Transcripts
1. Class 1 - Introduction: Hi, my name's Jake. I'm gonna be taking me through this skill share course in this class will be taking a look at Houdini and understanding the basics of particles. Fluid dynamics. We'll be taking a project based approach in this class. I can't wait to see what you create. We'll take a look at the basics and set up a system that can be reused in other projects. In this course, I'll introduce you to some notes to use in common workflow practices. I hope to get you up and running in Houdini as quickly as possible. We'll start from scratch and create geometry. We'll take a look at fluids, and creating geometry from those fluid particles will create our own custom particle network. We'll set up some materials and we'll look at mantra as a bonus video. I'll be taking a look at red shift in showing you the power of GP rendering. For your project, you will create a simulation using a fluid sin in your own custom particles. Welcome to an introduction to particles and fluid dynamics
2. Class 2 - Houdini Interface and Geometry Creation: All right, everybody, welcome to Houdini. This is going to be the start of our videos in this video. I'm just going to take you on a quick tour on the interface and will start to creator geometry. What kind of take a look at notes. So this is what the interface should look like when you first open it. It should open in the build desktop, and you've got a few different options here. You can see I have some pre built that I like. The typical look that I like to do is I like to actually remove that and push the letter p and that's gonna open up this parameters for you and all kind of scoot this over, come to the window menu and save the current desktop. You could name this whatever you want. I'm not going to save since I already have this. And I am actually just going to load and actually have a cup hold different views here Could switch to just a single view. So what this does is if I haven't no down and I'm just gonna lay down a geometry note and I pushed P. These parameters are the same as these parameters. I just feel like this gives you a little bit more room, so I prefer to work this way. All right, so in the view port, this is the view port right here. You'll notice that my cursor is a hand. I can get it to be a narrow. If you have this arrow, you're not gonna be able to get around just clicking. But if I switch back to this hand tool just the camera down here by pushing escape If I left click I can tumble Middle mess click It's gonna pan and right click. That's gonna dolly typically have I like to work I like to stay on the selectable so you can click here or push s and that will switch. And then if you hold down space bar where the altar key and you'll notice this gives you some contacts down here left mouse tumble middle mass pan right click zooms or dollies. All right, so I take some time, just kind of get used to moving around in three D space. It's gonna be really useful just to get around your objects. All right, let's take a look at nodes So these shelf tools up here, these air all knows you can click on and this will auto generate. So if we click on this box, you'll notice I get this bounding box. You can see the coordinates are changing. So if I click, I can drop that box down. And now it's at those coordinates that I place to that. And this note, it's just gonna default, will bind our parameters, will delete that out. Another way to create is just to hold down control and left click, and that will create a box right at the center for you. I'm gonna delete this out. Typically, what I like to do is I like to start by pushing Tab and then you can just start typing anything so we can actually get some test geometry here. Could lay down the rubber toy. This is just geometry that comes with Houdini. But how all usually get started and this is what we're gonna do is we're gonna type geo and we'll lay down a geometry note. This is gonna basically be an empty geometry thinking this is kind of like a null It's not annulled in theory, but it's just an empty piece of geometry so we can put whatever you want in here. If you wanted to import a file, you'd use this file node and you could load the file here. But what we want to dio is we're just going to start with a basic primitive and for this we're going to start with the tourists, since we're gonna be building the serial particles that we have so put this tourist down and in the parameters pain, we can move. So let's move this centerpoint And then I'm gonna go up. I'm gonna push you. And if you push, I it takes you back in, or if you go back up and you push enter, it will take you back into the note as well. So you'll notice I moved this in our three d space. So it's now above the grid. Somebody go back up. But our translate on this geometry node is still set at 000 But this tourists so anywhere you move it in here is independent of this location. Typically, what I'll do is I won't even use these mission to delete that out. And instead I like to use a transform. So this transform note and I got that just by right clicking and typing transform. And then it automatically adds that node. So do that again, lead that I'm going to right click transform. It's like that and you can see that it's now attached so I can place this. But I'm looking at this node because we've got these flags. So we have a bypass, a lock template and display and render. So let's display this and we'll template the tourists just so you can see you don't have to worry about temple ing the tourists on yours if you're following along. So in here I could scale this down. So we're looking at this transform note, and this is gonna show us. And since it has this render flag, which is the purple inner circle, that's going to be what actually gets rendered out of this note at the end of the day and this blue, that's what you're looking at. So you could be looking at one thing, but render another and we'll see that a little bit later. But with this pink flag, this is our template, so you'll notice when I select the tourists it gets a little bit darker. And when I select that, it goes a little bit lighter gray so we could look at another piece of geometry. So if I lay down our box and say we wanted to use this is a comparison, we could see the template of this box but affect this tourists and move it around. So I'm actually just gonna zero that out. I don't believe this box. So we're going to keep this transform, and we're gonna keep her uniform scale at a point to this is gonna be the size of that we're gonna use for serial particles. And the last thing we're gonna do in here is I'm gonna come down here, right? Click type? No. And that's going to give a sudden all note and this is actually a no. And you'll notice the parameters for this is just copy input and we have a cash input. So if we just said our display flag and I'm gonna rename this underscore and then all caps out and the reason why I will name this is when we're selecting geometry for a note to be out or the last render in our no tree. The's capitals will go to the top. And for me, I like to color code. So I'm just gonna push, see and like to make my nose black and then we can hit up And let's just rename this. We're gonna call this serial space geometry. And if you push space, it will actually generate the underscores for you since everything is based off of files and there you have it. All right, so you can kind of play around with these shelf tools. Just create some geometry. Try diving in, maybe lay down some edit nodes. If you connect open edit note, you can always add nodes in between. We can look at this and then with our select tool, we've got these different selection options so well done. This two is gonna be points three edges and four primitives, Fiver theses. We can move thes around. Push, t translate. We gotta pull those out the power of Houdini as if I did then decide that I don't want to use this. Said it known I could just pushed elite and we've got our same geometry. So go ahead and just kind of take some time play around. Just look at getting familiar with the interface, and I will see in the next class will start working with fluids.
