Learning Houdini

I’ve been doing a couple of freelance projects lately. The first has been modelling seed pods for Shape of The World.

Shape of The World is an independent game under development here in Vancouver which was Kickstarted last year and is expected to be released later this year. Hollow Tree Games Inc. plans on releasing the game for PC, Mac, PS4, and XBox One; so if you’ve got any or all of those platforms at your disposal, I suggest you give it a go when it’s released. It promises to be a fantastic exploration game where procedurally populated landscapes will unfold you as you immerse yourself in it’s unique embrace.

The second freelance project I’ve been working on is teaching the Houdini 1 course over at VanArts. As you may be aware, once upon a time, I worked over at Side Effects Software Inc. as a product specialist. Part of my role there was coming up with educational material. I’ve always had a belief that illustrating simple step-by-step instructions that provide a specific result is a poor way to teach as it provides but little understanding of the decisions that lead to that specific result. Instead, I prefer to encourage exploration of a wide variety of tools so that students understand that they can tackle a problem from any number of directions.

I had taken a bit of a sabbatical after working on Ender’s Game and quite honestly fell behind in Houdini-land. Working on the seed pods, felt like a great way re-familiarize myself with Houdini. I really enjoy working on effects in the geometry context of Houdini, more-so than simulating. I think it’s fantastic the way that you can access and manipulate data in Houdini, and feel that anyone who wants to use Houdini should spend time in the geometry context pushing points around with the modelling tools. To that end, I decided to get my students to model some seed pods too. Learning the difference between HScript, VOPs, and VEX Snippets; Edits and Transforms; Lines and Curves; Metaballs and Particle Fluid Surfaces; Extrudes and Poly Extrudes; etc., etc., etc., can only help with one’s understanding of Houdini.

If you’re keen to get into Houdini, I’d suggest you do the same. Go on the Googles, find yourself some very simple reference, and get started! Learn how to model! And do it procedurally! Learn how you can parametrize your workflows, and create permutations intelligently rather than by brute force. It’s a fun exercise, and a great place to start.

Here’s a time lapse of me modelling a Soy Pod. It might not be the best way to do it, but it’s an unrehearsed video.

If you enjoyed that one, you might also want to check out the Mahogany Seed that I did late last year in the same style. Be warned that it took a little more fussing at first to figure out the direction I wanted to take, so the first third of the video is me just trying to figure out how to get the model to work procedurally. But that’s part of the charm, I think 🙂