eikonoklastes

When you say missing, you mean that nothing shows up in the Tab menu when you search for "tree"? They have cleaned up the menus in 19.5, so all the tree-related nodes now have the word "tree" in them. In 19.0 you had to specifically look for "branch" or "leaf", if I remember correctly.

Yes, it's doable. On the dome light that you want lighting your scene, but invisible to the render, you don't have to do anything, as long as Render Light Geometry is turned off (which is the default). Just pick your texture for it, set the intensity and it's good to go. On the dome light that you want visible, but not contributing any light, make the Contributions parameter empty and enable Render Light Geometry:

Like mentioned above, For Each Connected Piece is usually the way to go, but otherwise Blast is the correct way to do it manually. You could also use Split, which is a nicer version of Blast for these things.

Point colours were supported in XPU in 19.0, just not for the Instancer LOP. Not sure if your system is auto-correcting, but the viewer is called MPlay. "MRay" brings back horrific memories of mental ray, so please don't do that any more... To your questions: 1. You need to enable Render Light Geometry on your Dome Light for the texture to show up (you will lose your alpha though). 2. In Solaris, the viewport render is still a viewport, so everything shows up in there. You say the camera doesn't exist anywhere in your scene, but in your screenshot I can see the camera node hooked into your network. Mantra has nothing to do with Solaris, so that won't be playing any role there. You can control object visibility in Solaris here: 3. In MPlay, use the Home icon to get a 1:1 zoom.

It's pretty easy to overwhelm yourself with the new stuff. My advice is to not overthink it. Take your time, choose your own learning path, and ask a question when you need some clarification. This is also a good starting point: Learning Paths | SideFX And join up on the PolyMarvels Discord. Both Igor and I can respond to quick queries over there. https://discord.gg/wN6RSTUd

You can easily load a default scene on startup, but unfortunately Houdini doesn't save the snapping settings with the scene file (you should RFE this). You can initialise the settings by running scripts on Houdini startup, and/or with a new scene creation using either HScript or Python. I could tell you where those scripts go, but unfortunately I don't know the code required to execute what you want, although I do know that it is possible with Python. Look into 123.py and 456.py if you want to dig into it more.

@3D-PangelTo clarify, you can install Houdini on your main drive, and point the cache to a different drive, if you have it. Also, unless you go hard on the sims from the outset (not the ideal approach), you won't actually need too much space. Houdini, being largely procedural, will produce tiny scene files, even with millions of polygons in them.

Honestly, for all the great content that Entagma put out, I would not consider them to be good instructors for beginners. They have been steadily attempting to simplify their content to appeal to larger audiences, but they still use legacy workflows that are unnecessarily complicated. In particular, this video is an unstructured, on-the-fly recording, and as such has many inefficiencies. I have watched that video in its entirety and there were several moments that could have been tackled in better ways, so be warned before investing the 90+ minutes that that video demands.

So, just to clarify what @Jeff H1 is saying, the ability for Houdini to do extremely sophisticated things with rotations have been there for a long time now. It is pretty complicated to execute, however, and dives into matrices and quaternions to pull it off. You don't need to know the maths behind it, but you would need to know a few very specific workflows to execute it. @Mike A @Igor and I were discussing it only a few days ago on the PolyMarvels Discord, where I was trying to demonstrate a newer method to more easily do this, and Igor must have been biting his lip trying not to spill the beans about the new orientation tool in 19.5.

A few things spring to mind: 1. This first one is by far the most importani, imo — understanding how attributes work, and how deeply they're embedded into everything Houdini. What Houdini does with attributes is what sets it apart from other DCCs and what allows you to do exactly what you want to do with your scene, with your objects, with your materials, anything. 2. Understanding the difference between "geometry" and "objects". Houdini has a very specific definition of "geometry", and will use specific words to describe them. For example, coming from C4D, "vertices" and "primitives" are not what you'd expect in Houdini. I'm not talking merely about having different words to describe the same thing between apps, but the very structured approach that Houdini has to what it considers to be "geometry". There are others, for sure, but these 2 were in the forefront of my mind as a couple of major ones. On a side note, I disagree with that learning comparison image you posted, if we were to compare the fundamentals of each app. Getting into Houdini today is significantly easier than what it was 5 years ago, and Houdini's UI itself is pretty straightforward. If you compare the capabilities of each app, then yes - the gulf widens. Houdini has an absurd quantity of production-quality tools as part of its core that other apps would need a bunch of plugins to match.

