Unpack Faster!

At my talk at Trollywood Animation Festival, I made a point that small technical decisions compound in your workflow over time, and as one of my examples, I showed a method for unpacking alembics faster. I haven't seen it anywhere else, so I decided to share it in a short video.

Trollywood

Going back to my home country to talk about Bridgerton s03 and how to be efficient in Houdini at Trollywood. Come see me! 

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Frustum Culling in Vex

 This video shows you how to create an HDA that culls points outside the camera frustum using vex instead of using a volume.

I originally recorded an example of how to crash your scene by using a volume, but I cut it out because I didn't want to bore everyone to death.

Addition: I missed to check if the points are in front or behind the camera in the video, but you can solve that easily by checking the z value. It would look something like this:
"if((campos.x+padding.x) ＜0|| (campos.x-padding.x) ＞1 ||(campos.y+padding.y) ＜0 || (campos.y-padding.y) ＞1 || campos.z ＞0)"

Simple Vellum Water Balloon Set up

 This video shows how to make a simple water balloon set up with Vellum in Houdini.

Bonus tip: In the video I'm writing an expression to change the amount of pieces, but you can also turn on and randomise the cost attribute to change the layout at the same time. Thanks Derya Öztürk for the tip! 

Shiny New Crowd Layers and Meta Power!

 Check out my latest Houdini Hive talk!

Houdini 19 HIVE

New exciting release and a day full of tech talks. Even though the crowd updates aren't as flashy as some of the other new features in 19, they are still pretty cool. Listen to me talking about the new agent layers and how to use meta data at Houdini 19 Hive.

Go here!

Zombies for Everyone!

I've made a beginner crowd course together with SideFX. It is quick and it's free. It also has zombies!

Zombies for Everyone is over here!

Keep Your Sim Through Cheating

In this video, I'm showing how to avoid resimming a Bullet simulation, when the environment changes or you want to compensate for a rubbish collision geo.

Be in Control - Crowd and RigFX

Here is my Houdini Hive presentation that gives you a quick introduction to KineFX and crowds in Houdini. 

Houdini Hive 18.5

Listen to me talk about how you can power up your crowds with the new and shiny KineFX at the next Houdini Hive, October 28th!

Crowd for Feature Film in Houdini 3

It has taken me way to long, but finally it's here! This time it's all about creating your own crowd tools.

In this course you will learn how to read clip data, play and blend clips in Vex, create digital assets, usable math concepts and some of the fundamental building block when creating non simulated crowds. This will give you the necessary skills to start building your own crowd tools in Houdini. This is an advanced course and you will need an understanding of all the concepts from my previous courses to be able to follow along. Get it here! 

Emitting Sticky Vellum Balls

In this video, I'll show you how to create a simple set up that emits Vellum balls that dynamically stick to whatever they collide with.

Blend Shapes and Full-Body IK

Here is a link to my Houdini HIVE Worldwide talk in case you missed it. You can also get the scene files over here

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.