VOXELS VOLUMES AND VDBS! Volume Meshing Workflows In Houdini for Beginners

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[@jean-alexdube2704]

your stuff is amazing dude. I'm really inspired after watching this

[@PostolPost]

Man that's very detailed and very helpful, thank you!

[@GogoSmek]

Regarding changing topology every frame and changing UVs, you could timeshift first frame of converted polygon mesh and then do point deform over animation, then just do UVs for point deformed mesh. That way you have stable UV mapping.

[@ViralKiller]

not sure that would work, the whole point is, that the point count keeps changing..point deform requires the point count to always remain consistent

[@gsdfg334]

I don’t know how I found you but I love your content

[@gregridd]

really cool tips thanks

[@ViralKiller]

Hey man, one way to stick the UVs, would be to texture map the original low poly geo, 'peak' it to expand it out along the normals so it cages the volume animated model, then shrink wrap the textures onto the volume animated model using raytracing/min dist....

[@lucastomaselli8674]

Yoo really informative video! You popped up in my recommended and I recognized you from doing the art for Chuck's Chess Bling. I was his roommate lol... small world

[@mustardofdoom]

I'm the inverse of your target audience. I work with voxels all day and use meshes less frequently. Helped me to understand many advantages of mixing and matching the two, so thank you for sharing.

[@chr1st0pher]

glad to hear that!!

[@davidbischi]

Is this approach suitable for animating CAM Animations (lathes or Mills) Stuff or would a different approach applicable for that?

[@Ugly_Baby_Gaming]

for the uv's you could have a "first frame" mesh with uv's then use the other frames as a mold for the uv body to mold to keeping the uv's in place how stable this would be?? could be good for animating muscles on arms etc

[@ghua]

really good video, inspirational. could you please make a video how to easily and quickly (!!!) rig a basic character? something like your crocodile. there are rigging tutorials for houdini but usually they are super complicated, making AAA rigs with all those advanced controllers and I would just like to create something quickly and easily :) next step of course would be how to easily animate a character :D best regards

[@chr1st0pher]

hey martin! Thanks so much glad you liked it. i actually don't really do any rigging in houdini yet, i was doing it mostly in maya, and then i tried to switch to c4d for character stuff but had some issues. now im in the process of switching to blender. i definitely want to do a quick rigging video at some point, as well as sort of a walk through my whole pipeline (sculpting in zbrush, texturing in substance, rigging and animating in blender, and then everything else in houdini + redshift). i can potentially do a rigging video for maya and blender and maybe cinema or houdini as well. right now i think that maya and blender have the best character rigging and animation tools though. let me know what you think would be the most helpful :)

[@GEORGE.M.M]

Is it possible to vary the vdb voxel size across an object, for example using another volume or object as a reference for a falloff in voxel size, so I can have a controlled variation? I'm looking to achieve an aesthetic that has a variation in mesh thickness over a base mesh that has a uniform geometry?

[@chr1st0pher]

hey george, unfortunately this isnt really how volumes/vdbs work as far as i understand, however you can do this with some cleverness in sops if you want to just do it with actual blocks of polygons and make a minecrafty/legoy looking thing. i have another tutorial of how to set that up just with boxes, but for varying the size in a controlled way, you'd want to change the pscale of the points before you copy the boxes to them. you'd also probably want to quantize the pscale to steps, or multiples of 2. you could do some of this with the trunc() function in vex. if you are unfamilliar with vex, I would recommend check out matt estela's "joy of vex" which is how i got started with coding. feel free to hop in my discord linked in houdininerd.com and i can try to provide some help and give this a shot myself, sounds like a fun challenge. perhaps i can make a video on that as well at some point.

[@GEORGE.M.M]

@@chr1st0pher Awesome thanks for the help and resources, I started out with an imported mesh, then used iso offset, increased the resolution to the desired amount, then used a volume wrangler with the shortcode 'if (f@density>0) addpoint(0, @P);' to add a point to each volume. Then I used a copy stamp to mode a cube to each point within the volume, and I'll try out incorporating varying the size of the box. I wonder if it's possible to modify scale based on proximity of the cubes to a second object.

[@GEORGE.M.M]

I'm might have to also explore reshape, in C4D new introduction to volumes its possible to use a second field to create a falloff effect where a region in which two fields intersect have a thicker appearance over, regions that do not intersect. I have attached an image of what the picture I am trying to paint here. [we.tl/t-v6f6kr9sP6]

[@GEORGE.M.M]

we.tl/t-pqo8ZvPGU9

[@chr1st0pher]

@@GEORGE.M.M woah clever, maybe i can mess with that. i started something but didnt get super easy to control results

[@RR-kn1tg]

i never try it. but intersting ... :)

[@polynightingale3969]

Hi I am noob in Houdini and just wanted some help if you have time. I was actually trying to convert whitewater into almebic. Is this possible?? I have already tried convert vdb but that didn't solved the problem.

[@chr1st0pher]

no you can't really export particles as alembics, at least not easily. you can make it vdbs and use it as a vdb sequence i suppose? i do all my rendering in houdini so i don't really deal with alembics much anymore.

[@MOGILEX]

Im 13 and i think this is really interesting

[@LazyNinjass]

Why is this recommended? I’m a fireman and I never even went to college lol

[@izvarzone]

In Houdini you can do a fire.