Sprites On Points Digital Assest

Sprites are pretty cool, but in a clean install of Houdini you can only use them on particles using the Sprite POP. It turns out, you can add some attribute trickery to make sprites work on plain ol' points. The cooler thing is that this Sprite SOP concept works in Houdini Escape (which doesn't have particles). I wrote a full ... Read More...

Varying Materials Using A Single Shader

Nothing ground breaking here, but for someone who is into neat little tricks to control shaders, I thought this was worth showing. What the video covers is a way to vary the materials on a single object using a single shader (differing from the usual method of using multiple shaders for different pieces of an object).  I'll leave it at ... Read More...

Houdini And 3DConnexion Devices

UPDATE: I thought I was doing something special and unique but it seems someone has beat me to it. Still, even with all the effort I've put into this (and it still not being totally usable yet), I'm finding the experience very fulfilling. When even failing is enjoyable, one must take note and realize that you must really love what ... Read More...

Houdini Occlusion Asset

I've received a few requests for an asset of the occlusion inline VOP I used for the occlusion video so I thought I would put one together. I call it "Occlusion 2" mainly because it's the second occlusion VEX function. The occlusion VOP that comes with Houdini is actually the first function which gives you occluded irradiance which is a ... Read More...

Houdini BRDF Asset

I'm not sure why illuminance loops fascinate me so. It could be because I never had access to such a cool feature or maybe it leads me to re-visit classic bi-directional reflectance functions (I like the math). Whatever the reason, I decided to create a brdf VOP digital asset so you don't need to type a lot to get ... Read More...

Image Planes Part 4 (Object IDs)

Didn't think the image plane series was complete enough so I tacked on this little diddy. I covers how to get object (or primitive) ids using image planes in Houdini and what you can do with them in the compositor using the lumakey COP. The compositor part I learned from SYmek, who I feel is an integral part of the ... Read More...