🧵 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