3. Class 3 - Fluid Shelf Tools: All right, welcome to class to in this class. We're going to take a look at the particle fluids on the shelves, and this will kind of give us a good ideas to how adopt network works and then for our actual serial particles were going to generate a custom particle network for that. So let's go ahead and dive right in. I'm gonna go. And for now, I'm actually gonna turn off this serial geometry. I'm just gonna hit the display flags so we don't see it anymore, and I'm gonna de select that select flag as well. All right, So to get started, we want to create a piece of geometry. So again, I'm gonna lay down and geometry known, and we're gonna call this fluid emitter. It will dive inside and we want to lay down. So we're gonna work with this flip fluid from object. So we want to lay down a piece of geometry, and in that we wanted to be kind of an interesting shape. We can always just use a sphere. But for what we're going for is we want it to look like it's pouring out of a milk container coming from something so we don't want to just have ah, very plain shape. So I'm actually going to use a platonic what the platonic is consume out. As we have this solid type, we can select a few different things, So it'll just be down to whatever you like. I'm gonna go with the Icaza Hedren. I kind of like the look of that hand in this. We're good to just go up and then let's select the object. Actually, let's de select and I'll show you how that creates. We're gonna click emit particle fluid. All right, so he clicked. It looks like nothing happened. But if you notice right in here, it says select object to emit fluid from press enter to continue someone a selector, platonic and then hit Enter. And now it says, select a fluid object to admit into if any press enter to complete. So we don't have an object we want to admit into. So I'm just gonna hit enter again. And now a few poor changes and it's taking us inside this network. I'm just gonna can't execute this over will give us a little bit of room. Gonna zoom out a little bit too, are so I'm gonna push El on the keyboard and l will lay out all your notes. Sometimes you have to kind of nudge things around the way you win them. And I'm actually gonna scoop these over just the touch. All right, So I'm gonna go ahead and end up and we'll take a look at the overall view of what happened . So we have our serial geometry that we made. We have this fluid emitter and we made that. And when we click the shelf tool, it's now created three notes for us. So, first and foremost, we have our particle fluid, our particle fluid interior and this hollow adopt network. So let's go back into our fluid emitter, and we'll look at what happened. So we Cleary did the platonic, and now it has a flip source. So it created this source and this is generating particles. And then it created an out node. So as I talked about in the last video, this is our display. So we're looking at this out, but it's actually rendering this No, and this knows not attached to anything. So that means in this node, nothing will actually get rendered out. It's not going to render out this geometry, because what you're seeing is actually coming from elsewhere. All right, so in this particle fluid will work with this, So if you push l here, it lays everything out. But like I said, it's not the neatest. So I usually pull this up, and I kind of bring this one down, just so you get a better idea of how this chain works. All right, so for right now is importing or particles and this is our fluid compress compress cash. So it's gonna cash these particles, and this is our surface preview. And if we turn the display on some of these on, you'll be able to see this is our particle fluid surface. So this is what we're actually seeing in the surface cash, and that's what gets rendered. Right now I'm gonna just all click and will set the display back to this stop important. And then we'll go back up this particle fluid interior. This isn't gonna matter too much for this, Sim, but there's gonna be an object merge, and this object merge will work with one of these. This is gonna be pointing to another object in R seen or inner project, and this is O. B. J particle fluid and render. So if I actually hit this jump to it's one of the things I love is if you ever want to know what this is, we could just click here, and it will take you directly there, and that's it. And then if we hit this back button or the Ault and Left Arrow, it takes us back to the note we were in. And then this is the null and this is what we're looking at. This will go up. Let's dive into this auto adopt network. So when you're working with fluids, this is where most of it's gonna happen. So we have this flip fluid object, and we have a source. This is our source surface from our fluid a Mitter. So it's taking the source surface and then from, and this is fluid emitter. So if we would have named this something else, it would have whatever he named it right here. And then if you look in this saw path, it's just pointing to O B J fluid emitter out and surface, which is if we jump there right there. So that's what it is pointing to. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit back and we'll get back here. All right? Let's go ahead and hit play on our timeline. But actually, before we do that, I'm gonna hit. Let's take a look at these global animation options, so I'm just gonna push all shift g. All right, So these air animation options so frames per second, you can set if you want to work in a specific time. I like to get 24. Unless I have Teoh do something else. This is our start frame are in frame, and we can actually probably bring this down. I want to take it down to 1 20 so we wouldn't look at thes. So we have this play every frame, but never faster than frames for second. Or we have maintained real time playback, possibly skipping frames. So that's the one we want. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit save his default, But I actually might switch this back to 2 40 saves default. And now I'm gonna switch for this project to 120 and we'll hit, apply, and then we'll close. So now we can push play or if we push the up arrow, this will start to calculate are fluid, Sam. And there you go. We won't let that cash all the way so you can play back your fluid, Sam, and kind of get a good idea of what it might look like. So if you push control in the up arrow or Control and the down arrow and since we haven't cashed all the way, it's going to take a minute to think. But I'm just gonna hit, escape it controlled downer tasty and control up arrow takes you back to the beginning and then right moves your frames and left. Takes you back. Frames are so let's get these particles that we're creating kind of dialed on a little bit more for a fluid. So this flip fluid object this is where we can control are the look of our fluid. So particle separation here, If we take this down, it's gonna produce the amount of separation in between. So if you read this says decreasing particle separation means more particles that weighed less but add up to the same mass per unit. So when you take this down. So if I do 0.1 it's the same amount of mass. So you see how that changed And now, All right, so this flip book is a good way to get a look at how your simulation rents you, conduce you every frame. If we do say 10 that would only render every 10th frame. But if we just go ahead and push start, this will launch a new window. And this cash is a little bit faster than if you were to just push play in the timeline, and this will give you a good idea. I'm not gonna let this cook all the way, but well, that's still playing. We get the opportunity to kinda look at what it looks like while it's still simulates down here. So I'm gonna go ahead and exit out of this. All right, So what's gonna dio It's been hit escape so we can stop sinning. Typically, what I'll do is while I'm working with things, I'm gonna leave this at 0.1, and then we'll dial this down right before we get ready to render or actually mesh are fluid. The other one will look at is his particle radius scale. So if you just hover, this gives you a good idea. And if you ever need more information, you can select the node and come appear to this question mark in this will launched the Houdini help. And this is all the documentation on this node, and this will give you