Happy New Resolutions for 2024! Houdini 20 & Upcoming Karma Materials Video!

Happy New Year to All!

2024 has officially arrived! What will this year bring? What new resolutions have you made for 2024? Is it improving your 3D skills with Houdini? Maybe leveling up your 3D renders with Houdini’s Karma rendering engine and save a bit of cash.

I created a poll on Bubblepins’ Community Tab to see what everyone Resolutions are for 2024! And I also included my resolutions on there as well. I wonder if there will be any common ground between my resolutions and yours?

Youtube Poll for New Year's Resolutions for 2024

Upcoming Plans for Karma

Demonstration of Karma Emissive Materials driven by texture in Houdini

I’m so impressed with Karma that I’m planning to create a short animation for the next video, probably 10-20s long and this will be a nice test to see if I can use Karma for animated short films. The quality is definitely there and it would be nice to say that I created a whole short animated film in Houdini, but that has yet to be proven so I need to hold back my excitement.

Here is a teaser screenshot that I was working on during the Christmas & New Year’s holiday, it’s not quite finished yet, but I can even sense the story bleeding out of this image.

Recent Video Post about Karma

In my recent video post, I did an introduction to Karma & Solaris to get Houdini users started into rendering in Karma. If you are paying for an external rendering engine like Redshift to get your Houdini scenes rendered out, you can try using Karma and save a few bucks. This is exactly what I’ve done! Karma is up to the job!

Emissive Materials

I am very impressed with the quality I’m getting out of Karma and the ease of use, just because it’s integrated with Houdini, the workflow saves me a lot of time. Redshift is faster than Karma, but Karma isn’t slow and it can handle quite a bit at great speeds. In the most recent video, I throw a lot of emissive materials in my scene with the Christmas Tree and emissive materials are quite costly for rendering, but Karma handled it very well. The quality is beautiful! Emissive materials is something that a lot of engines struggle with, even the great Unreal Engine 5 doesn’t have the best lighting when it comes from emissive materials and light bouncing from emissive materials is quite new to UE5. It wasn’t always there. UE4.27’s emissive materials didn’t really emit light, that was added in UE5. So I am proud of Karma and how it handles the emissive materials.

What is your favourite feature in Houdini 20?

Houdini 20 was released in late October 2023, but you might be wondering why I haven’t talked about it as much as the other Youtubers have. I didn’t see much that impressed me and during the same time, I was just getting into Unreal Engine. I was very distracted, but I finally got around to Houdini and when I’m looking at some of its newer features in Houdini 20, I think my favorite new feature is probably the Crowd SOP.

During Black Friday of 2023, I purchased a new Blender add-on named “Procedural Crowds”. It is SO SIMPLE to use! I thought I was done with Houdini’s crowds system, but Houdini 20’s new Crowd SOP tool looks very very good as well. And as of recent weeks, Reallusion dropped an awesome new Crowd feature in their iClone 8 app, which is amazing as well!

Man all these new crowd features, this calls for a comparison video! I find myself loving all just as much!

Houdini 20’s New Crowd SOP

I think they all have their respective positive strengths for selective tasks. For example, I would use Houdini for complex crowd motions, like things that require the agents to react to multiple things around the environment that you create.

Blender’s Procedural Crowds Addon

And I would use Blender’s add-on Procedural Crowds for stuff I need in 5min for a client or to demo something quickly.

Reallusion’s iClone 8.4 New Crowd SIM Feature

iClone 8.4’s new Crowd feature seems to have a very nice balance of both! I can tell you that iClone has an advantage over the other two with it’s massive library of animated motions. You can get high quality crowd animations for preview with your client in a matter of minutes. But iClone suffers from one very big flaw is that it doesn’t have a native rendering engine. So if you want to render a high quality animation of the crowds, you would still have to export/import it into another software like Houdini & Karma or Blender’s Cycles for rendering. Definitely buzz kill.