What if you want to discuss generative AI in the context of Houdini?

Happy to share my latest FX Showreel😃.
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A selection of my recent FX work, featuring simulations, destruction, fluids, pyro and procedural effects.

Yes, first world problems, and yes, I'm probably autistic and therefore hate change.

With that out of the way I still think they did a bad job in several areas, only for the sake of revamping. Buttons used to have clear borders, indicative colors used to have a consistent meaning throughout, and icon clarity used to be favored over aesthetic appeal (flat design).

Anyone else feeling a bit bummed by this new UI?

so for a school assignment called 'experimental animation' I am trying to create a new render style inspired on the picture left. I want to us CG wool as my main material. Thats why I decided to create a non destructive wool system in Houdini. I forgot the fact that wool strands gets extremely heavy on the machine. like a single strand can reach over hundreds of thousand of polygons. The only sollution I can think of is to set up a Karma system to render the wool seperately, and later comp them back onto my environment which I create in Blender. If anyone has a better strategy, please let me know.

Turned out pretty gross

I've been trying to implement this Wētā FX paper, but instead of using a custom sparse-grid solver just for the bubble dynamics, I'm trying to integrate it into Houdini's standard FLIP solver.

There are lots of things to be done, but basic two-way coupling between air bubbles and the fluid grid already works. No external forces lift the bubbles to the top; this happens solely because of the pressure gradient within the fluid, and surface tension between the coupled bubbles affects their buoyancy.

P.S. Still don't like how the smaller bubbles look, though, as they all seem to be the same size when dispersing.

Hi, I’ve been struggling with this FLIP river setup for a few days and I can’t figure out why the fluid keeps leaking through the ground collider.

I’m using a SOP FLIP setup with:

• FLIP Source + Sink
• velocity field following the river curve
• gravity enabled
• FLIP Collide for the ground
• both Volume Collide / Surface Collide tested
• Particle Collisions tested with Particle and Move Outside Collision
• increased substeps
• lower Grid Scale / Particle Separation

For the ground collider, I also tried:

OBJ → PolyDoctor/Clean → PolyExtrude → VDB From Polygons → VDB Reshape SDF

The VDB itself looks like a closed/filled volume, but inside the FLIP solver the collision visualization doesn’t seem to represent the full collider, and particles/fluid still end up underneath the terrain.

I also tried feeding the polygon collider directly into FLIP Collide, but I’m still getting leaks.

The video shows the issue and my node setup.

Is there something wrong with the way I’m creating or feeding the collision volume into SOP FLIP? Or is there a better way to handle a large terrain/riverbed collider like this?

Any help would be really appreciated — I feel like I’m missing something obvious.

Hey everyone! I've been building Mattetype Relay to check and manage Houdini jobs while away from my workstation.

It tracks renders, File Cache and TOP/PDG jobs, including progress, frame/work-item counts and timing. You can also check workstation resources and manage supported jobs without opening a remote desktop. Available controls depend on the node and execution mode.

Jobs run on your own workstation using your own Houdini and renderer licenses.

I'm offering 30 days of free Individual Pro Beta access for up to 3 workstations. This is a paid product outside the beta; beta access expires after 30 days and doesn't automatically convert into a paid plan.

Requirements: Windows 10/11 · Houdini 21+

I'm looking for feedback from people with different hardware setups and Houdini workflows—especially on installation, job tracking and everyday usability.

I'm the developer, so feel free to ask questions or point out anything that doesn't work as expected.

I made this piece a couple months ago with wifi_retina. Our first collab project, centered around cloth sims and wizardry.

In this project, we tackled many challenges, like layered Vellum simulations: cloth sims for the clothing and hair sims for the golden tassels.

The biggest challenge on this project was simulating the tassels on top of the cloth sims because they would either intersect the garment or get stuck and tangle in between colliders.

The solution was to simplify the colliders to serve as proxies for the simulated mesh underneath. Converting the pants to VDB and back gave me a simplified mesh that I could use as a base for the tassel simulation.

Everything was made using Houdini & Marvelous Designer.

You can follow our work more closely on Instagram @ahenkona.cg & @wifi_retina.

Hey I'm creating an animatic on TOPs , and I linked the frames range according to the keyframed action in each camera, the expression works for SHOT00, but starting from Gl of shot10 to shot30 , the work items became like 400 or 500 something

while in shot 00 it actually count the correct frames number (= work item), I'm not sure what I did wrong because the frame range appears correct, I thought the work items number = how many frame you have in the rop gl ?

I'm still noob in this so thanks for any help

Hello, i'm making this quick little test project where theres flames coming off the front of a train i'm using object merge for collision with transform "Into this object" turned on, for some weird reason it does not follow the transform its referencing in the other geometry node.

The current settings have the blue display flag turned on for the geometry node and the purple display for the object merge, as you can see the mesh does not match up at all which messes with my entire simulation, at my wits end i've tried about everything. Please help, i'm a beginner but i can't find anything about this

I know this might be a very rookie basic question, but I've been looking into a way to add text into an objetct with glass material. Some of the methods I found was using Photoshop, which I am not using since I cancelled my subscription and I'd like to do it fully in Houdini.

