🧵 Houdini General
Anonymous at Mon, 23 Sep 2024 18:40:20 UTC No. 996209
Houdini is fun and easy!
Pick up a free apprentice version today:
https://www.sidefx.com/download/
Anonymous at Mon, 23 Sep 2024 18:48:20 UTC No. 996210
Now that we've got the formalities out of the way, I've been having a nightmare of a time matching Karma renders in the viewport / mplay. The ACES transform from ACEScg just never looked right, colours ended up too saturated.
But I've cracked it for davinci resolve. Use EXR output:
Houdini Settings:
Edit > OCIO Settings > ACEScg
(Setting this to acescct fucks up the viewport)
Karma Render Settings
Image Output > AOVs > Component Level Output > Output Colorspace > ACEScct
Resolve Project Settings:
Pic-related + in the colour page, project nodes add an aces transform with the following settings:
- Input Transform: ACEScct - CSC
- Output Transform: sRGB
This will let you mess withe gamut compression and do post-srgb changes
This will exactly match what you see in houdini.
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 20:56:08 UTC No. 996470
>>996210
Yeah you could do all that but I am able to match the mplay by just adding a brightness/contrast node in fusion and turning up the gamma a little bit.
Anonymous at Thu, 26 Sep 2024 10:34:12 UTC No. 996502
>>996470
When rendering straight to disk with a rop the EXR's need to be transformed using linear rec709 by default instead of AP1/AcesCG or what have you. It then should match straight away.
Anonymous at Thu, 26 Sep 2024 12:27:19 UTC No. 996504
>>996502
Alright I will try it.
Anonymous at Sun, 29 Sep 2024 17:11:27 UTC No. 996824
>>996209
Does anyone have some good resources on how to shade and render pyro fire and smoke in solaris karma? I tried to make this shot but dont know how to make the fire at the end look like smoke instead of fire.
Anonymous at Wed, 2 Oct 2024 20:19:00 UTC No. 997183
>>996209
Is a Houdini General really warranted? How many people on this board have ever even opened it?
Anonymous at Wed, 2 Oct 2024 23:59:51 UTC No. 997193
>>997183
it's warranted. The thing about houdini though is that you have to have a pretty sky high iq to make use of it. Most people that can say sort of use it just end up making useless shit and/or trying to sell equally useless courses on it. Or, even worse, they end up trying to answer questions on forums or discord all day but they don't know why they cant make a sim that is actually interesting
Anonymous at Thu, 3 Oct 2024 07:30:06 UTC No. 997209
>>996824
https://www.sidefx.com/contentlibra
Anonymous at Thu, 3 Oct 2024 23:26:29 UTC No. 997252
Does anyone know how to add anything to material databases in Solaris? You can see them in the material linker catalog tab. You can create custom DBs, but I have no idea how to actually add anything to them. There are no docs and nothing useful on the discord.
>>997241
It's paid for my license a few times over tho I quite enjoy it. I've finally gotten a bit of a handle on Solaris too and it's cool as fuck hitting render on one thing and seeing a bunch of passes and cameras exported on the morning
Anonymous at Sat, 5 Oct 2024 12:52:41 UTC No. 997387
>>997252
I agree, it's still sweet at moment regardless
Anonymous at Mon, 7 Oct 2024 12:31:07 UTC No. 997592
>2024
>people still using houdini for rendering when Katana exists
>people primarily posting about Karma in this thread and not about simulations
why is this?
Anonymous at Mon, 7 Oct 2024 13:21:10 UTC No. 997596
>>997592
make a katana thread if you want to talk about katana, bro.
Anonymous at Mon, 7 Oct 2024 19:16:03 UTC No. 997631
>2024
>People talking about Houdini in a Houdini thread
>why is this?
