Building and animating surfaces with procedural beziers.
Row and column logic makes it easy-ish for texturing like below. A Houdini viewport animation using COPs:
Visualised handles although in the system they’re controlled by vex code & parameters:
Dynamic dunes
Houdini - Automate flipbook screenshot with key press
I’ve put together a method for creating a flipbook image and saving it directly to a folder with time and date as the filename, all from a single key press. It uses a python script and a boring bit of setting up. Big time saver in the long run though, if you need to save out single frames from the viewport often like I do.
Here’s how to get it running: (I’ve only tried this on PC but should translate to other platforms)
First of all we need to add the HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR to the houdini.env file. This is so we can add custom python modules to Houdini and in this case my little module for creating the flipbook images.
For me it looked like this (But can be anywhere you want to put it): HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR="D:/Dropbox/PixelsInProgress/PIP_HoudiniAssets/Presets;&"
Now go to the folder you've linked to in the .env file and add a folder with the name 'python2.7libs'
Download the PIP_FlipBook module here: PIP_FlipBookTools
And place into the 'python2.7libs' folder. Should look something like the image
Next go to This PC -> Documents -> houdinixx.x->scripts and add this script:
Or if the script already exists add this line: hou.hscript('''alias F12 python -c "'from PIP_FlipBookTools import PIP_FlipBook; PIP_FlipBook.ExportScreenshot()'" ''')
You can read more about the 456.py script from the houdini docs but essentially it gets called everytime a project is opened and in this case is setting the alias for the F12 key. https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/hom/locations.html
And that should be it! - F12 to automatically make a flip book image with the current camera resolution , saved to a screenshots folder in the project directory.
Growth simulation with dynamics
Improving some workflows for getting my growth systems to work nicely with simulated dynamics in Houdini.
Here’re some older prototypes which I don’t think I ever got around to posting previously:
Lidar painting
Trying out using lidar on an iPad in a sort of light painting context. The paint brush is my hat.
A few tweaks to the point cloud in Houdini to get a nebulous sculpture.
An another one with a bit more artistic license.
Twists
Kaleidocycles
Here’s some flip book animations of some vex generated kaleidocycles with dynamic GLSL shaders.
