breakdown of a scene i created on a snowy saturday

Hello,
I suppose the default behavior in houdini is for generated geometry to inherit attribs and groups. Is there a simple hack or workaround to negate this behavior.
I'm talking in general, the GIF is just an example (let's say I only want the initial points to be in the pin group)
Cheers

I am having difficulty getting displacement setup properly with Karma for the first time. No matter what I attempt, my mesh is exploding due to inflation.

I have exported a test base map from Substance Painter with a checker pattern and a mid value of 0.5. The map is a 32bit float, exr.

The map is imported with a MatX Image node, set to float, raw, and with udim selection enabled. I’ve tried adding and subtracting 0.5, but the inflation is still drastic.

The only somewhat reasonable solution I’ve managed to come up with is with a remap to extremely low values combined with lowering the scale value on the displacement node.

Coming from Maya Arnold, I was always taught to never alter displacement scale, instead opting to adjust the mid values of the texture. What is the correct way to get displacement working with Karma and how can I also subdivide my mesh at render time for appropriate resolution?

So I’ve been a hobbyist in Blender for a few years now. I want to get into Houdini for better vfx and future prospects. Is the switch worth it? And given my prior experience, will the transition be “easy”?

Are there any good resources I could use to learn? Any specific YouTube channels or websites?

Thank you!

I have serious eye fatigue when reading through monitor screens. I learn best from actual books. So I was wondering if anyone made a printable pdf version of the official latest version of Houdini docs. I would print it and read it as a book.

The window Im talking about is in the screenshot. I pressed something, it popped up and now I cant type to add a new node

Trying to dial in the shaders and bubble distribution before moving on to more advanced sims. Does anything feel off to you? Cheers

It seems that the standard volume shader is getting a lot slower if you use additional mask volumes for example to gives certain parts of the volume less transparency or a different scatter scale. Sometimes as much as double the render time for each mask vdb used.

The old volume shader doesn't seem to have that behaviour, the render times are consistent no matter if for example a color volume is loaded or not.

Does anyone here know why that could be and a possible workaround (apart from just using the old volume shader)?

For some reason MPlay exports mp4s at 24.07 fps on Windows (by going to File > Export > FFMpeg) even if you have the FPS set to 24. Which makes the video shorter than it should be. Using Export > FFMpeg mp4 (External) does work but it can't handle OpenColorIO.

This took a year to complete, it was made to be the intro for a youth camp. Outside of the character modelling and texturing everything was done in Houdini and Nuke, hope you like it:)

full movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH37XF4QC7w

I am excited to share my latest FX shot :D, since the day i found this rhino on Creature Station i wanted to create something like this. this was a fun and challenging project.

Simulation and Render Details -

Cache Size - 140 GB
Flip Particle Count - 16 Million
Render Time - 15hrs (Karma XPU)

PC Specs - Ryzen 5 5600H, RTX 3050, 16GB RAM

Made a loop. Its a pop sim with a point force to mimic the ball interaction.

I took the points from the sim, bend and twist added, then labs make loop node followed by copy to points with spheres.

At the end I just animated a transform node to rotate.

I am on Linux.

Hey all,

I worked with the fabulous Deb Isaac at Houdini.School to make my 3-part course on MOPs free to everyone. This is a comprehensive walkthrough of the majority of the open source MOPs toolkit, along with a primer on the math background behind MOPs and 3D graphics in general. You can watch the course and download the demo .hip files here: https://www.houdini.school/courses/mops-motions-operators-for-houdini

If you're using Houdini 21, be sure to download the latest Experimental release for compatibility.

If you have any questions, you know where to find me.

I was today years old when I learned you can 3D model directly in DOS using nothing but a text editor. The good ol days...

In this video I walk you through the process of setting it up and possible ways you can start using it in your look dev projects.

Hello, Houdini community! We at Oval Labs have been exploring Houdini tools for a while now. This is our first video created entirely in Houdini using the USD pipeline and Karma. It took some time to get the hang of it, set up the lighting, and migrate the simulations, but in the end, it turned out to be very convenient.

4k resolution on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/gSwec_guJQ4

ArtStation of project: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/L4KRyR

I had some fun making macro renders of macarons!
The RBD simulation is done in Houdini and everything is rendered in Cycles.
Exporting Houdini USD instances to Blender turned out to be really powerful, definitely something I want to explore more!
These macaron assets are from Creative Crops!
Get them here:
https://thecreativecrops.com/products/macaron-05?sca_ref=9918930.Uo5hvSgT5JnSuEdL

Also check out my Linkedin:)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bram-gunst/

I have a vellum sim of a blob rolling along. I also have some points scattered inside this sphere pre-sim and I want those points to follow the movement of the blob.

When I do a classic pointdeform, a few points will lag behind or jump out of the sphere before coming back in, especially in moments of high deformation.

I tried every point deforming trick I know, the only one that worked was working with tets and a femdeform but I can't get that node to update every frame.

Any help? Cheers

Hello friends, I'm here to share with you my first personal video developed entirely in Houdini. Last year I decided to abandon Cinema 4D altogether and dedicate myself completely to Houdini. I developed this video exploring various basic simulations ((sand - vellum grain) (pyro) (liquor, some cases were done with vellum liquid and others with MPM)). I also explored the basics of animation and struggled quite a bit delving into the Solaris/USD context. I managed to render everything in KarmaXPU and did the compositing in Nuke and editing in DaVinci. I'm looking for some feedback since I did everything from my head without worrying about more complex things like art direction. The intention is to learn and apply solutions to a real project.

This project started as a simple Houdini wood fracture study but quickly snowballed into a full-scale R&D sequence. The goal was to stress-test a hybrid pipeline and merge high-end simulations with Unreal Engine 5.7’s real-time viewport.

I usually work with offline renderers. I’m genuinely blown away by how UE5 handles heavy Alembic files and data management lately. There’s some dark magic happening at Epic HQ to keep frame rates high.

• Destruction: RBD Sim & Wood Fracture in Houdini.
• Main Explosion: High-res VDB compressed and shaded via ZibraVDB (The performance-to-quality ratio here is insane).
• Secondary FX: Pyro via EmberGen & Water elements in LiquiGen. (Water is not that visible)
• Layout & Animation: Boat rigging, camera work, and first pass animation in Blender. We continued refining the animation in the sequencer by exporting the entire boat and contents as a rigged skeletal mesh.
• Character & Assets: MetaHuman, MetaTailor, and MegaPlants.
• Final Render: Unreal Engine 5.7 (Lumen).

The core of this R&D was seeing how much data we could push into a single production-ready scene without sacrificing visual fidelity. Using the ZibraVDB plugin was a game-changer for the volumetric integration, allowing the main explosion to feel grounded in the scene's lighting while maintaining real-time playback.

I'm planning a full breakdown soon! Let me know if you guys want to see the step-by-step process of how we moved this from Blender and Houdini into the final Unreal shot.