get ideas to how to work with a node every different thing. This is very much the user manual for Houdini. I like this a lot. Just in case year, there's something you're not sure about. This is a good way to kind of brush up on it. So this particle radius scale, though, So what? This is, is this is the actual radius of every particle that we're creating. So each one of these is determined by this radius. So higher value results in more volume in the fluid but less surface detail as it gets smoothed out by the larger particle radius. So let's kind of take a look at what happens if we drop this down to a 0.6 and this is with particle separation and 0.1 and I'm gonna do a flip book, so you kind of take note of what this looks like coming out. So I'm gonna close out of that. And you notice how fast that Simms so default is 1.2. And if you ever need to get back to a default, you can control and middle mass button click, and that will reset it. But what I want to do right now is I want to leave particle separation at 0.1. I'm gonna take this up to two and let's zoom out just a little bit. We're gonna flip book again. So you notice how much more it looks like is in there. And that's with particle separation that high. It still seems pretty quick. But if I take this down to like 0.5 and then we flip book, is this still going pretty quick. But we get a much more impressive looking fluid, and this is basically what we're gonna work with. But for right now, I just want to control middle mouse button click, and we'll just reset those cause we just want to start directing this a little bit. So we have a few different notes here, So we have a solver. So this solver has four inputs and this is our fluid to solve. So that's where our particles are. So this is an object, basically. And then we have particle velocity, the volume block velocity, and then our sourcing. So this is post solved. So these all coming to merge? Really? If we didn't want thes emerges, we could just get rid of these and then we have a force. So if I were to take this gravity out and then we do a flip book, particles don't go anywhere. There's no force acting on them. So we're creating particles, but they're just sitting here, so it's closed out of that. So this gravity node, we can actually delete this and let's push tab, And then I'm just gonna start typing gravity on. This is what this is automatically creating is this gravity force, and we can just hover over this node and then we'll drop it on and this is just gravity. So it's set to negative 9.80665 and that's default gravity Sanofi flip book. We're back to what we had before, but we can affect this. So if we want this to float up, we could just take off the negative and you'll notice this reverse directions. So if I reset this, it's pointing down. But if I remove the negative, it points up. So now if I flip book are particles flow up. So as Houdini kind of works top down and this is our output and this is what's gonna be rendered, it calculates all this and gravity is the last thing. So we could have a couple different gravity forces for one for just our fluids and then one for, say, another particle network and we could have those work independent. All right, so we're gonna leave that here for now and kind of play around with flip fluids, and we'll take a look at creating our own rigid body dynamics in the next video.
4. Class 4 - Rigid Body Dynamics: All right. Welcome back. This video, we're just gonna take a brief break from our projects. You can just watch and kind of follow along. Just make sure you grasp of these concepts. So in this class, we're just gonna take a look at rigid body dynamics and dynamics in Houdini and kind of how that's calculated. So what I've done is I've created a ground plane, and if you notice we have this plane and we've got these arrows coming off of it, so this is just created using this collisions and ground plane, and that creates a grand plan object. And this is just gonna be a static object. So that's just imports. And this is just a static. So that goes through this static solver. So this doesn't move. But then these arrows say that it goes on forever. It only displays in this area, but it's going to go on forever. So if you had geometry back here or way up here at a camera, this grand plane just goes on. All right? I'm gonna piss push space H That will take us to everything kind of zoom in today. I'm gonna go back up when I did was I created a geometry network and I laid down Cragg, whose just a piece of test geometry and on crag when I selected him and I made him a rigid body. So now if I push play, when the de select, we could watch what happens So crack falls to the ground. Any breaks. That's kind of why I like using him and in this example, because he's got a lot of little pieces, so it breaks apart really well. So in this node, this is just a nought adopt network, just like our fluid objects. So we notice we haven't output. We also have gravity and this merge, and this merges just merging our static solver and a rigid body solver. And then crag is a rigid body. This merge doesn't actually emerge anything, since we only have one object and as a rigid body, and this ground plain is the only static object that we have in the scene. So these merge notes, we could just get rid of those and this scene's gonna function the same. So kind of, Let this play out So the scene plays out the same. This merge is the only one need because we're going into this gravity and then doubt put, it's just going to stop that. So a rigid body is affected by gravity and then crashes into a static solver and static solvers don't typically move. So this will get a set up in this kind of the basics of what we're going to use as a concept for creating our own cereal particle emitter. So we'll take care of that and the next lesson.
5. Class 5 - Particle Creation : All right. Welcome back. They were back in our project. And what we're gonna do now is we're gonna actually work with our serial geometry. Let's turn this back on and we're gonna create a custom particle network that can work with are fluid and matter. So I'm just gonna go ahead and turn off display on these and same with ease just so we can just focus on our cereal. All right. So when last we left our cereal, we made a tourists scaled it down using the transform. And then when created an output, Let's go back up. We're going to go into the tab menu. We're gonna lay down a piece of geometry that's gonna be empty. And this is gonna be our serial the matter. I just gotta scoot this over. Let's die of insight. So what we want to do is we want to take this tourists that we can see. You know, if we didn't want to see this, we could come up here where we have ghost other objects, said this right here. We could do show all objects, hide other objects. We wouldn't see anything. It's for right now, I'm gonna take round one. I'm gonna keep ghost other objects on. So we want to lay down a piece of geometry that we can scatter points on to. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this piece of geometry and we're gonna attach it to those points. And then we're gonna add dynamics to those so it will rain down. So it looks like that's being poured out of a cereal box. All right, so let's start. Let's push tab, We're gonna lay down a grid. We'll take this grid on a scale to stand just a little bit starts out. It's usually really big. It's maybe still a little bit, a little small. Now it's 24 by four to start. All right, so we have our grid. Now we want to add a bunch of points so we can visualize the points here. So this grid as points at every intersection, each one of these blue dots is a point. I'm just gonna push under. You will get that back to zero. But what we want is we don't want just thes points. We want a bunch of random points, so I'm gonna push Tab, we're gonna lead on a scatter node. All right, so this scatter node, if you ever need to look at what you need to plug in if you hover over the input known, it tells you so. If I have over this, it says required geometry to scatter points on two. So we want to scatter points onto this grid. So it's plug that in there. And now let's set our display flag there so our grid disappears. We've got a lot more than just thes intersecting points for points scattered on here. So if we select this scatter known but it turned this template off, we can look at all of our different parameters. So right away we can affect this. We just push one. We have a single point hit here, but if we say one of 10 points, we now have 10 points. If you wanted 100,000 we have 100,000 points. Obviously, this grades a little small for that, but if you wanted 100,000 points on that grid, there you go. There's 100,000 points. So let's start with just 10. This will get us started. Will drop this down later so we can have the maximum number of points, this global seed. And if we change this, that changes where those points are. If let's set this up to 2 50 So if we do this, relax iterations, we're gonna get everything a little more uniform or if we take it all the way down, it's a little more random. That'll be the scale. And that's the max. Relax, radius. So I'm just gonna set that back to do. Of all so we want to do is you want to work with this seed, we're gonna start to work with expressions in Houdini. We won't get too far in because it's kind of an intro class. I don't want to get you to far over your head. And I know when expressions come in, sometimes people tend to zone out or it just seems really complicated. So we want to ease into that. So what we're gonna do is we're just gonna push dollar and frame and what this is gonna dio is this is going to look at every frame so this global seed will change every frame. I said, I'm just gonna hit enter you notices changes to green. So that's an expression And now I'm just gonna frame forward and you notice that each frame is different. Control apparel, Get back to the start sin If I play, you can see how every single one of those is different Are so we have our points Now we need to get our geometry in here. So I'm gonna push Tab and we're gonna type Merge. So what we want is we want this object merge, and we're gonna lay this down and this is gonna be are gonna rename this serial geometry. Actually, you know what? I'm gonna call this instead. Particle geometry. All right, so with this node, we have our geometry, but we need to set that. So I'm gonna in this object. I'm gonna click on this. And this is our floating operator chooser. So we have thes air, different notes in our object context. So we have this serial geometry, and like I said, if we made that all caps and we select that it's right at the top, it's like that. And now we have our tourists in here. I'm gonna turn off points we could see. So now if I hide other objects, we have our tourists could look it Just start grid. We have our scatter. So that was wire frame because I had that selected. But if I d select, we don't see anything. All right, so we have our points. We have our geometry. Now we want to copy two points. So I typed in copy. We're gonna copy the points. All right, so we have two inputs here. So this is required target points to copy, too. Well, we have points here. We want to copy that there, and then this one is required primitives to copy. So let's attach that there. And now if I look at that since this is still set to 50 take it back down to 10. All right, so we have 10 objects on our points and let's take a quick detour, fs, and we're gonna look at this geometry spreadsheet. This is gonna be your best friend in Houdini because it's going to give you a lot of information. So I'm gonna click on this and you'll notice that in here we can see different things we can see. Okay, These air points, Vergis, ease primitives and then detail. So on this copy note Now, if I select that this we're looking at, we're just the points on this scatter note. So we have 10 points, So numbering always starts at zero, so we have 10 points at any given time. If I move forward, we still only have 10 points. And this is the vector location for each one of those points. But now, if I go to this copy two points, you notice at the moment I got a lot of points because I've got points for every single one of these on this copy. Two points. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna drop that down. So in this copied appoints, I'm gonna switch back to seeing view, emanated, click a pack and instance, and you're gonna notice that nothing really changed. All that happened is it just packed these objects and then instance from one of those points. So now if we go back to this geometry spreadsheet, I only have 10 points so unchecked and then checked with packing and instance so basically were reducing the number of points that Houdini has to calculate in this scene view, making it much easier for it to play out all right. So we're getting there. So far, we have a grid scattered points. We copied those points and we imported are geometry and place it on the copied points. So the next video going to create a custom dot network, we'll see you there.
6. Class 6 - Particle Dynamics: All right. Welcome back. This video, we're going to continue building on where we left off, creating your custom particle network. So what we want to do now is we're gonna lay down another note, and this is going to look very familiar. So we're gonna do is we want to lay down, adopt network. And what kind of build? A custom network. And we can always work with this elsewhere too. So we have adopt net. And if I dive inside, all we have is an output. So what I want to do is I want to take this out, put on a plug it in there, and then we'll dive inside this stop net. All right, so we're gonna lay down some notes, and then we'll kind of take a look at each one of those does as we kind of connect him up. So just kind of bear with me, this might seem like a lot of nodes at first. So what we want first is we know we want to force, so we want gravity. And this one we can go ahead and wire up as we know what gravity does. So we need a solver So for this, since we're working of particles, we want a pops Oliver. We need pop source. And then, since we want things to be rigid, bodies were gonna laid on an R B D packed object actually gonna work with a multi solver And then we want these so all be dynamic and kind of work with each other, So we're going to lay down a bullet solver as well, and that's where this mouldy solver will come in. All right, so let's kind of work backwards. What kind of build the network from the bottom up? So we have our output, we have gravity. That's our force. Then we have our multi solver. So what this is going to do is it's gonna work kind of like Emerge note for solvers. So I want to take this and hook that up. You notice we're getting an error right now, But then I'm gonna take this r v d packed object, and I'm gonna set this on the initial object type so we can create this different ways. So we want active objects in this geometry source. We have the choice for a sop path, but what I want is. I want first context geometry because I want to use this first context. So that's first contact is basically the same as input. 12 three or four. So we could plug different things in here and work with them inside this stop net. Let's go back in. We're gonna plug that into that multi solver. So now, inside this network, you notice now these don't air out anymore because this was looking for an object. And that's what this object is. So we're generating these objects from the first context. So now if we push play, nothing happens because our points aren't actually moving. Let's go back into the dot net. All right, So I'm gonna connect this pop source to our pop solver. So this pop silver has three notes, three inputs. So we have an object pre solve sources, so sources post solve pop sores. That's where we're going to connect it. And then we're gonna take this. You notice the colors on these so green. These air gray output on this one is grey. And then this is purple. This kind of purple pink. We're gonna connect this. Usually you want to go like colors Sometimes these will change, though, but this, like color, we're gonna keep that. So now on this pop source, we're gonna set our stop. But we don't want parameter values. We want to use first context geometry. And on this pop solver, we have a few different things. So we could affect timescale. And now, if we push play, we notice that they start to fall. All right? And then last we have this bullet solver. So this does. Let's wire this up, but actually worry about much. Here, take this time scale. We're gonna reset it back on the pop solver. This bullet solver is gonna look at the bullet data here. Bring this down. So, bullet