I've been with Houdini since v17, and every release they put out has me wondering how exactly they are able to pull off so much with each release, including the supposed 0.5 releases. Glad to see that they aren't showing any signs of slowing down. Can't wait to get my hands on this puppy.

So full disclosure, I didn't even watch most of that video because he gets into alternative methods that hurt my brain. All I did was click a couple of shelf tools, and I was up and running with this effect. I am not even exaggerating — one shelf click to set one object as the source, and then another to set another object as the target. It is a FLIP sim, so you still need to know your way around Houdini to tweak it, but setting up the sim itself was dead simple.

Had some time over the weekend and I tried out some morphing based on an excellent video I found. The sim was surprisingly easy to set up and quick to execute, and I'm quite happy with the results. Going to try to set up a render for this bad boy sometime soon and update this post when I get the chance. flip morph.mp4 Here is the video that I followed:

Rendering tech is possibly my weakest area, so I might be entirely wrong here, but I don't believe that you can convert a displacement shader into geometry. The renderer is working in camera space, and translating the displacement data into micropolygons and mapping them to screen pixels. It does not build a 3D object. The only way to visualise it would be to actually model it, and it would be impractical to do that, because the poly counts on such a sharp ridge apex would need to be astronomically large to resolve cleanly. Again, I might be talking far out my ass here, so any rendering gurus, please do chime in.

Go in reverse for some next-level grooving. Here's an extreme close-up to see how good the dicing is:

Can also do falloffs along the curve

Here's the ramp that drives the falloff. It lives on the shader. And because it's a ramp, you can go a bit nuts with it.

Not much to see in the wireframe. Just a standard sphere and a curve projected onto it.

Hello. Another C4D-inspired post, from here. To tackle this, a displacement shader can do an excellent job at render time, using standard geometry, that would otherwise require unreasonably high poly counts, if modeled. The below image, rendered in Mantra, uses a curve (rather than a texture), to define the displacement area, and the shader can use a ramp to create the falloff. Mantra might be slow, but the quality it produces is evident from the extremely clean displacement it generated. I'm not fully comfortable with Karma, but I believe I can reproduce a similar image with it. If you inspect the attached scene, you'll see a bog-standard setup with the geometry. All the magic happens in the material shader, where you can query the distance between two objects (at render time), and then drive a displacement with that information. Displacement Shader with XYZDist (Mantra).hiplc

My knowledge about volumes is pretty limited, but I think a Volume Rasterize can do something close to what you want. scatter_on_volume_density.hipnc

Scatter can read the density values in volumes natively. You don't need to enable the Density Attribute on it - that setting uses the density attribute from points. Just initialise your values in your volume and you should be good to go. Extra note on the Force Total Count parameter on the Scatter node. If you have that enabled, and your density values are too low, Scatter will forcefully add points outside your defined density range. So, either crank up your density values, so that they exceed the Force Total Count value, effectively using that parameter only to prune the point count, or turn off Force Total Count, and let your density values drive your point count.

Quick follow-up. Lit Spheres is also extremely useful in shaping and lighting particle sims. With just the standard view, the particles just look like a generic mass, but with Lit Spheres, you can really bring out the shape and detail, without needing to do a render. Here's are comparative top views:

Hahaha, yeah. Trying to show scale on 10 million points individually is tricky. I cranked it up to demonstrate how well it works even at absurd point counts. I do zoom in on them in the video at around 15 seconds.

The C4D posts are serving as a good source of inspiration. Saw this thread and decided to play with some rigid body dynamics, something I've barely touched in Houdini. mplay_I11tJhYlsV_H.264.mp4 Scene file attached. A 250 frame sim took about a minute on my 5 year old machine. Rolling RBD Sim.hiplc

A pretty common workflow in Houdini is to copy geometry to points. When dealing with a large amount of points, the copy process can be a bit slow, and make the viewport sluggish. A good way to preview the copies and tweak their sizes and colours without actually copying any geometry to the points is to change the display of the points themselves to Lit Spheres in the Viewport Display options (press D with the mouse cursor over the viewport to bring up the options). Here is a preview of 10 million points running effortlessly on my old GTX 1080 Ti: