Posts in Houdini
Crystal Renders, Fracturing by Material Type with RBD Tools in Houdini

Fracture a geometry, add interior noise displacement using RBD Tools, and material blending in Redshift.

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RBD Connected & Disconnected Face Nodes in Houdini

Have you ever tried rendering a transparent material that is fractured? How about rendering a fractured geometry before it breaks? This becomes an issue when rendering a destruction simulation with glass-like material, because the geometry looks broken before it actually breaks. This article describes briefly how in the video tutorial these issues are solved.

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Tearing & Deforming Metal (RBD Tools in Houdini)

The RBD Tools redefine the workflow and simplified how the physical attributes are created and how easily it is to create and customize constraints. Break and switch constraints is super awesome feature and all this power with a click of a mouse. It’s starting to feel like cheating.

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Destruction Dust Pyro (Shelf Tool)

Here we demonstrate how to add dust pyro to the a previous Destruction scene that already contained Debri Particles to exaggerate the collision impact. Here we reuse the Debri Source points and convert it into a volume.

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Controlling when to Break Glue Constraints in Houdini

Here I demonstrate how to animate the force field to produce a delay in the destruction of a fractured wall. This is a technique I used to produce some variation in the scene of the destruction of a fractured wall structure. The resulting visual effect has a huge hole that gets blasted through the wall and slowly destroys the rest of the wall pieces as the force field grows in its animation.

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Coordinate Positions are Vectors

Points can be formed into vectors. By knowing one point position and the origin position, using two points, a vector can be formed. This comes super handy in Houdini once we realize this. Vector manipulation can be used to influence simulations.

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Basic RBD Scene Setup with Glue Constraints in Houdini

Demonstrates how to setup a simple basic RBD (rigid body dynamic) dopnet simulation scene in Houdini with glue constraints. The glue strength is adjusted to a level that withstands the gravity. This is a perfect starting point or template that can be used as a starting point before adding more complex forces.

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Destruction Glue Constraint in Houdini

Destruction Simulations are controlled by the way you fracture the geometry being destroyed and how the glue constraints are to be broken on impact. Check out this video, where I covered the basics of setting up a destruction simulation using glue constraints provided by the voronoi fracture and I covered some basic concepts for glue constraints, to understand some fundamentals.

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Vellum Sim & RBD Sim Interactions

Having Vellum simulations work with other types of simulations can require some creativity. The multisolver didn’t work with the Vellum solver. I started tinkering with different ways to mix the Vellum solver with a simple RBD simulation setup and came up with a multiple phase workflow to create a more realistic Vellum cloth dynamics with the RBD simulation.

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Normals in Geometry & Computer Graphics

Normals are vectors in computer graphics that define the exterior surface of a geometry and the direction the surface is facing. Normals may also be called “Surface Normals”, but usually are referred as “normals”, are used in 3D applications to help render the polygon on the screen by distinguishing the front and back side of each primitive.

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