data is how Houdini is gonna look a collisions. So we could set each one so you can look at the guy geometry. And this would typically give you a good ideas to how the collisions gonna work in Houdini . We don't want to freeze that. So that's the guy geometry. So that's how each object is seen. So if we switch that from convex hole to Con Cave, it's hard to tell. But instead of it being solid all the way in the middle like convex hole. It actually just looks at the base geometry and there's holes inside. So we'll leave that Akon Cave for now. And this bullet solver just tells this RBD packed object that it can collide with other objects and other particles. So that's our basic set up. Let's go back up. We're gonna lay down. I know said that. Let's rename it now and kind of hard to see my colors because I dragged my parameters down . Go and tell her that, Black. And now let's take a look at what we have. All right, so we have those falling. All right, There we go. We created our own custom particle network. Now, in the next video, we're gonna look at actually generating these over time and going to start kind of directing are particles using forces, and them after that will set initial states, and we'll start looking at setting up camera. We'll see in the next class
7. Class 7 - Particle Forces: Okay. Welcome back. We're gonna pick up where we left off. So in this class, we're gonna start to work with our particles. So where we left off is we have 10 Tora shapes here, but these just fallen. We're not actually generating particles. So we want to start to work with ease. And we're gonna start to direct these where you want them to g o using forces. And then we're gonna do the same with our fluids. We're gonna start to look at collisions. All right, so where we left off? If I push play, you notice we have template geometry and those scatter around, but our tourist hot chicks just fall. So what we want to do is we want to look at this pop source. So I'm gonna select that and where we want to look. Is this a mission type? So we set to use first context geometry. And then, if we do, instead of scatter onto surfaces, which is the default, we can kind of click through these. But I can tell you we want all geometry. And now that brings geometry in. You'll notice my timeline changed orange. So we need to re simulate I'm gonna push control at. And now if I push play and we simulate Stop that have a lot of objects and we're kind of getting a lot of them were kind of laid out, but we notice some of these have interacted with each other and are actually starting to fall. That's how we kind of get that random creation. All right, so let's go ahead and go back up. So we want Teoh affect the position of this. So right here on this grid, what I want to do now and this is the power of Houdini and being procedural is I'm gonna lay down a transform node, and I want this kind of user grid as a base. So on the Z plane in the Z axis, I want our particles that kind of cross here. So I almost want fluid coming from one direction and serial coming from the other someone to do cereal this way and fluid coming this way. So I know I want to bring this up. So if I click on this axis, bring it up and then same with the ex. I can always strike this over If you look kind of small, but I have this X Y and I can move that along busy plane so it moves it and why? But it also moves in an X and then same thing. I could move it forward if I wanted to, but I kind of want these tow line up. So I want to keep him where they are. Let's say my kind of balance. He's out of your five and a seven sen LV push play. They're above link grid escape out of that. All right, so I'm gonna dive in here and my start to direct this a little bit. So pull this down. We can work with these forces. So we have different pop forces. So if we go into pops, we've got all these different nodes we can work with. So in here, we can create a pop force, and I'm gonna set this up here so pre solved, I'm gonna hook that up and let's just take a look. We can type in a value and X. And now let's hit play and you'll notice it starts to direct him that way. So the direction we want to go and if we look at our grid. It actually gives you a pretty good hint. So if we wanted negative five, negative 10 and Z would plug that in there, So X, y and Z negative five. So let's try Negative 10. And I'm gonna kind of use this 00 point as our target. All right? It's looking pretty yet so far, it's kind of getting there, So this looks like way too many for me right now. So what I want to do is I want to come up to this scatter. And instead of forcing the total count to 10 I'm gonna drop this down to two. That might not seem like very many, but I also don't want this to run real time because we kind of want that slow motion. And we wanted to look pretty epic, so so didn't want to dive in there. Probably gonna take these time scales down, and we'll affect it on both of them. And that way when I push play kind of generate two at a time, and we'll kind of get some randomness that way as they play out. So still not quite happy with it. So I want to look at this, and I just cannot wanna play with this. Just kind of get something random. So now we go up, you'll notice that because I affected the transform in just our serial geometry, it affects how are particles or birth. And if we get back in here, so it's maybe a little too much because we still want him to collide with each other. Been There we go. It's kind of trying to treat this like it's a product shot or something you might see in a commercial. All right, so we're looking pretty good there. Now, let's try and do the same thing for our particle fluid. So I'm gonna turn these back on way left this positive, someone to switch that back to a negative. We definitely want that fluid going down. And if we turn this fluid a mentor back on What I want to do is where this platonic is. I'm gonna drop in a transform. And then for this, what I can do is I'm gonna hit up. We're gonna go to this serial a matter and where this grid is, I'm gonna take this transform, and I'm actually gonna push control one and watch right up here Says set, Quick, Mark one. And I want a copy parameter, and I'm gonna push up. And in this fluid and metering, when I go back in about a push control too. And that set, Quick, Mark two. And in this transform, I want to take in this translate. And I want a right click. Do paste relative references. And then so what? This is this just refers to channel operator, and it goes up, goes into the cereal matter note Celexa, transform, node and then transform X. And what we want to do is we're gonna take this. We want to multiply it by negative one enter. So now whatever I switched that grid to in the negative X It's gonna move it there, but in the negative. So we set those quick marks. Now, if I just pushed number one, it jumps back to that note I can right click copy, parameter and then hit, too. And then in the why I could do paste relative reference. So this looks the same. Serial emitter transform one t. Why transform why? And that would be opposite. So we still want that on positive. Why? But now these will be counter to each other. So if we go up, these are now evenly spaced. So now if I ever want to move these over, I know I can go into the serial on better and move this over. And if we jump back in here and if we click if you just left click, it will switch from the expressions and I will show you the value. So if we go back to one positive seven, have we go back to two negative seven. So really power of a way you can affect a lot of things in Houdini really quick. Just with one note and you can just affect one transform node, and you don't have to worry about the other. All right, let's let's go up. We're going to go into our auto adopt network. Remember, this is our fluid, sim. So in here, I kind of bring this over, so we have her gravity, but really, we just want this toe collide with our serial particles. So we're gonna work this pop wind. We're gonna play send a particle velocity. Yeah, we want this to I kind of have us lined up here That's the kind of coming this way. So I'm actually turn this swirl size up a little bit. It's going to see what this looks like. All right? I want to take air resistance down two straight 20.5. All right, so we're not quite crossing where we what? So let's take this up higher. Beautiful with this amplitude to come up. So this amplitude is gonna dio is this gonna affect our noise field? But this is going to use. There we go. So we just kind of want some randomness because we want these across and they were gonna have this collision, and we kind of wanted, like, a nice explosion from the milk, because we are capturing this in slow motion in theory after all. All right, so let's go ahead and come back up here to our main network. Let's push play kind of make sure these air crossing paths. And in the next video, we will work on the collision of these. Did you notice we don't actually get a reaction here. Work on that collision and we'll set the initial start time for these. All right, I'll see in the next video