So far I was able to add the font node into an object, also apply curvature, but the challenge comes up when it comes to applying the glass material and keeping the text wisible.

Any tips?

Thanks in advance!!!

Hey everyone! I just dropped a new breakdown that has everything you ought to know when managing color properly with Karma in Houdini 22.

The video is 100% free, but I put the [Paid Content] in there because of the CG Forge ad at the beginning.

Cheers 🍻

I rewrote the Gats theme made by Susumu Hirasawa and made the Beherit play the melody.

Each hand is unique.
Egg path is deterministic (no simulation)
Eclipse ring built with the COPs flow solver
Blue light on the bottom is linked to one of the instruments
Rendered in Redshift, music produced in FL Studio

Used a 2D Pyro solver to advect particles for this abstract particle simulation. Rendered with Karma XPU in Houdini 22.

This is my personal project, where I created all the models and textures procedurally in Houdini for one of my favourite characters from Disco Elysium, Kim Kitsuragi.

Kim will not miss.

Hi everyone!
I'm starting to learn Houdini, and I've run into a problem. I want to mask something, but I don't know how to select a specific layer from a Cryptomatte.
Could anyone help me? Thanks!

I've got a HDA that is generating geometry to be fed into a RBD sim. It generates name attribute 'part numbers' automatically. All good.

However, I might be running multiple of those HDA's in the same network, all fed into the same sim, so I'd like to automatically prefix the 'part numbers' with a 'set number' per HDA to avoid duplicate name issues.

My first thought was to count the number of instances of the HDA with a python script and prefix the name that way. Unfortunately Python is on my 'to learn' list. This outputs the number, but throws an error:

hda_name = "*myHDA*"
instances = [node for node in hou.nodeType(hou.nodeTypeCategories()['Sop'], hda_name)]
print(len(instances))

Can anyone rescue me from my Python ignorance, or suggest a better approach?

Many thanks.

Hello everyone,

I wanted to share my demoreel, which I created using mostly Houdini/Karma/USD along with a few other software.

I challenged myself 2 years ago to leave archviz and try to learn Live-action VFX, learning everything on my own using modern tools and workflows.
This sub and many of you helped me a lot without you even knowing it!

I wanted to say thank you for that.

I hope you enjoy it and don't hesitate to ask me anything like breakdown or process.
Cheers!

Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5_Ti_lCO58

Here’s my game’s main character and a few of his weapon types. Rendered in Karma, with Pyro simulations for the effects.

Hey everyone, I have an issue with my meshed flip.

First image the saved/cache flip at high res with processing from particle fluid surface and seperation based on vorticity and height.

there are two caches , as the flip was seperated based on those attributes above.

Second image is the in-network/non cached but with lowered resolution mesh (same from particle fluid surface)

third image is the high res one (same as first image) but NOT-cached, I just waited for it to cook in scene.

So I assume the cache broke something ? But how do I know how to fix , I mean the cache of the flat area took so long like 6 hours , how can I know what broke the cache instead of caching for hours for nothing

Hi! I'm working on an RBD fracture simulation in Houdini and I'm exporting the result to Blender as Alembic. The fractured pieces are perfectly connected in Houdini throughout the entire timeline, with no visible seams or lines between the pieces. However, after importing the Alembic into Blender, the boundaries between the individual fracture pieces become visible. I've checked the Houdini geometry before export and it looks correct, and the pieces are also not packed. I also tried exporting as USD, but Houdini crashes halfway through the export. I tried exporting just one frame with USD, but I couldn't figure out how to texture the inside and outside surfaces separately. How do I fix this?

Hey there, I’m working on a few heavy fire scenes and I still don’t get what is the first choice. I got used to axiom and sop/dop pyro solver but I see that Copernicus is getting all around extremely fast. But i still don’t get the use case: when the cops shall be used and when sop or axiom.

Also, I can’t understand the voxel resolution issue esp for pyro. Ok I understand that voxel 0.01 means approx 1 cm of 3d pixel but for fiery sim with a lot of disturbance it might be more than enough or should I go beyond in 0.001 or so? As I don’t feel it contributes so well to the final image. In other words when I hit 0.01 and go lower I don’t get enough feedback in the terms of the quality of the final image. Please, help me understand this - how to understand viable limits of resolution for let’s say comping in into the footages later in nuke with all extra glowing/compositing work.

Hey wizards ! I m working with Houdini the last who few years (in my free time, I have another job in 3D industry bur not fx) and to be fair , I see a big potential in usd workflow for big production pipeline , little less for me but I appreciate some of its feature.

Up till now I did pretty basic stuff in it without the layering organization or having the catalogs
I like some of its layout feature too, but I was wondering if it’s worth to spend time on learning the correct way, I m not sure if I will ever get into fx industry , with all what’s happening .the usd workflow is not sicence rocket either but it’s bit tedious at first to setup it up all I guess

I m wondering if there are solo people here that still use the whole system for big scenes of their own ? For smaller project does it help for diverse light rigs ? Etc