Houdini Practice Hour: Modeling fully procedural

Posted on 10. July 2020 By adminNo Comment

Ok, Friday is release day and the next “Houdini FX Practice Hour” project has started. We will start this week building a Coffee Cup Scene with some beans flying around. Also, we will dive into “procedural” Polygon Modeling in Houdini FX and, later for the beans, into Retopo and Rigid Bodies.

So, for people coming from other 3D applications, you will find a whole bunch of important Houdini FX concepts like selection, groups, automatically generated groups and channel expressions with HScript. Everything step-by-step, so that you can build your own scene.

Let’s start this week with fundamentals and build these paper cups – procedurally.

Thanks and have a nice weekend,

Helge

If you want to support me for publishing more free tutorials, you could join my Patreons: https://www.patreon.com/pixeltrain3d

Or you can download the Project files on Gumroad: https://gumroad.com/pixeltrain3d

In this tutorial, we will talk about the ideas of the Coffee Cups & Beans project, collect references with the help of PureRef and setting up our Houdini FX Project. It’s about learning how to start a new project.

These topics are covered:

Setting up a new Houdini Project
Understanding $JOB & relative paths
Importance of References
Using PureRef (https://www.pureref.com) to collect references
Moving & Resizing the PureRef Canvas
Finding the Key Bindings Re-arranging Boards
Entering Nodes /Text in PureRef Presenting Images
Adding Images to a PureRef Board
Optimize Boards
Exporting a PureRef Board as PNG
Loading Reference Images to Houdini FX

This tutorial series „Houdini Practice Hour“ is meant for newbies in Houdini FX, who want to learn the basic tasks of modeling, uvs, shading, lighting and rendering on a project base in Houdini FX. I will explain you step by step the workflows and tools, so you can follow along and then experiment to deepen your knowledge. Learning means „getting your hands dirty“. This series doesn’t give you the most effective, elegant or the “only right way”, it’s concepted to give you a solid learning experience.

If your are searching for a complete introduction into the fundamentals of Houdini FX, you can take a look here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/houdinifxfundamentals