8. Class 8 - Initial State and Collisions: All right. Welcome back. So we're gonna pick up right where we left off. So right now in this class, what we're going to do is we want to get our serial particles to interact with our fluid object. So I'm gonna go ahead and shut off this serial geometry. Just a preface. As we don't need that hanging out in the center just floating there, render time. So I want to go ahead and dive into our auto top network. So this is our fluid network. And here I'm just gonna push control and the number two and I'm going to set a quick mark for two. And I'm gonna go up, push. You going to go into our cereal, a matter, and then in our auto adopt network, I want to copy everything. I'm not gonna copy this gravity. We should be able to reuse what we have. I'm gonna go up one level, and I'm gonna push control one to set quick, Mark one. So now I want to come back over and I want a paste. So this is our fluid network, and we just paste that are cereal on better in here. So we have all of our notes here, and what we want to do is we just want to get those referencing the's notes over here. So to do that, I'm gonna use this gravity, and I'm gonna actually call this fluid. We don't really need that merge per se, but I want to hook this up here, and then I'm gonna hook up the serial first. So this multi solver and let's just call this cereal so that we have a better idea. And now I want to hook up the fluid and now we can see our fluid again. And these were both running through this gravity force. But we don't have any particles here because if we come back to our RBD packed object, you'll notice when we set this up, we used first context geometry because we built that an adopt network inside of the sops. So our surface operator, we actually need to pull. So if we do geometry source sob that allows us to come over to this floating operator chooser and we can go Norm, better select out. And there you go. Now we've got a couple particles, but if a frame forward, we only have those two because we also need to set our pop source to use parameter values. So this gives us the option to select, just like we did. And the RBD packed object. We can accept that. And now if we play, cancel out because we don't need all those frames. We have our particles. All right, This just still looks like a lot particles to me back in our serial emitter. What I want to do, I just want to cut down on the number of particles, so I'm gonna select our scatter and we're going to click in here. You know, when I do multiplied by, let's try 0.6 hit, Enter. And now let's play. I kind of let this cook out a little bit. All right? That looks a lot better. So we're not getting nearly so many particles. So the other thing I want to do is a minute. Select this stop net, And I'm just gonna shake that and we'll remove it from the network. So now it's not gonna calculate out in our simulation. We'll just need to remember toe put that back in. But we'll get that in a second. So now, if we push play those particles match. So now we want to check our collisions. So I'm gonna go ahead and run a flip book are so we don't have full it. We'll let this key and continue cooking. But what we're looking for, it is exactly this. So where we have these white particles, that's a collision. I'm gonna go ahead and close out of our flip book and had escape. We can actually view that in here. So if you notice these particles are actually hitting through the fluid are serial pieces and that's exactly what we want. And that all happens here because we had left inputs, effect, right, inputs, and it's a collide relationship. All right, so the next thing that when I do is I want to come into our flip fluid object, and I just want to dial in our viscosity a little bit. And a lot of this is just down toe personal taste, and you just kind of have to play around with what you like and the look that you're going for. And I'm actually gonna use volume velocity for collisions. And let's take a look at that, see what it looks like. All right, that's kind of what I'm looking for. So And to play around with the settings. Now, the next thing I want to dio is going to come up and we're actually gonna turn this down. Now, we're going to kind of get ready and gear up, so I'm just going to turn the standard. Ah, 0.5 And let's take this up to about 1.5 and you'll notice now just how dense this looks. So I want to run a quick flip book just to get an idea as to how this is gonna look. This might take a second. Okay, so our flip books done so we can push play on this and you'll notice just how thick this looks. Now, where there's a lot more particles, it still has the same shame. We just have a lot more particles. So we're gonna use this, so I'm gonna go ahead, and I'm actually just gonna move this out of the way. All right, so we're going to use that data from the foot book and we want to try and direct are particles now, So I want to set initial state, so I'm gonna come to about frame 28 and I'm gonna come up to this menu. I like to use this menu because if you use this and select new camera, he'll notice we now have a camera. And we can use this to get an idea of where we want our shot to be. So I click this lock. And now, if I tumble in the view port, you'll notice I have thes black bars here, and that's gonna be our final shot. So we can actually use this kind of frame up our shot, So I want to be back a little bit, and we'll go through it. Kind of dialed to send a little bit more. But I'm thinking I'm gonna keep the camera. What kind of a low angle? I'm gonna try right there. So Frame 28 is what we're going to shoot for. So I'm gonna die back in, turn off the lock on our camera. So now in here. Last step on this video. I promise. I know it's a long one. I'm gonna push Tab, we're going to select a file. We're gonna drop this down. We're going to select this file note going to make that the render and appear we're gonna select instead of no operation, we're gonna do right files, you're gonna do a file chooser, and then here I just want to make a folder, and we're gonna call this You keep this with your project serial or for this one, we're gonna call it milk. Any state for this folder and then on the file will call this same thing milk underscore dot dollar F and dot sim. It should just accept that. So now if we go back a frame and we go forward of frame and now what we can do is we should be able to copy. This is if we load this. We notice says milk initial ST 0.28 dot sim. So this the file I'm just gonna switch us to read files. I'm gonna disconnect, and we can actually bypass that. And now we want to go up. We're gonna go to Auto top and we had copied that previously were gonna pace that in. It's like that. And now at frame one, we have our initial state. So do the same thing. We're gonna can go a little faster on this one. So now we can hook this one back up. Do quick save. Grab this file for this one. I'm gonna make a new fall there. I'm gonna copy that Had except instead dot dollar f dot sim it. Except now I'm gonna go to frame 27. I'm in a frame forward to frame 28. Now, we should be able to copy this. Let's double check, But I forgot to do. Right files, someone a backup. Go forward. There we go. Now, I can copy this Now instead, I want to set this back to render disconnect. And I just like to set this to read files, so I know I'm not writing again. We go back up to adopt net initial state pace that in and now on frame one. That's our initial state. All right, let's go ahead and save this. And in the next video, we'll get our cameras set up and then we'll set up materials will render this out. We'll see in the next video
