I had to remove the textures from the terrain because Quixel assets cannot be redistributed. You can use whichever materials you want instead. Also, yes, my mousepad is a piece of cardboard.

[@AsirisC]

I wish I could double like it. Really good stuff!

[@giodos]

Probably one of the best explanations on how to use instancing in Solaris! Thanks for sharing! Can't wait for the Part 3 :D

[@user-ue5ue5bh9k]

You are a Master, Oh my God, thank you so much for everything you share.

[@khalilboss2855]

Another great tip as always. Thank you for sharing!

[@Gyanevlogs]

its awesome to see your videos which make it all clear, loved it.

[@syntheticperson]

Very helpful! Thanks

[@jeroenlapre1043]

An excellent tutorial! Thanks

[@JeroenLapre]

Extremely helpful! many thanks!

[@alexmar5543]

good stuff! The noise posterization tecnique is really usefull

[@serialvision]

Great tutorial, thanks for sharing

[@antoineroyal4515]

incredible content

[@ThePrimeVID]

awesome stuff - love from SA

[@NineBetween]

Thanks! Also, if you wouldn't mind dropping me an email (under the "About" section), we are looking at holding an event in SA for Houdini Artists. I'd love to get as many people involved as possible.

[@lalitdesai6321]

superstar you are, thank you!

[@davidevalvona6739]

I love the way you explain and I guess it becomes extremely useful for someone like me that it's now approaching to the Houdini proceduralism for doing things. The only thing that I can't figure out is the way we can proceed into the lighting/rendering stage as the material, in the stream, doesn't seem to work and it gets overwritten by the Cd attribute coming with the scatter points into the stage. I've tried with deleting attributes, putting the material library under the "instancer", applying the materials directly to a specific geometry of the instances, but nothing chaged and I don't have any idea on how to proceed with this method to get the material I've made show up in the final render. Even in your scene there is no material at the end of the tutorial so I was guessing what was your next stage in that specific scenario to advance to the final asset showing in the renderview. Thank you in advance! 😊

[@6glocktoss46]

You my hero fam

[@vynylPooh]

thanks!

[@6glocktoss46]

SA to the world 💯

[@paoloricaldone6273]

Grazie.

[@kevin2028]

YES!!!!!!!!!!

[@clao_80]

Thanks for your videos! Is there any advantage in terms of rendering results or performance in using Solaris instances instead of cached instances in SOP?

[@lenxie4501]

greate tutorial ! thanks ! could you also show how to create vaiation on geometry subset materilas.

[@hoangbop3131]

its awesome to see your videos Thank you for what you have shared "So with VDB (such as Cloud), we can use this method, right? Can you make a tutorial on how to instancer VDB?"

[@NineBetween]

No problem! And yes, VDBs can be instanced in the exact same way. I recently made a cloud system that instanced hundreds of vdb cloud clusters. They use pscale and orient attributes in the exact same way. Thanks for watching!😁

[@Rafffaello2]

Hey, great tutorial, thank you ! But i cant find hip file in description.

[@SonGoandaGame]

Somehow I followed every step and even instancing the same geo in sop everything works perfectly fine but when I use the instancer node Houdini instances all different variations in every point, not one random variation for each point. Dyk why could that be? Thanks and amazing job!!

[@animhaxx]

Please do a beginning guide on Attribute VOP

[@NineBetween]

Great idea, I've been meaning to do one. I'll get to it soon :D

[@Scuhfed]

I'm aware this is an older video but it's worth putting the idea out there for you to make a video or if anyone knows a good solution to this. For the species attribute is there a way you could have multiple different meshes for the species as well without splitting them into different instancers. For example having the species attribute specify what actual species the plant is but then like a sub-index attribute that could randomize which variant of the plant species to use. Is there an intuitive and or efficient way to do this without just splitting species into different instancers?

[@WillPreston3D]

bump

[@MoneyBaeDubai]

does anyone know how to come he has the materials on the trees in solaris .. even tho he never used a material node after the instancer???? i expected the trees will be without materials

[@timothybladel84]

For some reaon when I get to instancing in Solaris the trees are putting like 7 on each point and I cannot figure out why.

[@xEnjoiiLifex]

Would you mind sharing your workstation specifications? I am running on a i7 13700j, 3070ti, and 128gb of memory, but for some reason my station is killing itself trying to load this.

[@NineBetween]

Hey, we're running very similar specs. If your pc can't handle it, it's likely some other issue (duplicate points resulting in extreme point counts, re-cooking of something, pscale issues, etc.) Have you tried starting again with a clean file?

[@xEnjoiiLifex]

@@NineBetween I transferred the file over to another machine that is way spaced down from what I have but still runs just fine. So much so that I noticed that I do have like 3 trees per point for some reason. But I was able to navigate the scene and have the trees rendering just as you did. I could be over thinking it, but to me this screams ram issue. So today I’ll be testing for defective ram or mobo. Thank you for getting back to me! If I could take up more of your time the “crash” I’m dealing with throws an error about memory running out, the application will then glitch into the left side of my monitor with the right side going fully black. Strange huh? Thanks again!