Vellum 5 - Create a Snow Simulation in Houdini in Under 10 Minutes!

[@base_ma5478]

It's so hard to find good tutorials on making snow and rendering it in Solaris! This one was super helpful, and the material was really easy to follow. Great job!

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Thanks a ton, yes I remember struggling to find a good video about snow shading in Solaris, that's one of the reasons I created this one!! Subscribe for more :)

[@lemmonsinmyeyes]

Excellent tut my dude! I appreciate that you also went into solaris/karma and explained how to get good render settings for the grains

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Thanks my friend, absolutely, karma and XPU are the future of rendering. This and unreal engine!!

[@Lexvfx0710]

Great work !easy explanation and easy to follow :)

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Heyy, thank you so much, subscribe for more 😃❤

[@vfxguyshivam]

Thanks for making tutorial on vellum

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Thank you for watching the videos 😊, subscribe for more!!

[@JustThyce]

Thanks for sharing your knowledge here, overall I think there should be more videos about Houdini.

[@nodeflowhoudini]

I agree, I am on a mission to make more free Houdini learning videos for everyone to enjoy. Thanks for your comment 🧡

[@UmairAliMughal2009]

excellent as always

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Thans my friend, subscribe for more ♥️

[@maxie6990]

yayyyyyyyyyyyy it's getting more and more interesting

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Yessss, hahahah. I am happy you are enjoying the series 😊

[@JeanYanb]

Great video brother, helped a lot ! did you try the new MPM solver? It seems you have more control using this method. Cheers

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Thanks, regarding MPM it is not necessarily about the control you get but more about the ease of use and the presets that get you 80% there already. I am considering making a series on MPM too. Thanks for commenting, Subscribe for more ♥️!!

[@Birkkromann]

Really nice and well explained tutorial! Also really great with a Karma snow shader 😊 I know you stated in a previous comment that getting glints/speculars in the snow is difficult. But is there any way, that you could explain how you would do it? For me that alone, is a reason to render with Mantra instead as the speculars really help sell the realism!

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Hey, thank you so much. Absolutely, I understand you concern, to my understanding you could calculate the gradient of the volume using the vdb analysis SOP and then create a custom shader to add reflection to the volume using the gradient as input. Although I have never done it yet, I have seen other videos explaining the same concept and applying it for mantra. The concept would be the same and you could play with a pre-made whitewater shader or make a custom one and still render with karma. I hope this helps, I am still in the process of understanding the reflection side of a volume, as usually is not really needed for smoke, explosions etc... thank you!!

[@MarcouscousAurelius]

Great tutorial, insta-follow, I see a bright future for this channel

[@nodeflowhoudini]

I appreciate that, thanks for the kind words 🧡

[@JAYJAYFx]

Am a new fan, great video man, If you don't mind what your pc configuration?

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Thank youu, I have a ryzen 5900x and a 3080.

[@monirul3d]

Cool

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Thanks!!

[@JeanYanb]

One question please : The volume rasterise is to give the snow the correct look ? It's like meshing ? Why not vdbfromparticle for example?

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Hi, if you check the video, I have explained what it does, there is also a little pop up from the bottom clarifying. Anyway, this nodes converts the points to a volume. It's not like meshing. Hope it helped

[@JeanYanb]

@@nodeflowhoudini Hahaha I can imagine your face : "I explain everything, I even create little boxes, but he still asks why oh my god..." hahaha. Bro your tutorial is very clear and your little boxes are perfect! It's my brain which is slow, sorry. My question was more on the esthetic side : you create a volume for the snow to actually look good, right? You got a new sub, by the way. Thanks again!

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Naaah, don't worry at all hahahah. To answer your question, yes using a volume can lead to more interesting results, it's just one of the possible ways of rendering snow. This method is particularly useful for large scale snow simulations, like an avalanche, where the snow tends to behave more like a volume then like a mesh. Thanks for commenting 😊

[@BaydamK]

Hi! Good tutorial, but I'm struggling with how to make much stickier snow chunks.

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Hi and thanks for commenting, usually snow doesn't tend to be so sticky, although I am preparing a new tutorial on this, how to make grains stickier. If you are curious, the workflow would be to create the glue constraints into the vellum solver and connect them into the "Source" output. After defining the 2 groups that should be connected together, play with the settings and make sure to check, Create constraint = "Each Frame". That should be it, thanks!

[@ZAIDARTSS]

what if i wanna convert it to mesh after volume rasterize attributes is it gonna look the same if i tried to render it in different software ?

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Hi and thanks for commenting, to my knowledge is common to render snow as a volume. But you could use the particle fluid surface SOP and convert it to geo, although I cannot assure you it will look in the same way, you will probably need some subsurface and experiment a little more in shading. Hope this helps ❤

[@zurasaur]

Can we render the volume with normals like in mantra whitewater shader? That is standard workflow for snow because we need the reflections/ specular

[@nodeflowhoudini]

Yes you could, but using Mantra you will be limited in performances, great render by the way, but for this series we are using karma! Also using the normals for reflection is a nice trick but the proper volume reflection in shading is a more advanced topic. To sum it up I chose karma over mantra because it's faster more efficient and more subject to updates and "in studio" implementation, and I chose the "XPU pyro material" because it's a simple way to get nice results without faking reflections or diving in the complex realm of volume reflection shaders... I hope it helped 😀

[@zurasaur]

@@nodeflowhoudini I am very interested in how to achieve a specular volume shader in XPU. if you can figure it out you'd be doing the community a huge favour! so many posts on the sidefx forums looking for an answer to this problem

[@nodeflowhoudini]

You are right, it's a pretty well known issue. From a teoretical standpoint it should be done in the same way used for mantra, but rest assured, I will experiment in solaris, and once I have it I will post it here. Thank you for the interest and for the comment, subscribe for more ♥️