9. Class 9 - Camera Setup & Particle Cook: All right, so in this class, we're gonna take a look at our camera. We're gonna get this framed up, we'll start to get everything set up. So we created a camera in the last video, but we didn't actually really dive into it at all. So the camera gets created, you're gonna have a little camera and you're seen so you can see it. Well, now you work with a camera. I like to work with two views, and I like I'm stacked this way. So I like to come to this menu. It's like camera and I'm in a locket here. So then up here, I can still see things. And this will come when When we set focus. That's why I like to have this for you so that I can set focus. So down here, what we want to dio If you're middle mouse click, you'll notice we keep these bars. And that means they were looking through our camera. So I want to just set this vertical. So we're just below, because the idea here is that we don't really want I wait too long to see this collision because we want to keep this animation pretty short. So I left this set to this file known for the render. So we're not going to render this right now, so we can kind of get in idea based just off of this serial geometry coming from this serial emitter. So I want to jump forward, and I want to kind of frame this up. So in our camera settings, I want to use view and actually have this. Your default should be 50. I like to use 85. It's a little bit longer lens. I just feel like it gets a little bit better. Look for more of a macro photography. Look. So once I set this to 85 and you can always come into the sampling. You can affect f stops here, focus distance and shatter time. So I don't typically set focused distance here, but I'll set it in the view port, and I'll show you how we do that. So we have our camera, and for this I'm actually gonna push control one on a frame, all select our camera, and then I'm gonna us like this pose. Now, if I right click on our access handle, I get some options. So we have orientation focus handle for us TEM handle. So focus, handle. That's what we want and you'll notice we have this box, these two arrows. So if I can bring these arrows down, that's gonna be our focal plane. So that gets smaller and you'll notice that our f stop goes down. So you decrease your f stop, your focal plane gets reduced so you can leave this kind of wired for now. And then it's kind of bring this out. And I want to set this kind of in the middle of our cereal because I want a pretty shell of focus for the shot and it just kind of down to taste. So I think it's something like that. I'm actually gonna go with 0.6 just get a nice even number. And then if we were to come over to this surrender view and we can just click render, so generate your scene so you can kind of get an idea of what you're gonna be working with , and we'll actually have to set up step the field. But this gives you an idea of what your frame's gonna look like. So a lot of times I'll float of this window and I won't go that on a second screen. But for this, we're just gonna work in this scene view. All right? So I like that for a camera. Just gonna scoot this back over. So I want to get us a backdrop. So for that, I'm just gonna laid on a grid and we'll dive inside. And we actually want that on X Y and for the script Just gonna increase our size. Let's make it maybe a little whiter. I want to go toe wire frame, go back up. I'm gonna push t to get our transform handle. And then I just want to look through our camera again, accidentally select the wrong one. So I'm gonna push w again. And we could just bring this back further. So we just want to make sure that it's basically blocking, and that's gonna be our background for the shot. All right, so we can push control one in our view port. That'll get us back to this look. And now I'm gonna go back into our cereal and manner. Just gonna remove this. Go back to the beginning now I'm gonna go up. We're going to dive into our auto dot network, and we want to set our render to this output. So now we want to try and prepare our fluid mesh to be lit. Says going to take some time. So this will be the last thing we do in this video. So I'm gonna go up, we'll go into our particle fluid, and I'm just gonna pull this import particle up. And what we're going to do is we're gonna lay down a file node. We're going to connect that there. So on this, we can continue to look at that. So on this note, we're going to switch this over, so we're going to use a file cash, and we're gonna lay this down right there. So here what we want to do is we want to switch us to write files. We're going to click on this. I'm gonna go back up, and I'm gonna make a new folder, and this is gonna be our fluid geo gonna hit, accept. And then on this gl two vtb dot dollar f and then three. So this is gonna be frames and we're gonna have three number values and then we're gonna hit dot But Geo well had except And this will give us, say frame range. That's what we want. And then we're going to just click save to disk, and this will start to cook this operation. This might take just a little bit. So we're going to go ahead in the end of in the video here and will pick up in the next video. We'll finish out. Our fluid will give that a mesh and then we'll set up our lights and then in the following video, will set up materials and render I'll see in the next video.
10. Class 10 - Finalizing Fluid Mesh and Lighting: Okay, Welcome back in this class. We're gonna pick up where we left off. So in the less class, we set up this file cash and we cashed our geometry. So if we click on this, we should have this fluid geo to GDP when this is what we set up. And this is if we can check that shows this is an image sequence basically similar to it. So GM geometry sequence. So this is cached all of our frames. So I'm just gonna cancel out of that is you don't need it starting loaded. What we're gonna do is we're just gonna check load from disk, and now that's going to switch from right files. That's now great out. What we can do is we can actually shake this, no doubt select all of these, and we're gonna slick this bypass so here can set this up. And now this is pretty fast to play out. And you notice that we have all of our collision geometry. This is cashed all of these particles. So now we want to mess this. So to do that, we're going to right click. We're gonna type VTB and we're going to use this VTB from particle fluid. I will lay that down. So what this is is this is taking our particle fluid So all the particles in our fluids him and this is converting it to a VTB VTB is a sparse foxhole format, So this is just a way to store information in really small cubes. So if we click display on this, you'll notice, I presume in it looks like a bunch of little cubes so you can get some interesting effects . We wouldn't typically will want to leave particle separation, But I'm just going to show us. So if we drop this down and this will take just a second to cook so you can see now they all look like little spheres. So what we want to do is we actually gonna put this back to 0.1? It's a particle. Separation should be kid instead what we're gonna dio, Let's drop this down. Let's try instead a 0.75 Let's try 0.5. We go down 2.3, so the smaller you go with this, the better. This is gonna look Russia, if you could see that, so we don't need this to be perfect because it's still pretty blocky. But that's gonna work because what we're gonna do is we're then gonna add another node. So we're gonna blur these box ALS. So these air basically cubed pixels. There's just a lot of them. So what we want to do is we wanted to you vtb smooth sdf It's a sign distance field. We'll turn this on and you'll notice gets a lot smoother. I might go down one more level. So now we're gonna take this vtb So we want to convert from a volume. That's what this is now. Right now it's a volume and we want to convert this. We're gonna do vtb convert, convert vtb lay this down, Gonna get a polygons And now from here I like to add a null and we're gonna call this out, make that one black and we want to control Click where we can all click and set both because we want to pull our render flag from over here. And we wanted to could be right here so that this is what we actually render out. Alright, We could go up a level so we don't need this fluid emitter anymore. And this