Week 1 introduction

The HUD

The overall look of Houdini is similar to Maya with a little bit of Nuke. For me the design looks close to how Maya and its tools are positioned in the same areas. The part of Nuke that I see in this HUD is the use of Nodes. On the far right is where all the nodes are placed, this is where all of the reactions/commands happen.

On the far left is where a lot of the interactive tools are kept. The top left is the different selection tools when grouping object.

The lock image at the bottom of this example image is to stop any changes from happening with the selecting tools. This is also called the secure selection tool.

Node area

On the far right of the scene is the node area. This is where all of the information for the objects and rendering are stored. By pressing Tab in the boxes it will come up with a search bar that can be used to search up specific nodes.

Move

Rotate

Scale

The top arrow is pointing to where the settings for the nodes are. The barrow below that is where the nodes are arranged and created. You nay notice a blue bar on one of the nodes. This shows what the user is viewing.

Lastly these arrows point to the timeline at the bottom of the Houdini viewport.

11/10/24 week2 (dominoes)

Week 3 18/10/24 (ducks and water simulation)

Lego wooden floor Houdini render

25/20/24 week 4 Cloth break simulation

week 5 01/11/24

week 6

Week 7 15/11/24 Destruction

This lesson we used glass and cement simulations of destruction. We had a robot that comes with Houdini in the default files, walk through and interact with the materials. The final video shows the wall being obliterated by the robot. I find myself struggling with the tasks in Houdini. I think this is due to a lot of of adjustments in the work. I understand what everything does so I will start practicing the lessons at home as well as in class.

Week 8 22/11/24

truck movement

The truck exercise was a great exercise. I think drawing car movements is a useful skill to have as you can guide and create realistic ways for a vehicle to travel. I’m happy to have done the class work.

When opening the file for the work a few things were already done. Such as the camera view and the scene environment textures. We imported a truck and used the lesson guiding and adjusting the speeds when travelling down the set environment.

I tried exporting a clip using the mantra rendering system and for some reason There’s a line and no background. I’ve put my clip up regardless just to give an idea of how the smoke and movement looks.

week 9 29/11/24

Week 9 consisted of making a building in Houdini. I’m not a fan of the bu8ilding aspect in Houdini as you have to put a lot of thought in to the geometry side of things. Such as stretching grids and multiplying box columns.

This is an important lesson to learn as it makes destruction easier to use when destroying thins built in Houdini through a script instead of unpacking an obj model from the internet.

My building inn the lesson didn’t turn out the best but I learnt a lot of basic nodes and the basic principle of creating buildings and objects in Houdini.

Week 10 06/12/24

week 11

week 12

Assignment project

Create a simulation of a natural disaster – tsunami

I tried to do my best in creating a tsunami for my assignment. I found the task to be very difficult especially since Houdini as a whole has been challenging to use. This is due to the amount of settings and nodes that are used to make up such simple simulations.

If I had top do this assignment again I don’t think I’d end up creating a tsunami just because the render was too much for my PC. Another thing I’d like to note is that I didn’t import anything apart from the HDRI in my scene. Also I made the tsunami from scratch instead of using the ocean simulations.

I struggled with Houdini, due to the in depth mechanics for simulating the scene I didn’t know where to start.

Creating the scene took a lot of trial and error and playing around with. I was thinking on adding in an ocean from the ‘Oceans’ tab in Houdini but decided against it due to the stress when simulating thew scene. Also I originally planned on using a submarine to be placed and destroyed in my scene but again decided against it as there were complications on taking the object apart. The ocean didn’t have the exact look that I wanted it to have but I tried my best in using Houdini and using tutorials to enhance my skills from class.

Creation of the tsunami

For the tsunami I started by creating a tube and using a clip node to cut it in half, producing a a curvy plate that will end up becoming my wave. I then use3d a remesh node to split my wave into lot of triangles that will be used to calculate ocean like movements and particle interactions.

I used a tube node to begin with my project and combined it with the clip node to cut it in half creating a half cylinder. It has the general shape of a tsunami so it helps having the building blocks for the natural disaster already.

The Vop net helped add layers of detail giving it that rippel effect that water would have when moving about.

The ocean evaluate and ocean spectrum helped create the ocean like movement for the project when closing towards the building.

Building

I chose to make a building in Houdini so that it would be easier to destroy it and have parts flying off. The original plan was to use a submarine model and have that destroyed, however I couldn’t find out how to unpack the model and destroy it using the rbdbuletsolver.

Another issue I had was having the building collapse on command when making contact with the tsunami. My original plan was to use the scatter node and have points scatter on the building. All points would have a base value of 0. When making contact with the tsunami the points would have a value of 1 and collapse. There’s a picture/screenshot of me attempting to perform this above.

The network of nodes I created for some reason didn’t work. Instead I timed the destruction myself using a keyframe and applied force in the direction the tsunami was moving.

I made to buildings so that one would break on frame 102 and the other would fill in for the majority of the scene and leave the scene on frame 102. Its not the a great way of using the rbd node however I couldn’t find a setting or a node to make one tower stay in the scene for the whole time and break at a later point in the scene.

Spray scatter

I attempted created a spray that would burst off of the wave when moving and made contact. I followed a tutorial that would replicate this interact5ion however the outcome did not come out they way I wanted it to and it took a strain on my pc. The loading time in my scene would be really