Week: 24 – 31 Jan
Last week we were introduced with Houdini software by Mehdi Daghfous. I never used Houdini before. Starting from this week forward, Mehdi will provide a weekly tutorial for us to practice and familiar with the software.
This week tutorial is about the basic interface and getting to understand the software concept. Speaking of concept, Houdini is quite different from any other 3d software I’ve tried before. It is nodes based and use it for pretty much everything. It’s like we do a visual coding and connect the functions to achieve what we want to create. There are a lot of syntax that we should know as well to use throughout the software.
These are some of them that I noted when watching Mehdi tutorial:
- OBJ : Object
- SOP : Surface operators
- DOP : Dynamics operators
- ROP : Render operators
- $HIP : Path for saving file
- $OS : Export geo name
- $F4 : Frame number
We learned how to build a simple cabin model and get to familiar with the fundamental of the software along the way. During the modeling process, I found that Houdini has all the standard modeling tools like we found in the other 3d software, but with they are done through nodes. It’s quite tricky at first as to understand what and where the nodes can be connected. But I can see the advantage of this is where a node can be shared which creating a number of procedural objects and instances with variations or similar parameters can be faster.
Final Model 1
This is my cabin model after following the tutorial. As my ‘OCD’ kicks in, I also organised the nodes and renamed everything accordingly.
Final Model 2
Mehdi want us to add wood shape wall to the cabin and do it ourselves using the knowledge that we have learned before. Below is my cabin version 2.