Anonymous at Mon, 7 Oct 2024 20:01:49 UTC No. 997635
>>997592
houdini + redshift blows that shit out the water regardless
Anonymous at Tue, 8 Oct 2024 01:11:46 UTC No. 997675
>>997635
i get the best renders from prman honestly and i hear 27 next year is going to be insane
Anonymous at Tue, 8 Oct 2024 14:56:34 UTC No. 997736
>>996210
why not use AgX
Anonymous at Tue, 8 Oct 2024 15:03:14 UTC No. 997737
>>997736
Not him, but use khronos
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Oct 2024 10:24:38 UTC No. 997824
>>997736
renderview is too flat for me and i don't want to fuck around with slapcomps just to have a good starting point.
>>997737
i haven't seen a working implementation in houdini yet. i do want to try it though, it looks good.
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Oct 2024 13:07:56 UTC No. 997829
>>997736
>>997737
>>997824
AgX, Khronos, ACES, blah blah blah. It doesn't matter when doing real projects, only side by side comparisons, so just pick the one that's the most comfortable to you and your workflow for now
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Oct 2024 15:38:01 UTC No. 997837
>>997833
>>997835
applied houdini pyro 5 has a no-sim approach
houdini course pyro section has a couple of sim based approaches
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Oct 2024 15:39:01 UTC No. 997838
>>997837
>volumes* 5
he changed the name at some point
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Oct 2024 19:13:20 UTC No. 997864
Does anyone know how the hell I can get points scattered as a volume on a deforming mesh to not jump around like crazy and change their point numbers? Time shifts and rest nodes aren't doing shit. I just want to use this running character as a pyro source and have the points stick in one spot- so I can drive a certain degree of the smokes velocity using their normal direction
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Oct 2024 23:26:53 UTC No. 997900
>>997867
Thank you!
Anonymous at Mon, 14 Oct 2024 21:44:35 UTC No. 998315
anyone happen to own the Steam version? asking because I will eventually buy houdini indie and I happen to have a ton of steam cash from when I played CS and sold my skins. I'd rather just use that to buy it but if there are bugs or differences then I'll just shell out the money for indie separately
Anonymous at Tue, 15 Oct 2024 21:00:50 UTC No. 998426
>>998315
Unless you plan on making money with houdini I wouldn't bother buying any version. Apprentice has very few limitations, the biggest one is that you can't install any third party renderers. But karma xpu is great so I don't really see the need for this anymore. Also houdini is easy to crack if you really want to..
Personally I don't own a commercial houdini licence, the studio I work at buys it for me. That being said, stay away from the steam version. Version management is a pain and you can only have 1 houdini instance launched on you PC at a time.
Anonymous at Tue, 15 Oct 2024 22:17:19 UTC No. 998430
>>998426
You don't get it. For one, the value of paying of having a legitimate sidefx license comes from the support and the scene files YOU have to send in to receive support. Just in this past month I had to email side 2x and they solved my issue in multiple lengthy emails and example scenes that they provided me and even let me know in advance notice about upcoming things they are going to be releasing that relate to the issue.
Two, using third party addons is actually a must. Karma isnt the be all end all, either.
Anonymous at Wed, 16 Oct 2024 08:28:55 UTC No. 998581
Sounds cool!
Anonymous at Wed, 16 Oct 2024 15:04:03 UTC No. 998658
is there a catch with the free version of Houdini?
Anonymous at Wed, 16 Oct 2024 15:16:28 UTC No. 998660
>>998658
renders are limited to 1280*720
no third-party renderer support
no geometry sequence export iirc (technically no geometry export at all i think, but you can get around it, but it would be tedious for exporting sequences)
if you buy a license, then open a file saved in apprentice, it'll temporarily make your houdini session an apprentice session - saved files need to be converted, sidefx will do this for you once. there is a bit of a hack around this but it has some minor limitations (nodes inside sop solvers won't migrate properly, neigther will sticky notes iirc)
Anonymous at Sat, 19 Oct 2024 12:18:48 UTC No. 999064
what is everybody learning?
APEX?
MPM?
Anonymous at Sat, 19 Oct 2024 13:41:07 UTC No. 999072
>>999064
The only thing that matters : Vellum
Anonymous at Sun, 20 Oct 2024 13:45:07 UTC No. 999152
What format do you use to import characters from blender into houdini? FBX or what??
