I recently came across this blog post on Substance Magazine about footwear design using Substance Painter. This got me fired up and inspired to try this workflow out for apparel and CG. Houdini’s Vellum Drape node is awesome for creating clothing and simulating it action, which got me thinking what awesome animation could come out of all this if combined forces with Substance Painter.

In this Bubblepins Member-Only Video I give out a few techniques and hints on how the Vellum Solver can be used to model the trashcan full of scrap paper in the dorm room scene. The full solution will be available in the Live Stream.

Procedurally add some more realistic movements to the walk cycle animation.

I finally started a new Blender channel on Youtube, it’s about time!

Creating Toon Animation with Houdini’s COPs and Blender Toon Shaders. zBrush’s NPR Filter inspired me to explore more ways to create Toon and Stylized animation.

I often interchange between using the Transform node and the Edit node in Houdini and I was asked in the comments on one of my Youtube tutorials, why I choose the Edit node over the Transform node?

Remap my Procedural Animated Flapping Wings to a full 3D Model Mesh and drive the flapping wing animation

Procedural Animated Legs generated in Houdini! Still in proof of concept stage, but I think it’s getting somewhere.

Procedural Animated Wings generated in Houdini

My Procedural Animation Test that procedurally generates flapping wings inspired by Sculpted Animation, also known as Key Meshing in Blender

To create the growth activation effect you see in the animation, you slowly wake up the grains, but not all at once.

Polishing up the Grains Simulation Visual Effect. Terrain is made with Heightfields in Houdini and added a Vellum Grains simulation for rock slide effect.

Adding Vellum Grains Simulation to my Heightfield Terrain created in Houdini from the previous couple of posts.

This post is inspired by Andrey Lebrov’s Spring CG Channel that was announced on his Youtube channel. I had always wanted to learn Substance Painter to enhance my Houdini Heightfield terrains. And also solve my UV issues with Heightfields in Houdini.

Breakdown of Terrain Generated in Houdini with Heighfields, textured in Substance Painter and Substance Designer for the water material. Thorough step by step process with images along each step. Masking heightfield layers and texturing them in Painter.

There’s a correction I need to do for a tutorial video I posted. In the video, “Camera Tracking Objects by Translation Position” at 14:17 to 15:13 on the timeline I made a mistake in editing. I am trying to demonstrate how to adjust the Camera position in the SOP Level, but I mistakenly put the transform node in the wrong place in the network.

How can Houdini Help? As the world enter a new day with lock downs and the world changes adjust its life style, I hear more and more brave souls that are trying their best to help out the situation and save lives. I can’t help it by ask myself how I can help?

I continue from the last video on setting up the Agents and Crowd simulation, using those same agents to Avoiding Obstacles and add more complexity to the Crowd simulation by creating a main walk path from a curve node.

The Crowd tools in Houdini is optimized very well. The 3D animated characters used in the Crowd system are known as Crowd Agents in Houdini. Houdini bakes the animations and a name is assigned to the animation for the corresponding agent. This makes it easy to attach several animations to one rigged character.

In this article, I demonstrate how to setup a very defined force field that will influence certain geometries in the destruction simulation. This should leave certain geometries in the same dopnet unaffected by the forces, but still have forces affect selected geometries.