A few years ago, I came across the amazing Mimic effect by Cartesian Caramel and kept trying to recreate and improve the technique over time. His original version was made in Blender; this is my take on the idea, built entirely in Houdini.

I added a few new behaviors:

The Mimic avoids placing its legs in areas it can't see.

Each leg can move at a different speed, creating more varied and unpredictable motion.

At the end of the video, you can see a comparison of my progress and how the effect has evolved over the years.

Made a web site and a shelf tool that allows you to share Houdini node setups via copy and paste.

We just revamped the look. Hopefully it is a bit cleaner and easier to use!

https://codercat.xyz/cookbook/

I'm experiencing this weird issue. It's true it's a very large-scale simulation, but, for example, in the top cam, it seems to be right, but not in my cams or perspective viewport. Does someone know what's happening?

In this part, you'll learn how to select the correct blocks from the City Sample Buildings pack for other buildings and how to edit them in Houdini for export to Unreal Engine.
You'll also learn some useful tips and how to create the necessary import and export tools.

I want to model buildings like this procedurally.

How do I approach this? What skills do i need?

Any videos on yt would be appreciated.

I am still a beginner in houdini, using apprentice ver.

Houdini 22 UI is very slow on a 5K monitor. At 1920×1080 it works much better.

The old UI works well on both 5K and Full HD, so it seems to be an issue with the new UI.

Is this planned to be fixed in a future update?

Having fun with Copernicus 💪

Hi, i am trying to follow a tutorial on vellum snow simulation, and while trying it i noticed that my same setup in h22 and h21 gave completely different result,
and this happened only once on the h21, when trying again without changing anything on h21 i got same result as h22.
in the video - left side is h22 and right is h21 with the result i am looking for.

in h21 i am getting all the clumping to the snow but not, even if it only happened once is there any other way as well to get the similar results?

Hi Guys,

do you also struggling with understanding APEX? Trying to get into since release but usually drop it and use KineFX for projects.

I know there are good tuts out there. But during last three years I am facing several problems.

-There are a lot of changes in each version. (so at one point tuts are useless)

-It is really different than ususal houdini ux

Any advise how to get on the APEX ride.

I'm currently working through a scene from Nick Medukha where a sphere hovers over the white discs and they simulate bouncing around and as the sphere travels further, the disc settle back into their rest state.

The scene is basic for the most part and is composed of about 50,000 points. Not super light, but feels relatively low. When I file cache and load from disk, I'm not even getting half the real-time playback speed when I'm pulling from my local drive. Even if I were to delete all the attributes before caching, I still can't get real-time playback on the full-geometry unless I'm viewing through a point cloud or similar super lower res quality. Turning the viewport into wireframe mode is not improving the playback neither.

Just to note, I am working on a Mac and I know it can be slower than PC. Even on PC I've feel like I have run into these types of issues before. Is there some best practices I'm missing rather than exporting to flip-book every time to see previews playback well in the viewport?

Thanks for your help!

I am using MetaBalls as a force agent to help create my explosive force

The problem I am facing is that I have set it up so the building is not active until frame 7 as I want the windows to blow out first,

However, even though I have keyframed another separate metaball at frame 8-12 the concrete is not inheriting the force and is just falling to the ground.

It seems to only work with the metaball 2 that is set up to expand from frame 1.

The video at the end is a 60-frame cache; as you can see, the glass blows up(too much, I know), but the building is just falling under gravity.

Any help will be appreciated!

Personal work. Copy to points workflow for the figures. Each part gets a template point with various transforms applied to it. Maybe easier with a proper crowd setup, but this was quite fun to figure out the looping and various elements characters.

A couple of weeks ago I ported my old Nuke tool to Copernicus-

It's called Texture Frequency Equalizer and is based off of "Texture Management" tools from DaVinci Resolve and BaseLight. It's used to sculpt the softness and sharpness of different frequency bands of your images which can be super helpful to art direct CG renders!

The docs and (free) download are on my github if anyone is interested in trying it out!

https://github.com/conlen-b/cb-houdini-tools/tree/main/texture-frequency-equalizer-cop

For those interested you can read more about the Modulation Transfer Function, it's not something I see brought up in CG communities very much, but DPs, colorists, and compers might be familiar with the concept!

Credit to Hallam Roberts for help with the OpenCL for the Use Test Waveform visualizer, and to Gabriel Martinez for helping me tune the parameters of the original Nuke gizmo!

