Houdini HIVE Worldwide

Don't miss Houdini Hive Worldwide next week where you can, among other things, listen to me talk about blend shapes and full-body IK for crowds. Check out the Event Page

Acadamy Awards for Visual Effets on 1917

Congrats to all my colleges at MPC that worked on this! I only helped out a tiny bit on one of the shots, but I have also created our current Houdini crowd framework, together with Chris Bending, that is used on all our shows. You can learn more about it over here

Read about MPC's work on 1917

Guided Simulations in Houdini

In this video I'm showing how to use the new guided simulation feature to make a crumbling stone man.

Edit: Something has changed in the latest build so you might get funky results. However, the only thing you need to change to get it to work, is to connect the first port to the assemble/group instead of the point deform. Check the scene file below.

Download Scene File Here

Free Crowd Course!

I created a crowd course together with sideFX that you can watch for free. It's an advanced course so it assumes that you already are familiar with the crowd system and it will teach you how to deal with not so good assets, quadrupeds, ragdolls and hair. Check it out here

Building Menus Dynamically in Houdini

When you are making your own tools in Houdini, building menus dynamically can be very useful. There is a bit of coding needed so I've included the project file to make it easier to follow along.

edit: Koen Vroeijenstijn pointed out that it's must faster to use the string table for an attribute and then you don't have to check for duplicates. Here is a code snippet:

geo=hou.node("./IN_shapes").geometry()

menuList=[]

attrib=geo.findPointAttrib("name")

names=attrib.strings()

for name in names:

    menuList.append(name)

    menuList.append(name)

return menuList

https://www.dropbox.com/s/95ikzajj4zmxtad/menu.hiplc?dl=0

Showreel 2019

Finally got around to make a new showreel, so if you are interested in knowing exactly what I've been up to, here is your chance. :)

Inflate an Object in Vellum

In this quick video, I'm showing you how to inflate an object in Vellum. I got his question a while back, so I decided to make a tutorial about it. This method also work for whatever constraint properties you want to animate.