Anonymous at Sun, 20 Oct 2024 13:52:06 UTC No. 999154
>>999152
fbx is ideal since you can still mess about with the skeleton/animation. use the fbx character import node and set it up like pic related.
if you just want the baked animation, then it doesn't matter, use alembic or some shit.
Anonymous at Sun, 20 Oct 2024 13:56:09 UTC No. 999155
>>999154
also, if you do want the skeleton and you've set up the chat with rigify or w/e, when exporting to fbx there an option to export just the def bones - i remember having to fiddle with those options, although i can't remember specifically what steps i did. should be easy to work out.
do that or you'll get a big giant mess that you can't work with.
Anonymous at Sun, 20 Oct 2024 14:05:43 UTC No. 999157
>>999155
Yeah, the models in question do use rigify, so I'll probably have to figure some FK stuff out in a bit, but I have the model, the IK rig atleast, and blend shapes seem to be working, so that's good.
Anonymous at Mon, 21 Oct 2024 13:22:42 UTC No. 999253
>>999252
>ambient occlusion
diffuse/spec secondary bounce*
Anonymous at Mon, 21 Oct 2024 13:43:50 UTC No. 999254
>>999252
use DDU. Also, have you tried another video card? Cards dont last forever
Anonymous at Mon, 21 Oct 2024 14:19:23 UTC No. 999257
>>999254
i just rolled back to an earlier version.
565.90 studio is the one doing the teal shit with houdini 20.5.332. 560.81 studio is fine.
i can't even be bothered to fix the opencl errors with vellum; it's probably an edge case and there's barely a speed gain anyway for my project.
Anonymous at Tue, 22 Oct 2024 00:10:49 UTC No. 999293
>>999257
thanks for the heads up about 565.90. I dont have time to stop producing and mess and troubleshoot with faulty "studio" drivers that MUST be released every X number of weeks. There is almost nothing worse than troubleshooting faulty drivers
Anonymous at Wed, 23 Oct 2024 22:52:41 UTC No. 999510
Does anyone else feel like they're perpetually at 70% with everything they try with this software? At this point I get the basic jist of how to do most of the things I think of, but then I either hit some wall that brings all of the experimentation that came before it to a complete halt, or I just get stuck with a shit version of the thing I was imagining, that's everything I was trying to make it be, except it looks like shit.
Anonymous at Thu, 24 Oct 2024 01:30:11 UTC No. 999519
>>999510
No. If i come to a complete halt after exhausting all possible learning resources then I email side and give them my scene and tell them what I was trying to do and wait for their response
🗑️ Anonymous at Thu, 24 Oct 2024 15:18:58 UTC No. 999563
https://cmolfino.gumroad.com/l/pyrj
anyone got this hip lying around?
Anonymous at Fri, 25 Oct 2024 12:09:54 UTC No. 999684
>>999257
they have an official statement on 565 in the forums now, talking about the issue with XPU and optix. They say not to upgrade for now...
Anonymous at Fri, 25 Oct 2024 12:32:40 UTC No. 999685
>>999684
lel. i thought i was losing my mind when it happened to me. hopefully it gets fixed by the time i update in ~6 months. inb4 this turns into a redshift memory leak nightmare.
Anonymous at Fri, 25 Oct 2024 19:20:34 UTC No. 999730
I've a final project to do in 7-8 weeks and now we're off the rails from traditional assignments and I can't recite a single thing I've learned. It's over!
Anonymous at Fri, 25 Oct 2024 21:07:04 UTC No. 999761
>>999730
Whatcha gonna make anon?
Anonymous at Fri, 25 Oct 2024 21:33:08 UTC No. 999765
>>999761
Probably not interesting, but procedural symbols/text like the runes in Diablo 2. Then I'll try to arrange them in animated circles and ribbons for a "magical circle" type thing swirling around the character.
Anonymous at Fri, 25 Oct 2024 22:02:33 UTC No. 999767
>>999765
Sounds fun t bh. Let us know if u get stuck on anything
Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:58:41 UTC No. 999788
>>999765
that sounds super boring, not gonna lie.
Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 01:13:56 UTC No. 999791
>>999788
one man's symbol generator is another man's viscous googirl dripper
Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 02:02:21 UTC No. 999792
>>999791
do something actually worthwhile
Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 09:49:49 UTC No. 999827
>>999792
Bro we make pretty pictures, calm down. If u wanna do something worthwhile go cure cancer .
Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 10:58:34 UTC No. 999832
>>999827
there's a range of things that are worth doing in any activity
Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 11:41:02 UTC No. 999835
>>999832
keep telling yourself that, pixelmonkey
Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 11:59:01 UTC No. 999838
>>999835
you are the one literally taking a course and paying money to make a really weak project
Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 12:01:33 UTC No. 999839
>>999838
you can't even keep track of who you're talking to lol
Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 12:23:41 UTC No. 999842
>>999839
yeah because everyone is posting under anonymous and even if they're not i have "forced anonymous" on in settings
who would have thought that
Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 13:12:41 UTC No. 999846
>>999842
don't speak to me (mr anonymous) or my son (anonymous) ever again
Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 22:32:46 UTC No. 1000036
>>999835
post prog
Anonymous at Sun, 27 Oct 2024 06:31:45 UTC No. 1000070
I have a challenge for ya'l
Suppose I have this shape. I want to duplicate this shape dozens of times and scale it inwards, and have each smaller copy nested perfectly inside the larger copy. But the vectors don't want to let me do this. I get this crap instead. What do I do
Anonymous at Sun, 27 Oct 2024 10:38:07 UTC No. 1000105
>>1000070
polyexpand2d should do this
Anonymous at Sun, 27 Oct 2024 22:18:15 UTC No. 1000164
>>996209
What is this? It always pops up when I launch Houdini
>>Prelaunch pb? 1
Anonymous at Sun, 27 Oct 2024 22:31:34 UTC No. 1000165
>>996209
shit ui and sluggish performance. i took a month to really learn it and found out its just easier to work in a general 3d package with similar results. if you wanna do extreme high end sims, sure. but general use from renders to shorts, not worth the headache.
Anonymous at Sun, 27 Oct 2024 23:02:50 UTC No. 1000176
>>1000105
Failed to process triangulation. See helpcard for possible causes.
Don't see anything relevant in help, Tried remeshing and quad remeshing first and didn't help.
Here's another problem- I want to project an image onto some vellum grains and have all my forces jumble those grains around, breaking apart the image and making the black grains get mixed up and lost. But I can't seem to get the Cd of these points to become independent of the projection- so the grains move around but the image continuously projects onto them in the same way. How can I bake the colors onto the specific grains so they stop doing that?
What I'd really like to figure out is how to bake an image, have the simulation shuffle them around and end with them arranged into a different image
Anonymous at Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:44:06 UTC No. 1000186
>>1000176
you shouldn't need to do an attribute transfer at all. once the points have the attribute pre-simulation it should 'stick' through the simulation.
if for some reason it doesn't, attribute transfer won't help. attribute transfer is proximity based.
what you want is an attribute copy based on point numbers. i think in this scenario if you run it naively it'll work.
ideally you want to keep track of points not based on point numbers, but based on id's just incase the point numbers get shuffled around (vellum will do this for primitive numbers all the time iirc) or if new points are spawned.
usually this is done with an @id attribute and some schema to ensure that point numbers remain unique.
however, you can't assign @id prior to a vellum simulation because the vellum solver needs its own @id attribute to keep track of this.
i usually just use i@pt_id as a custom id attrib and then shuffle it around for idtopoint() lookups (that function only works for @id attributes.
re:failed triangulation, i'd need to see the actual geo, but desu i'm going to be slammed during the week so i doubt i'll be able to help.
for the image rearrangement thing, i'd have to think on it. again, i won't be able to really spend any time on it. but the idea would be this:
1. precompute the second projection and store it as a point attribute
2. maybe randomize point order and project based on that
3. inside the vellum solver you can then use an attribute wrangle to just move towards this stored position. so if you've got a precomputed position stored as v@precompute you can just use a wrangle inside the solver and do something as simple as v@P = lerp(v@P, v@precompute, 0.05) and it'll move towards the position 5% per frame.
