Currently, I am in grade 10. I find houdini particularly fun to learn, but is it hard to find a job in VFX now, or in the future? Should I quit houdini and learn maya instead? Can I find a job on maya? Will AI replace the whole industry in 20 years?

I am doing an animation for my thesis project and I am creating this praying mantis to tear open its abdomen with its own claw. What I have done is animated it in blender, imported it into Houdini and isolated the claw. I am using this object as a collision object. I am then using a vellum cloth simulation for the praying mantis and I have tried to use a point deform to go around the vellum sim to still keep the majority of the praying mantis model animated, while the abdomen I have attempted to fracture using a boolean fracture and a distorted grid as a cutting object.

Top Image is a test simulation of what I hope to achieve. The tetrahedron is representing the isolated claw (shown top left). The bottom row is my glamorous ass praying mantis and the motion I have animated.

I am having issues with how to approach this. I cant seem to use the same vellum cloth tear that I usually do with my animated object, while maintaining the animation. I followed some videos that allowed me to isolate certain parts of the mesh and using a point deform to keep my animation for the rest of the mesh, but I am having issues then with how to split and stitch the vellum simulated parts. I am going to have this mantis rip itself open as its guts pour out.

this is for a larger thesis project and I am pulling my hair out a bit, if anyone would like to tell me how they would approach this, I would truly be grateful.

edit: I am also open to other methods of making this effect, this is just the best way I could come up with

I'm using a basic grooming setup with a Guide Deform and a Hair Gen to create copies of my guide geometry. The Density attribute in the Hair Gen does a great job of creating hair from the guides, but when I use a Vellum Solver the Hair Gen shuts down. Other parameters like Influence Radius also do nothing. Without the solver, everything works as expected.

I've deleted all the attributes created by the Vellum Solver along with activating the 'Clear Dynamics' button on the solver. I've also tried a Vellum Configure Hair after the solver with no luck.

Don't know if it can be useful to some of you, but here is a little python script designed to simplify the material workflow setup using Karma and MaterialX, by automatically scanning a designed folder and creating all the maps, connected to their right input, with their rights conditions (image signature, color space, etc...), inside a KarmaMaterialBuilder subnet. I was tired of doing it again and again...

It :

• Auto-detects textures based on naming conventions.
• Creates mtlximage nodes for each texture.
• Automatically links textures to their appropriate mtlxstandard_surface shader slots.
• Node names are automatically set based on the imported folder name.
• Automatic fill correct signature and filecolorspace

Usage: Add the script to your toolshelf, select the karmamaterialbuilder node, run it from the toolshelf, and choose your texture folder. Supports .png, .jpg, .jpeg, .exr, .tif, .tiff.

Not all the possible maps are created for now, but you can modify texture_types dictionary in the script to fit your specific needs.

https://aletheiadesign.fr/houdini-karma-automatic-material-importer-karma-automat/

Github

PS : by the way, do you know if there is an easy way in Houdini to access the indices of a node's inputs? For example, the mtlxstandard_surface has about twenty inputs, and I'd like to know if there's a way to access the index of these inputs without having to count them one by one...

I cannot, for the life of me, get viscous fluids to stick to surfaces. I've spent a month searching online and I'm biting the bullet writing here because nothing's working.

Picture this: I have a donut mesh, and it's rotating in place like a record, maybe even moving left or right just to test both translation and rotation. (yes, re-evaluate sops and use deforming geo is on) Now imagine a viscous fluid, like glazing or whatever, landing on it continuously.

You would think the viscous fluid would get dragged along with the rotation and stick to the mesh, maybe even make it become more viscous as it ages so that it solidifies. unfortunately, that is far from what is happening in all my testing.

First, I was trying with Vellum, since I heard it excelled at small scale fluids, but as cool as it was to work with, the moment a viscous vellum fluid spreads on a surface, it acts more like mud or sand, where even with a high surface tension, it tends to "rip" when rolling off an edge. bumping up surface tension any higher sends particles flying everywhere. While it does kind of stick to the donut a little due to friction, a higher viscosity still ends up slipping off in the end.

so I searched and searched, experimented with all constraints, and the only thing that seemed to make a difference was attach to geometry, except it's...very wrong. it just seems to scatter points where it lands, and everything else falls off. So I thought "well maybe if I add a glue constraint, it'll stick to itself more, and thus on the surface points more too" but no, and glue constraint just makes it look like random strands of rosemary beads are in my liquid. I thought about scattering points across the surface of the donut and making those stick, but I couldn't manage to make the donut points interact with the sim.

I pretty much hit a dead end so I switched over to experimenting with Flip DOP instead. Immediately the behavior of the liquid was better in terms of consistency, but there were definitely some more issues. first, the tutorials basically emphasized that having volume collisions was better, so I added a VDB from polygons on the donut, which had the side effect of completely negating the rotation transform, despite it being after the VDB. I imagine the volume itself isn't really spinning, as the collision visualization seemed to just update the voxels in place. either way, it was clear that particles weren't really interacting naturally with volumes, where the donut would just warp the position of the points outside the mesh, and it looked jarring. so I turned everything back to surface collisions, but doing that makes the liquid extremely thin when it lands on the donut, which didn't happen on the volume version. People online mentioned it usually being tied to particle separation, but upping that seems to slow down the simulation a LOT. not only that, but it doesn't really help with it being ultra thin when it lands on the surface, it just creates a second thin layer slightly above the first one. I said screw it and just thought I'd figure it out later.

