Category: hou-general

Archived post by ajk48n

I mentioned last week that I had made an hda that utilizes TOPs and makes it easy(ish) to save file caches / render an opengl contact sheet of all the caches. I’ve gotten permission to share the HDA, so if anyone wants it, here ya go. The main hda is a geo node called wedge cache. Inside it uses a TOPs hda that is a simple wrapper of ffmpeg to make saving out mp4s easier.
If you just want to use this for caches, you won’t need to install anything else, but if you want to render the contact sheets you’ll need imagemagick and ffmpeg installed
The hda is a little complex, so I’ve put together a demo video on how to use it. I recommend watching at 2x password: wedgy https://vimeo.com/490719853

Attachments in this post:
http://fx-td.com/houdiniandchill/wp-content/uploads/discord/20204612/16/20/ffmpeg_encode_mp4.1.0.hda
http://fx-td.com/houdiniandchill/wp-content/uploads/discord/20204612/16/20/wedge_cache__1.0.hda

Archived post by Solitude

@rich lord

this is the expanded version

🙂

it’s not wrapped up into an hda at all though

so the parameters for blend distances and stuff are a bit scattered

it’s definitely not perfect if you push it too far or have lots of uv seams, but I think it does alright in a lot of cases. I used something like this for a ‘dirt skirt’ setup

Attachments in this post:
http://fx-td.com/houdiniandchill/wp-content/uploads/discord/20200512/06/20/boolsmooth2.gif
http://fx-td.com/houdiniandchill/wp-content/uploads/discord/20200512/06/20/boolblend2.jpg
http://fx-td.com/houdiniandchill/wp-content/uploads/discord/20200512/06/20/bool_blend_v2.hiplc

Archived post by Lorne

this is a pretty specific tip but if anyone’s ever doing fabric with seams this has been working pretty well for me…build out your seams as geo that also becomes vellum, make it far more stiff, glue it to your main cloth, and drop the restlength on the glue constraints, it’ll start bunching up around the seams automatically

another good one is hijack the output of the cloth constraints and multiply the restlength attrib by a noise pattern fit between like 0.9 and 1.11, that’ll also give you some really nice wrinkling even before the sim starts doing anything

Attachments in this post:
http://fx-td.com/houdiniandchill/wp-content/uploads/discord/20203810/15/20/image.png

Archived post by Sepu

then you can render instances procedurally in Arnold

if you want to render in other engines you gotta use a replicator but that defeats the point of procedural – until they get an SDK out, you gotta use arnold for that matter

you gotta use this guy in Houdini to output the pts correctly

and write them as .vdb

the .hip just in case

Attachments in this post:
http://fx-td.com/houdiniandchill/wp-content/uploads/discord/20201902/20/20/maya.gif
http://fx-td.com/houdiniandchill/wp-content/uploads/discord/20201902/20/20/maya_Ik2V30mFRU.png
http://fx-td.com/houdiniandchill/wp-content/uploads/discord/20201902/20/20/PTS_FROM_HOUDINI_v002.ma
http://fx-td.com/houdiniandchill/wp-content/uploads/discord/20201902/20/20/maya_VIAgt6q6BE.png
http://fx-td.com/houdiniandchill/wp-content/uploads/discord/20201902/20/20/houdini_GNjsPecs8i.png
http://fx-td.com/houdiniandchill/wp-content/uploads/discord/20201902/20/20/PtsToMaya.hip

Archived post by lcrs

i’ve done it in the past just w/ timeshifts to get previous and next frames, vdb combine all three, chuck a vdb renormalize sdf afterwards for luck

in fact i’ve done this with as many as 7 frames 😬 it does help but there will be some oversmoothing damage. i think i remember getting better results with the A multiplier in the combine at 1.0, even though you might think 1/3.0 would be approriate 🤔 having extra interior and exterior bands was worth it