I have a ton of video tutorial material on my machine that covers all sorts of stuff in Houdini, but I must say that the gas solver series is may favorite. I knew it would be great, because when someone says, “Hey, want to know how to create a gas solver that shows how to create volumetric vector fields from implicit surfaces from scratch?” I’m sure all of us would want to be the first one in line… well, maybe just a few of us. This series really opened up dops for me because I saw many implications of what was being shown that could be used for so many other tasks like the utilization of vector and scalar fields.

Of course, it might just be me finally coming into my own with Houdini because I have made a pretty serious study of it. I’m still not quite where I’d like to be with the rigging and shading systems, but I’m getting there. I’m still in awe of the infinite possibilities that Houdini has and I see more and more how it is ideally suited to be at the center of any 3D production environment.

In other news, Side FX posted Houdini 9.1.244 which has a big fix that I have been waiting for which dealt with accessing the help files quicker (it was an IPv4 vs. IPv6 issue if I recall), so if you are using Houdini and haven’t downloaded it yet (yes, Apprentice users can get it as well), it’s worth getting.

Here are the gas solver results directly from the tutorial and a tweak I did with the particles following a curve. The stringy these are the vector fields, the plane is a scalar pressure field, and the box points are being manipulated by both of those:

Custom Gas Solver Result from Geneome on Vimeo.

Custom Gas Solver With Curvation from Geneome on Vimeo.