It wasn't sticking to the donut, but with surface collisions it at least interacted with the rotation a bit, so I tried playing around with Pop collision detection (stick), friction, slip on collision, gas stick on collision, and nothing seems to make a difference. stick on collision seemed to somewhat be affected by the floor, which is a volume cube, but not the donut.

Frankly I feel like I'm losing my mind. all these tutorials and different setups I tried worked in theory with stationary objects, but it's like the moment movement is involved, everything stops working. using volumes for collision looked awful with the weird warping, yet it sounds like it's what Flip expects for any constraint to work right.

and to clarify, yes, I COULD just not make the donut move or rotate, but my goal isn't to make a pretty donut sim, it's to get a viscous liquid that behaves naturally when landing on moving and deforming mesh.
Apologies for programmer-duck-ing onto this sub. I might need a bit of help wrapping my head around how I'm supposed to set this up.

I'm wanting to dive into learning Houdini better and making something of it by upgrading my ancient tower. I want to be able to do fluid sims and sand simulations, and I understand it takes a ton of RAM and CPU cores. I see that a workstation with Intel Xeons would be the candidate, but I don't have the roughly $10k it would take to make that worthwhile. My budget is more looking at the best and latest i9, but that maxes out at 192 GB supported memory, and it technically only has 8 cores. I'd also be wanting a 4090 as that's the best option but I'd want to upgrade to a 48 GB card when that becomes mainstream.

So yeah, I'm just looking for info and recommendations on this as I can't seem to find comparisons of real-world specs testing for Houdini. Thank you!

Hi, I'm quite new in TOPS and I can't figure it out how to accomplish this task.

I have a bunch of XML files, each one of them represents a spline. inside the XML file, there are "knot" elements, each one of them has attributes "pos_x", "pos_y", "pos_z". So far I was able to read this attributes with an "xmlinput". Now I would like to switch to SOPs(?) and generate one point per each of this knots, any idea how to do this?

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XML file structure

what I've accomplished so far

Thanks.

Hi guys i am having this weird bug where if i increase the size of my volume limits slightly above 7.2 in the Z , my fluid compress outputs duplicate surface as well as velocity fields. When i plug the cache into whitewater solver it doesn’t work . But if i keep it below 7.2 it gives one of each field and the whitewater solver works fine.

I've been trying to make house on fire for awhile, but making the fire come out from the inside to the outside through a window of the house is giving me a lot of issues. Right now I'm using a sphere as the emitter and the wall with a hole as the collider, but the flame still passes throught the collider. Any idea what woud be better to do? Specially if I can avoid the colliders because they seem to be the biggest issue

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i was redering something overnight and woke up to this

When I do my cach lets say in D:\ , I find that my C:\ drive is start filling and I dont have enough space In my C drive , So how can I change the temp file ? and thanks for help <3

How could I effect the surface of an object or grid based on the noise map i have created. For example using a mountain node which is based on the noise, having a higher amplitude in the darker noise areas.

Thanks

Sorry if this is a dumb question but super new to Arnold and while I can render with it in render view I cannot figure out how to see the frame being rendered or even something as simple as a render progress bar when I render to disk from Arnold ROP. Am I missing something obvious, been reading the manual but I couldn't find anything there.

Thanks for any help guys.

My server has an RTX4090 and I’m considering using a thunderbolt pcie card (40gps) to eGPU solution to add a 2nd GPU (and possibly 3rd if this works well).

I don’t want to go the watercooling route to fit the gpus in the case.

I’m aware of diminishing returns when gpus are internally connected. Would the thunderbolt-to-egpu method provide comparable performance?

So I've this Pyro sim with a resolution of 0.005. At this particular frame I'm getting 23,224,320 voxels but the fire appears blocky when you zoom in close.

I tried with a resolution of 0.001 but while caching or trying to play the sim Houdini crashes after a while (hardware limitation most likely)

Any work around to upres it without impacting performance much?

For context: Caching the sim with a resolution of 0.005 and 4 substeps takes about 7-8 hours on my system.

I'm making characters in Houdini, but I don't want to groom their hairstyles myself. Is there any online marketplace where I can buy pre-groomed hairstyles? Most of the stuff on Artstation is hair cards.

Hello,

Can anyone recommend a good useful channel for Houdini on discord?

HoudiniNerd is the one I have but it's hard to get any responses there.

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Hi, for a Junior FX Artist that has Houdini and Unreal Engine as their main software, what are the most important aspects to show in a showreel

I’m interested in either game industry or filmmaking

Also I’ve seen a lot of showreels and something that I need to learn is to do the breakdown thing, if anyone has any tutorials I appreciate it.

Hey all, I feel like this should be easy but I'm drawing a blank.

I've got a grid with 4 points (0-3).

On frame 1 I need points 0&1 in group 'active' for just a single frame. 6 frames later it should be points 2&3 in the group. The group then should alternate pairs every 6 frames whilst remaining empty in between.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Much appreciated.