Applied Houdini | Rigid Body

In Rigids I, we will talk about how to combine memory-efficient packed geometry instancing with Houdini's implementation of the Bullet solver to create super complicated sims quickly and easily!

In Rigids II, we will take what we learned about leveraging instancing in rigid body simulations from Rigids I, and apply it to a super-detailed building demolition! We will talk a lot about advanced constraint creation and management techniques, swapping instance geometry, and applying custom forces and rules for breakage. After we find the best simulation parameters by wedging our simulations, we'll render out a great looking sim!

In Rigids III we will tackle the complex task of destroying a vehicle! Included with the lesson is a high resolution helicopter that we will smash into the ground. We talk extensively about the mysterious "hard" and "cone twist" constraints, as well as strategies to combine them with the "glue" constraint in order to achieve the looks of different physical materials under stress. Perhaps most importantly, an efficient workflow is described in order to keep this complexity manageable as well as art directable. As a bonus, we will also render our final work in Mantra as well as export to the Alembic file format in order to read into other packages if we desire!

In Rigids IV, we're going to use Houdini 16's new Boolean SOP to learn how to fracture and subfracture (and sub-subfracture!) a large chunk of terrain that we'll make from scratch. We'll learn how to make a powerful workflow to surround this new production studio-class fracturing tool, as just knowing how to do the fracture is not enough. We will need to make every step of the way completely art directable, as well as efficient to create, to cache, to simulate, and to render. Along the way we will learn more scripting techniques, simulation tricks, and production tested tips in order to arrive at our exciting result!

In Rigids V, we'll create a series of blasts whose shape and position are based off of a dynamic laser gunfire simulation! We'll design the shape of the explosion at each laser bolt impact by controlling the sources of the new rigid body debris, particles, streamers, and smoke. Several commonly (and easily) used math topics are introduced here in order to achieve professional and art directable results, including quaternions, cross, and dot products. A professional workflow will as always be demonstrated to keep all of this organized and efficient, plus lots of advanced tips and tricks. The final renders will even be brought to life with illumination from the lasers themselves!

In Rigids VI, we'll learn how to create fast, stable, and easily art directable chains that can be used for all kinds of situations. Common pitfalls of naive approaches will be discussed, while demonstrating advanced constraint chaining, positioning, and orienting techniques to overcome them.

In Rigids II, we will take what we learned about leveraging instancing in rigid body simulations from Rigids I, and apply it to a super-detailed building demolition! We will talk a lot about advanced constraint creation and management techniques, swapping instance geometry, and applying custom forces and rules for breakage. After we find the best simulation parameters by wedging our simulations with TOPs nodes in PDG, we'll render out a great looking sim in both Mantra and Karama in Solaris!