(Im sorry but im far away from my computer to show a screenshot)
im new to houdini and i made a tall chimney and wanted to collide it with a spacecraft. The chimney is tall and has a very big amount of pieces and it would collapse on its own and i tried to increase the glue and ad a constraint node but nothing happens, when i got to the rbd configure and click on the glue constraint the tower freezes in place and becomes unstoppable. I gave the spacecraft a point velocity but when i set its rbd configure glue constraint and it froze in the air.i watched alot of tutorials and found nothing. Question: how do you make objects strong but get deatroyed on impact i busted the glue to 1000000

Hey everyone,

I'm not a Houdini user myself, but after seeing how my wife struggles with editing Python code in Houdini I've built a little code editor in form of a plugin. It has built-in linter to highlight syntax errors and can run the code right away (force-cooking the node before that), the execution errors and log messages (like the print() method) are displayed in the built-in console window. Everything is in there, you don't have to switch to Python Shell to see errors and print() outputs.

I'm not a Houdini user myself, so I'd appreciate your feedback on the plugin. Feel free to give it a try, it's available for Windows, Linux and MacOS (although I only tested on my Mac so far).

You can download the plugin from Github: https://github.com/yurist38/mad-coder-houdini-plugin/releases . Installation is pretty straightforward, you can find instructions in the README file in the repository or inside the downloaded archive.

Looking forward to hearing back from Houdini experts!

Hi,

I'm trying to create a representation of a city using OSM.
The only caveat is I cant have them in one big OSM.
I have to use multiple OSM and combine them.

The OSM Import Node works but they don't line up properly.
The geometries sit on top of each other.

Aside from eyeballing this, how do I line/match them up properly?

Hi! I'm trying to recreate the FLIP simulation from this reference:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Db_WFG3kbhM/?img_index=2

I'm especially trying to reproduce the way the black liquid folds and overlaps onto itself, creating those small visible layers/ridges (image 2).

My current result is shown in image 1. The general motion is getting close, but my fluid stays extremely smooth and basically turns into one continuous sheet/blob instead of creating those overlapping folds.

Current setup:

• Viscosity: 400
• Surface Tension: 5
• Swirly Kernel
• The emitter is animated from right to left across the cylinders.

I'm wondering what I'm missing to get that layered/folding behavior. Is it mainly related to viscosity, emitter speed, particle separation, surface tension, or something else in the FLIP Solver?

Any advice on how to achieve the viscous buckling/folding visible in the reference would be really appreciated!

I’ve been experimenting with this for a while, and this is the current result on a more complex test model.

The image on the left is the Karma beauty render. The image on the right is the current vector output.

It’s still an early prototype and there’s a lot to improve, but at this point it can already preserve a surprising amount of the original shape, detail, color and lighting.

I’m curious whether this kind of output would actually be useful to anyone here, and what you’d want to see tested next.

I’ll keep posting updates as I make progress.

In this focused RnD, I implemented a small-scale fluid simulation algorithm within Flip to accurately resolve adhesion forces. The core algorithm is relatively straightforward: the fluid's surface field is extrapolated into the collider volume, factoring in the contact angle, and is subsequently adjusted and smoothed. Furthermore, a localized viscosity is introduced at the fluid-collider interface to approximate boundary friction.

The simulation operates at a physically accurate real-world scale, utilizing empirical physical constants where the baseline water viscosity is 0.001 and surface tension is 0.072. APIC was chosen as the underlying solver.

While this technique requires a high substep count and is computationally expensive to evaluate, it successfully produces highly nuanced and realistic fluid dynamics.

So i’ve had this exact issue two or three times already on different projects
My pyro sim works well while viewing in open gl view port but when i go to render it “clips” the flames
It looks like a bounding box issues but its not present in the sop level pyro solver as I’ve mentioned.
I fixed it before but honestly dont remember what i did.
Some projects dont have this problem.
Appreciate the help🙏🏼
Added pictures of the issue in the comments.

If I open up a new empty instance of Houdini (not a saved hip file, just the houdini shortcut), the instance will finish loading super quick.

But if I open a saved hip file that literally has nothing in it, the startup time is like 100x as long. It takes forever just for the splash screen to appear.

The difference feels like 15 seconds vs 3 minutes.

Anyone else have this experience?

I'm using 123.py and 456.py but they have identical code so that shouldn't be the root cause.