Happy 2025! New Year means NEW RESOLUTIONS! New Goals! New Hope! A new year bring new opportunities!

What do you want this year?

What do you want to change?

Houdini is theme of my blog so a lot of my own New Year Resolutions are Houdini related. For me it’s creating Short Films!

What are your New Year Resolutions for 2025?

I know it’s probably been a broken record for me now, creating films is something I’ve been ranting in some of my live streams and videos, BUT I have exciting news! I really think this is the year I can make it happen. I’ve improved a lot in my Karma rendering skills, tweaking parameters, and just getting to know the Karma rendering engine. I spent the recent months just close to the end of 2024 doing a non-stop material study in Karma. Rendering food to transparent caustics, and to realistic human facial skin. I think I’m finally getting somewhere.

The skills I’ve improved on rendering in my recent material study in Karma (Houdini) marks a new milestone for me and I’ve come a long way in comparison to last year. Last Year’s Resolutions for 2024

Here’s a RECAP (below) of some of the things I’ve done in 2024!

Realistic Facial Human Render in Karma Houdini

Rendered in Karma Houdini & Human Model is CC4 Reallusion

This one was HARD! Probably the hardest thing I did in 2024. It took a good several months non-stop trying to get the skin to render out right. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t create the awesome human model, I mainly focused purely on getting the Karma material parameters to render out the skin as realistic as I could. The human model is a CC4 character from Reallusion. I ported the character into Houdini and recreated all the materials in Karma and tweaked the parameters until I could get this realism level. I admit there’s still much more work to be done, but take a look at my earlier versions, where I started off with, it’s a HUGE IMPROVEMENT!

Keep scrolling a little lower for pictures of a timeline of my versions.

Progress Timeline for Skin Rendering in Karma Houdini

These are the earlier versions that I started off with. It’s a different human model, because in between the two character models that I worked out, Reallusion had several major updates to the software that generated more detail texture maps in the screenshots above at the top of this post that generated MUCH better results. So I decided to update and generate a new character with higher detail maps and re-imported all the materials in Houdini once again. That’s what you see in the images above at the beginning of this blog post.

This timeline snapshots is my progress during the more earlier stages of my material study in Karma Houdini.

Hard Surface Modeling in Houdini

Rendered in Karma Houdini using a LOT of PolyBeveling

Late last year of 2024, I did a bit of experimenting with hard surface modeling and experimented how the light would reflect on surfaces. I used a lot of polybeveling. The results were very pleasing! I’m starting to get a feel of how product designers think when they design hard cases to hold our electronic devices. This experiment really changed how I look at a product or how I would design/model something, I’ll always look at how the light reflects on the surface and how I could model things with more interesting light reflections on the surface.

Digital Baking

3D Models Created & Rendered in Houdini Karma

During November and December of 2025, I started a hiatus of creating Snack assets non-stop of almost more than a week and I did that everyday. I was hoping to use these assets for a Christmas video that never made it in time. I learned a LOT during this short 2 week journey of creating non-stop assets! Normal maps are SOOO important.

And on the little pose on the right with ALL my assets in one scene, that was done with Solaris’s Layout system which I really enjoyed playing around with for the first time! It was really fun! A little slow, but definitely something I will use again in the future and I’m planning on doing a video on the Solaris Layout, because I think everyone will benefit from learning how to use it!

Transmissive Materials

I did some test rendering with how Karma works with transmissive materials and what parameters would cause more refractions and reflections while testing the caustics in Karma Houdini. The caustics in Karma Houdini weren’t really that great, I find that you need a lot too much light to get that to work.

Unreal Engine

Last year I managed to create a workflow for characters created in Houdini and successfully export it into Unreal Engine that would still work flawlessly with UE’s Modular Control Rig system. All that took a LOT of trial and error figuring out the right parameters and getting everything right, because I wanted a click and drag solution from Houdini to UE and working seamlessly with UE’s Modular Control Rig! All that documented in extreme detail as well in a video series for Perk Members!

In the above screenshot on the right is the successfully created Custom Character Rig in UE5 working with the Modular Rig system. The character was modeled and rigged in Houdini using KineFX and exported with parameters to match that of UE’s mannequin to get that seamless satisfying click and drag solution in UE’s Modular Rig. That was important to me because I wanted Houdini to use it’s procedural features to prepare the character and make it as easy as possible in UE.

The screenshot above on the LEFT is an experiment I did trying to push my luck by increasing the number of arms to 6. Unfortunately I learned the hard way, UE5’s Modular Rig works very differently when it comes to more than 2 arms!

Photogrammetry

Last year I explored some photogrammetry and scanned my tart that I baked and failed to scan the strawberry due to reflections and my camera lacked polarized lens. The polarized lens in photogrammetry can be another goal that I will tackle this year!

Happy New Resolutions for 2025!