Particles II - Velocity Fields is available!

Hey everyone! Just in time for the holidays, Particles II - Velocity Fields is available now!

We'll be making two effects in this lesson! Here's the first.

We'll be making two effects in this lesson! Here's the first.

And here's the other effect we'll be making!

And here's the other effect we'll be making!

Hey everyone! Just in time for the holidays, Particles II - Velocity Fields is available now!

Go make cool stuff with it here: http://www.bit.ly/2kL5GP0

Applied Houdini Particles II - Velocity Fields will teach you everything you need to know to make stunning particle effects with velocity fields! We will create two different effects in this course, one based off of a dynamic Pyro sim, and one using curl noise to wash particles around a surface. After simulating, we'll take our particles even farther by shading, shaping, and lighting them based on data derived from the sims themselves. You'll be making professional looking advanced particle sims in no time!
 

Particles I and Rigids VI are available!

It's been a busy month with Applied Houdini! Just capped off the epic Rigids series with a lesson all about cone-twist constraints and chains, and now there's also a free lesson to kick off the new Particles series too! Go check them out!

Sweet robust chain simming!

Sweet robust chain simming!

Rad free lesson on getting started with particles!

Rad free lesson on getting started with particles!

"Porcelain" by Chris Honninger

Don't know why I haven't already been doing this, but better late than never!

Here's a great piece that Chris Honninger just sent to me, partially based off of what he learned from the Applied Houdini rigid body dynamics video tutorials. Looks great Chris, and thanks for sending!

New FAQ section added!

I love all the emails that I get from you all - keep them coming! I did notice some common trends through some of them, so I decided to make a Frequently Asked Questions page for all to see. I'll be updating that page too as more come up.

FAQ

New Demo Reel!

Just updated my demo reel with some of my VES award nominated destruction work on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story! Check it out here:

Rigids IV - Terrain Destruction out now!

Rigids IV - Terrain Destruction has just been released! Go watch the preview and learn how to make production quality massive destruction here.

In Rigids IV, we're going to use Houdini 16's new Boolean SOP to learn how to fracture and subfracture (and sub-subfracture!) a large chunk of terrain that we'll make from scratch. We'll learn how to make a powerful workflow to surround this new production studio-class fracturing tool, as just knowing how to do a basic fracture is not enough. We will need to make every step of the way completely art directable, as well as efficient to create, to cache, to simulate, and to render. Along the way we will learn more scripting techniques, simulation tricks, and production tested tips in order to arrive at our exciting result!

Houdini 16 launching soon!

Houdini 16 is coming February 21st! A bunch of people have asked what Applied Houdini will be doing regarding this happy event, so I figured I'd lay it all out here.

First and foremost, all of the existing Applied Houdini tutorials will remain completely relevant in 16. While the look of the network editor has changed (and even added some cool new functionality), volumetric and rigid body simulations have remained essentially the same. Check out this quick video going over the new features:

Lots of really cool stuff in there - especially the new booleans! Booleans refer to taking solid geometry and subtracting, intersecting, or unioning to another piece of geometry. A solid model in this way can be deconstructed into many small pieces, which is of course great for fracturing! The Cookie SOP (and Shatter SOP, which relies on the underlying Cookie SOP) is the existing way to do this, but never really worked reliably on complex geometry, and as such was useless to do any major fracturing.

The new cut planes and booleans in general will open up a lot of new fracturing techniques that until now were only enjoyed by major studios who could afford to develop their own. That said, Voronoi fracturing is still the cornerstone of many/most Bullet driven rigid body systems. Bullet simply works best when all of the rigids are non-intersecting, convex pieces - which is exactly what Voronoi gives us. The trick then is how to best balance the look of arbitrarily cut geometry, with the speed of basic convex shapes.

Tune into my next rigid body lesson, Rigids IV - Terrain Destruction to see how we're going to do just that. You can bet we'll be tackling Houdini 16's new booleans plus a lot more there!