FEM Driven by Kine FX Animations & Mocap

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Public Live Stream (free)

On the right is a link to the unedited version of the Live Stream.

Houdini’s FEM driven by Kine FX rigged Animation

FEM Driven by Kine FX

When Houdini first launched Kine FX as one of the new features of Houdini 18.5, it opened countless possibilities! This FEM scene turned out very nice and I really enjoyed preparing the Plant Eater bite effect. Kine FX rigging and keyframing the mouth opening and close movements was super easy using Rig Pose nodes.

In this week’s Live Stream I go over how to setup two scenes. The first scene which is also the first part of the Stream video is shown on the right. A weird sphere character taking a bite out on our favorite Houdini Rubber Toy.

Doesn’t that lip just make it all worth?

Emebedded FEM Layer in Houdini using FEM Fuse Constraint (can be applied to bone and muscle scenes)

Plant Eater

Part 2 of this Stream video will cover Embedded FEM Layers that is often used to simulate bone & muscle. There is a Bone geometry that is has an animation driven by a Kine FX rig. The Bone geometry is then tightly glued to another FEM layer, which is the skin of the Plant Head and then causes both geometry to move. Since both FEM objects are tightly binded together and the Bone moves, this consequently causes the Skin geometry to move.

Plant Eater Mouth Animation generated with Houdini FEM embedded layers & rendered with Blender Cycles materials

Rendering

I love how this technique creates this bumpy skin look for the head of the Plant Eater. After throwing on some materials and rendering it in Blender Cycles, this is what it looks like on the right.

I love how the wrinkles are so visible on corners of the mouth, it makes the Plant Eater look more realistic. I wonder what this will look like if I have an army of these Plant Eaters on a grass field for the upcoming topic on Crowds!

Foot Print technique is used to dent this wall as a Destruction scene in Houdini

Foot Print Technique

From the previous Stream, I went over a Foot Print scene, where a character walks over a grid plane and stamps foot prints all over the ground. I took this technique and made minor adjustments to create a destruction scene. The scene seen on the right is just one application of the Foot Print technique for denting destruction.

It was unfortunate in the last Stream near the end, I ran out of time to properly go over the Foot Print technique in more detail. I am now preparing to redo the tutorial for this scene, stay tuned!