Well, just after a long party yesterday night at the Creative Circle, here is the latest installation.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/22l2sx82m75buxj/H-0buUQAUP [dropbox.com]

HoudiniGuides_GeneralConcepts_10_Camera.pdf

I am sure you guys are going to like this one, it was one of the things that took me by surprise because of a naming issue.

Enjoy.

Jordibares, a thought regarding takes and overrides:
while softimage structure allows you to override from top->bottom (you can place override on the top most layer and override everything below)

overrides in houdini propagate the other way around bottom->top lowest level override will be on point attribute.

Not saying the one or the other is right - just pointing out the difference.

Ultimately that is my intention with this effort (bigger than I though I must confess), to show the Softimage community Houdini is way closer than Maya philosophically (ICE gave us that!) and extremely more powerful, but also can be easier to learn that looks at first.

If there is one thing I am realising is that the training material for Houdini is very biased to their core market (understandably) and I am trying to use these guides to show how I would love to be exposed to the product.

Hope you are enjoying the guides.

nick angus
A nice one I figured out also is something I thought would always be Softimage exclusive!

Hiding polygon faces, I love the fact that you can put a visibility override on a cluster of Polys and hide them at rendertime. It's great for culling geometry outside the camera frustrum etc.

I discovered you can select poly faces in the viewport and tab (still in the viewport) a group node down, this makes a group of those faces. You can then put a delete sop down and delete only that group. The bypass on the delete node is respected by takes, so you can turn faces on and off with takes!

Once I got my head around some of the Houdini logic I find that if you can think of something you want to do there will be at least three ways of doing it in Houdini.

As much as I love our amazing Softimage for lighting and rendering, I think once people adjust their thinking a little they will fall in love with a product that goes way deeper and will keep them interested and challenged for years to come.

I would find Houdini far more logical than Maya if I was just starting out in 3d today.

Cheers, Nick

You are right, Houdini is a top>down approach, and after working with both product I can tell you I am much more productive due to that design approach.

Something to discuss with the guys at SESI

owlYzarc
Jordibares, a thought regarding takes and overrides:
while softimage structure allows you to override from top->bottom (you can place override on the top most layer and override everything below)

overrides in houdini propagate the other way around bottom->top lowest level override will be on point attribute.

Not saying the one or the other is right - just pointing out the difference.

Jordi,
I managed to find a way to replace my current MOCAP workflow from SI to Houdini(thanks for the fitting curve tip - i think this was from Phil). I now find out some more issues(will solve them as appear). But i need to tell you, your guide it's missing in one key aspect: shaders. Houdini comes with this mantra surface shader, but how to quickly achieve metal, wood, glass from this? This is one area where Houdini is well behind others - Arnold is coming to Houdini but that is some extra money, and not unlimited render nodes. So far i like the Mantra rendering engine, but shaders are, grrr, abysmal -it's a shame that this beautifull engine lacks in this key aspect. So try to make a quick tutorial on creating metal/glass/wood and upload scenes.
And one note to SideFX: on Orbolt there is a shader done by one guy and it has some great samples of photo real materials(https://www.orbolt.com/asset/_danylyon::PBR_layered_material). [orbolt.com] It lacks a clear tutorial on how he did those photo real materials, and scene samples. If you don't have a huge library shipped with the product(like Modo for example) at least do some training on this crucial topic. So why not make a tutorial on shaders(past on that grass shader done by Ari Danesh witch is really only help a little). I mean a tutorial on glass, metal, wood etc so we can achieve productivity levels quick with Mantra. Hope i will not start to talk alone like on Autodesk side again. Just to be sure there are no misunderstandings. No one is attacking anything/anyone here or being impolite or rude. I just find some aspects are lacking, and i try to ask politely to remedy them. What you do next it's your call.
Thank you for your work Jordi,
Constantin


p.s. someone bragged about the lack of pivot moving hot key; well it's insert key. let's focus on things missing, ok? so far animation tools are great, modeling still trying to grasp it.

Its on the plan, if you look at the mind map on my first posts you will see shaders is one of the areas but I though first go through some basic comparative introduction to the interface, the camera, what nodes are, the interface.

My suggestion regarding shaders, stick to the mantra surface shader, that is the one that is closest to mia_material and will do the job brilliantly.

Regarding PBR_Layered, I already fired an email but you should add on the Feature Request (bugs) so they know about it. I believe is great too!