Anonymous at Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:49:49 UTC No. 1000187
>>1000186
oh also, you can just 'cheat' the rearrangement but just lerping @Cd. if you do it cleverly most people will never notice that you just blended from one colour to the other.
Anonymous at Mon, 28 Oct 2024 11:30:14 UTC No. 1000235
>>1000165
nah
Anonymous at Mon, 28 Oct 2024 18:08:29 UTC No. 1000255
>>1000165
lol
Anonymous at Fri, 1 Nov 2024 14:28:20 UTC No. 1000614
>>1000093
just wait until you realize that most of them don't even work in any industries.
Anonymous at Fri, 1 Nov 2024 14:49:49 UTC No. 1000616
>>1000614
Mate, the Industry has completely collapsed. Are you living under a rock? The movie industry? Gone. Direct-to-dvd? Gone. App industry? Dead. VR apps? Dead. All you can do now is try to gain social media clout.
Anonymous at Tue, 5 Nov 2024 10:04:26 UTC No. 1000882
>>998660
I see, so it's really mostly for learning. You can't just use the free version for years and then buy one month of a real license and then use the stuff you've made in the free version commercially.
Anonymous at Tue, 19 Nov 2024 16:42:45 UTC No. 1002005
>>1001962
The time when one need to be a 'good coder' is nearly over. We will very soon be programming in natural language in such a way that everyone will be a programmer.
Once that happens in no time AI will write for us in machine code that'll be ineligible even for expert humans to interface with directly.
It'll be more impractical than reading large programs viewed as assembly code.
We will be reliant on AI interpreters to map out what a program actually does in metaphorical ways that is eligible to us.
In that near future your ability to be creative will be gated more by your ability to be highly specific an concise in describing things
while talking to a LLM than you will be dependent on knowing the ins and out of syntax and how to write efficient and clear code.
Anyone who's anyone in programming has stopped saying we should be teaching kids how to code, because that skill will be irrelevant.
Growing your vocabulary and understanding of higher order concepts will be the success path going forward.
What you can contribute will be gated by what you can express thru your command of linguistics and what you can conceive of as cohesive mental constructs.
Anonymous at Tue, 19 Nov 2024 18:19:41 UTC No. 1002009
>>1002005
But it's not here yet. I interacted with 20 chatgpt solutions (paid model) and they all failed (or my descriptions did), and so I have to cope with my poor abilities in the now.
I get time's will change, and I'm looking forward to those times as an artist.
Anonymous at Tue, 19 Nov 2024 21:31:30 UTC No. 1002029
>>1002009
Chatgpt is good for houdini's python stuff but mostly miss for everything else.
Btw if you want to copy different objects per point look up the attributes from pieces node and the variant copying workflow in copy to points. I think there's a nice post on the toadstorm blog about all the ways can do it now.
Anonymous at Thu, 21 Nov 2024 03:29:28 UTC No. 1002107
>>1000616
so what's the point of learning Houdini then?
somebody's learning, course makers are making bank.
why are they learning Houdini, why?
Anonymous at Fri, 22 Nov 2024 12:30:43 UTC No. 1002180
>>1001962
Don't listen to the other fag, I stopped reading after his first sentence.
I'm a software programer and i use Houdini as a hobbyist.
If you're saying this for VEX, then you're in luck cause it doesn't require to become the most excellent programmer out there. Learn the basics concepts of every programming language and you're set to go (variable, conditions, operators, flow... whoch you can do in a day, honestly).
If you want to make production level stuff, then yeah I guess you'll have to learn some Python and be able to code more advanced scripts and programs. But even then, it's not the most advanced stuff out there.
You WILL HAVE TO provide some effort though.
Anonymous at Sun, 24 Nov 2024 18:30:31 UTC No. 1002319
>>1002187
Don't even know if you're baiting me at this point