Special Guest: Ben Watts - Shortest Path Growth

We're thrilled to have Ben Watts from benwattsdesign.com/ in for a guest tutorial covering his technique for growing veins in Houdini without the need for any VEX coding.
Make sure to also check out Ben's Vimeo channel with lots of great Houdini resources: vimeo.com/bwdesign
Download project file (.hip): www.dropbox.com/s/1teroq1fpip...

[@svogunelis5]

For houdini 18.5, because there is no "Thetrahedralize" node you can get these lines inside your mesh by putting a "Point From Volume" direcly after your mesh, then a "Connect Adjacent Pieces" node with the Connection Type parameter to "Adjacent Points". Then the rest seems to work just fine.

[@aboldmule]

There is the Tet Embed node as well.

[@VoxelFX]

I love it, clear and concise. Thank you for all the amazing videos!

[@ifaisalstudio]

Hello Ben, always Glad to see more tutorials from you, You had been a great help in my C4d journey, guess Its time switch to Houdini now? thank you for sharing your knowledge.

[@the_grand_blooms]

Great tutorial. Thank you guys. Also to do true 3D, turn the object into an iso field and "scatter" points throughout the field - then set "tetrahedralize" to output "connected polylines" on this iso field.

[@mjparent222]

Wow so great tutorial. Thank you so much !

[@0x0abb]

very nice! thank you for this tutorial

[@keltart809]

really damn cool. thanks for sharing this

[@BradNesseth]

So great, thank you!

[@Entagma]

Glad you liked it!

[@mahmoudrashad7727]

Amazing Thank you

[@AcidManiak678]

That was amazing

[@dailyeudemonia9359]

amazing!

[@Rayartstudios]

Nice!!! Thanks man

[@JeanErostique]

Nice tutorial! :D

[@thyroid99]

Great tutorial! I do have one issue tho. The ramp effect doesn't work as well as your example here. Mine looks like it only ramps between the first and second point, and the rest of the points have the same size until the end. Does anyone know why this happens or how to fix? I'm in h18 btw. Cheers!

[@itishappy]

Hi, super noob here (I've spent less than 2 hours in Houdini so far) but I'm still going to take a crack at your question. I think the reason that you're seeing this is because ramps only expect inputs in the range 0 -> 1, while "cost" in this case is counting the number of edges traversed to get to the current point. This means cost is going to be 0 for the start point and 1 on the second (you've only traversed one edge). Everything else is going to be greater than 1, which ramp can't handle, so it's just using the last value. Luckily, that should be a pretty easy fix (I think? Nothing in Houdini is easy for me right now...), just divide the cost by some value to make sure it fits within the 0 -> 1 range!

[@thewhat308]

The group nodes that I have avalable in Apprentice, do not have the range and pattern actions we see here. which node and operation can I use instead?

[@amandeepsangwan0077]

use group by range

[@thewhat308]

@@amandeepsangwan0077 thank you!

[@smaugthewyrm]

i would like to keep the final frame on screen as the camera pans around. was thinking that the TIMESHIFT SOP should work, but cannot get it working. any help appreciated.

[@Entagma]

Heyhey, why not just tweak the keyframes on your carve SOP? Have a look at the project file, Ben set it up accordingly. Simply shift-click into the keyframed parameter's field to bring up the curve editor. Cheers, Mo

[@alessandrobaldi847]

shading?

[@darranedmundson1505]

Watching this at 1:20am and those dark wipe transitions freak me out. I keep looking behind me thinking they are a shadow. :-)

[@ryanmills6751]

I was watching this in bed, in the dark at about the same time and was sure someone walked past my TV. I live alone. I'm still not ok.

[@rahulrawat952]

Grouping changed in houdini 18 .. cant follow along :(

[@rahulrawat952]

Found out by reading dcumentation,.. thanks

[@penguinkao6044]

Use Group Promote to convert

[@Rhiggins5173]

@@penguinkao6044 This is the reason not all youtube comments are cancer ^^^ ty

[@yuliaspesivtseva8521]

@@Rhiggins5173 can you explain how to do it, please?

[@williamreger7932]

@@yuliaspesivtseva8521 You can use another node called "group by range" then set [select: 1 of 1] to [select: 1 of 2] in the range filter. Like that you´ll get every second prim, make sure your [group type: points] to select thoose points :) Hope that helps!

[@vytasrauckis6703]

For a tutorial from just 15 months ago, there are so many nodes I can't find in 18.5. Tetrahedralize, Group is different as shown in the comments, etc. I understand wanting to advance the toolset, but couldn't SideFX at least have the deprecated toolset for a few versions?

[@Entagma]

Hi Vytas, there seems to be a misconception about us being on KZbin. We uploaded all of our free videos which had previously been on Vimeo about one and a half years ago. This one is from end of 2016. Close to five years old. Cheers, Mo

[@18bovende]

A File SOP in a Geometry node? Ancient times...