I will try to accelerate the development on shaders instead of digital assets which will take quite a bit.

thx

Constantin X
Jordi,
I managed to find a way to replace my current MOCAP workflow from SI to Houdini(thanks for the fitting curve tip - i think this was from Phil). I now find out some more issues(will solve them as appear). But i need to tell you, your guide it's missing in one key aspect: shaders. Houdini comes with this mantra surface shader, but how to quickly achieve metal, wood, glass from this? This is one area where Houdini is well behind others - Arnold is coming to Houdini but that is some extra money, and not unlimited render nodes. So far i like the Mantra rendering engine, but shaders are, grrr, abysmal -it's a shame that this beautifull engine lacks in this key aspect. So try to make a quick tutorial on creating metal/glass/wood and upload scenes.
And one note to SideFX: on Orbolt there is a shader done by one guy and it has some great samples of photo real materials(https://www.orbolt.com/asset/_danylyon::PBR_layered_material). [orbolt.com] It lacks a clear tutorial on how he did those photo real materials, and scene samples. If you don't have a huge library shipped with the product(like Modo for example) at least do some training on this crucial topic. So why not make a tutorial on shaders(past on that grass shader done by Ari Danesh witch is really only help a little). I mean a tutorial on glass, metal, wood etc so we can achieve productivity levels quick with Mantra. Hope i will not start to talk alone like on Autodesk side again. Just to be sure there are no misunderstandings. No one is attacking anything/anyone here or being impolite or rude. I just find some aspects are lacking, and i try to ask politely to remedy them. What you do next it's your call.
Thank you for your work Jordi,
Constantin


p.s. someone bragged about the lack of pivot moving hot key; well it's insert key. let's focus on things missing, ok? so far animation tools are great, modeling still trying to grasp it.

This is where I am… let me know if there is anything missing…

Hi,
Jordy thanks for you guides,
I'm in the Concept Layout one, and guys i'm curious about how do manage the parameters view ?
- Do you open a floating one(for me the keyboard shortcut change the active view, how to open a floating one ???) and do it all in this one
- Do you have sort of a shortcut to open like the right clic/geometry parameters floating view, so having multiples floating panels ? maybe we can open one on a double clic or something ?

Thanks,
Noël

jordibares
This is where I am… let me know if there is anything missing…

To me looks pretty much complete. Maybe someone with few seats will fire a request to SideFx for pbr layered shader.
Have a great weekend,
Constantin

NNois
Hi,
Jordy thanks for you guides,
I'm in the Concept Layout one, and guys i'm curious about how do manage the parameters view ?
- Do you open a floating one(for me the keyboard shortcut change the active view, how to open a floating one ???) and do it all in this one
- Do you have sort of a shortcut to open like the right clic/geometry parameters floating view, so having multiples floating panels ? maybe we can open one on a double clic or something ?

Thanks,
Noël

Hi Noel,
I am new to this as you so don't shoot me if i did not understood what you want. You need to press ‘p’ inside network pane to bring the parameters up. If you want a floating window go to ‘windows’, ‘new floating window’ and click on the plus sign at the top. Then choose new pane type-parameters. Look at the windows and you will see that it's an area where you have two arrows and one dotted line(in the middle). If you hover your mouse over you will be able to flip panes between them(up-down; left-right) or to extend one window over the other with left click. Hope i helped you.
Constantin

thanks constantin i was looking for this “p” shortcut, perfect. I' sorry the help is very good but haven't found this one !

Just a precision, we can't pop out this temp pane right ?

If you press P in the viewport, you'll get a popup dialog with the various dialogs (tool parameters, handle parameters, and the regular operator dialog).

Try pressing P to bring the parameters and then, hovering on top of it, press

Alt+Ctrl+C

To tear it off as a copy.

That way you can have easily many parameters from many parts of the network exposed, like we use to do in Softimage.

BTW, you can change the keyboard if you want to mimic Softimage but I will suggest go little by little on that.

:-)

Bookmark this page

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini13.0/basics/panes [sidefx.com]

Today I was too busy to do a big one so spent a bit of time on the Color Management in Houdini which is very easy.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/22l2sx82m75buxj/H-0buUQAUP [dropbox.com]

HoudiniGuides_GeneralConcepts_11_ColorManagement.pdf

Tomorrow more.

This I am sure I will be extending in a big way over the coming weeks but for now I think it showcases a few things all XSI users are going to like.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/22l2sx82m75buxj/H-0buUQAUP [dropbox.com]

HoudiniGuides_GeneralConcepts_12_Expressions.pdf

Feedback very welcome on this one houdini experts.

jordibares
HoudiniGuides_GeneralConcepts_11_ColorManagement.pdf

Small correction in slide 3: I think 16-bit floating point images (eg. .exr's) are also assumed linear.

HoudiniGuides_GeneralConcepts_12_Expressions.pdf

I think slide 10 has the text repeated from slide 9?

What's the advantage of using curly brackets? i.e. ${HIP} & ${OS}, vs $HIP & $OS.

MartybNz
What's the advantage of using curly brackets? i.e. ${HIP} & ${OS}, vs $HIP & $OS.

Normally when you use the $ sign, it just takes the word following it as the name of the variable. By “word”, I mean all the letters/numbers until the first space or punctuation character. So if you want to have extra text that is *not* part of the variable name, you need to denote with curly braces.

So for example,
$OSfoo expands to value of the OSfoo variable
${OS}foo expands to the value of the OS variable, followed by the word foo

Curly brackets protect the variable. ie,

$OS = foo

sim$OSsmoke.0001.bgeo : Err: variable OSsmoke not found while..
sim${OS}smoke.0001.bgeo : resolves fine.

..this is just like the linux bash shell script language.

Very cool Edward/Paul. That's going to very useful; was using punctuation for separation.

Thanks!