fluid interior, we can actually turn both of these off disabled those. I'm just gonna turn that note off and there you have it. Now we have our geometry meshed for fluids. So in this auto duct network, it's come in and give us a quick save. And since we've already cashed everything, we can actually disable all of this because we don't need to calculate any of that right now. I'm gonna go back into our cereal, a matter we want to hook this back up. And now I want to do is I want to hook up, have already set it up before. But I want to use this rob geometry output. We're gonna hook this up and we want to basically save this two disc we're gonna do is we're gonna use our entire frame range And who wants to be the dollar f three Poggio? And we're gonna let this cook and you'll notice that this is running down here. You may never window that pops up. For some reason, I'm having issues with our recording software as well, having that show up. All right, so that's done. And now late on a file, and then we can show this file. And now, if we play through, we have our particles in the Orender a lot faster because we've cashed this geometry in the background. So we're gonna go ahead and do the same thing. They're particle fluid. Just wanna hook up. It's wrapped geometry output. When I check this dot dollar f three dot Biggio, Well, I'd accept we're going to do render frame range. Everything looks good. We'll do save to disk. This one might take just a little bit longer because we are doing a conversion from Fox ALS into this rob geometry. We're gonna let this cook, and we'll come back in just a second. All right, so that just finished for me, that took about an hour to calculator fluids. So before we move on and we'll lay down our file cash note the other option you had to do all this is you could actually use this particle fluid surface. And you could just took this vtb from particle fluid up here. Or you could always use this cash Noon. Always. Just use this import particle here, and then just do this file cash, have a pretty modest PC set up right now, the CPU is not the fastest. So for me, doing it this way just kind of saves it from crashing. And then using this rap geometry output ultimately, this You just want to use this after you've converted everything to a polygon because you want to make sure you have the geometry. But this time that you'll spend doing this, this will save you a lot of time in the end. Because now, if we lay down the file just like we did in the cereal if we select particle fluid Geo, you couldn't bypass all these Show this now the same thing, this place through a lot faster. All right, so you get these meshed, get her camera set up. So now what I wanna do is on a switch. My views Specter to view stacked. So I couldn't see my camera because I want to get a rough idea. So we want to set up a couple lights, so I'm in a tab, type in light. So we have a few different light options, and typically, what I like to use are good lights and then a few port actually move this So this just works. Kind of like area light would in cinema four D. If you're familiar with that. The interruption I really like is I also like this disc light. So for me, it just kind of want to get these set up kind of a nice three point lighting set up. So this intensity can I take this up? This will make things brighter. That's I want to set up another light. So I'm just training can get these set up double this. Is that a little bit of a color to these? But I think for the scene, we're gonna keep these pretty white, and then I'm just gonna make one more light. And for this one, do you just want it to be a point light? I might try. That one has a point light as well. Look, that camera, it's going to remove some of these shadows. - All right, so let's go over to our interview. We'll take a look at this. All right, so that coming is a good approximation. This will continue to build on, but I think we're looking pretty good with lighting here. I'm gonna go ahead and stop this class and will pick up in the next class, will start adding textures on here, and then we'll get set up to render we'll see in the next class.
11. Class 11 - Render Setup: All right, Welcome back. And this should be our last video for Houdini. So in this what we want to do, I'm just gonna go ahead and rename this on my call this backdrop. So in this video, we're gonna get our materials set up. I'm actually gonna move this fluid. It met her in a move that over here, we're gonna pull this particle fluid over here. So these were gonna be the three that we're gonna work with. Serial geometry. We don't really need just kind of group are notes a little bit. So I'm gonna set my quick marks, miss Set one on this, Geo. I'm gonna come up. We're going to switch over to the material context I'm gonna set to here, and then I'm gonna go to the out. Going to set three here. I won't always use this particular context. What i'll do is I'll show you where I usually pull that from, so to start most the time, you won't have a mantra. Node. So you wanna lay one of those down? So we'll go ahead. And Leah mantra? No. Damn. And i'll usually rename this. So we set up our camera with depth of field. I just wanna make sure that we use that. So I'm gonna go ahead and check this box, enable depth of field and into the render engine. Actually, when he used physically based rendering Ray tracing is the default rate. Racing looks pretty good, but for this we want physically based. And then in here What? I'm gonna dio someone come to our limits and Israel separately high. So we just want to get our materials set right now. I'm just gonna turn these down. And what kind of turned some of these up in a second? All right, so let's jump back toe to which is our material output. So working with materials, we have a few options here. We can always hit tab, and we've got a lot of notes. There's a lot of stuff to go through. But the other option you have is if we use this material palette, this will give you some pretty belt materials that come with Houdini. So you could always start here. This is a good way to kind of play around with things we wanted say, marble for our backdrop. I'm just gonna clicked and dragged that over. And if you want, you can hit this refresh, and it will give you just a second later too. I should give you a shader ball. All right there. Yeah. So you get spheres. You can kind of get to get ideas to what this might look like. So you can always take these and dragon Drop, and you'll notice things change to that kind of highlighted orange. And you could drop that on or we could take So you want this metal paint? Um, if you wanted to do toon shading could drop that on so you can get a decent ideas. So what color things might be, but the real way you want toe check it is. You want to come into this render view years might have this popped up, so we'll select our mantra note. Since that's the only one. Select our camera and let's go ahead and fire off a render. This is going to start rendering our image for us. So this will start to render and this is just gonna build because we have this preview. So this is enabling the gradual refinement. So basically, you can see these. I don't know if it's coming through on the recording. But there's all these little squares, so that's our tile size. What it's gonna do is it's progressively just gonna render and continue to render. So this is actually going pretty quick. The reason why I had to turn down all that is just to get speed up our render here so we can preview our materials. So I'm actually gonna delete these out because we're gonna build our own materials. But these were good way to start. And if you add these, actually, let's add it's had a dirt in here and then if we come back over to this material, So this gives you a dirt, and that's actually gives you a good idea as to the textures they're using and how they built this shader. So same thing can drag and drop That and it applied are dirt. So you can still drag and drop things in this or interview. So I just want to delete that, so to make our own what I'm gonna do is we're gonna look for Principal Shader. We're gonna use this and let's start with our backdrop. So for me, I want this to be a white backdrop and I don't want if you'd notice, we're gonna have a speculator. So I just want to take that down. I'm gonna make this white. I don't want any reflectivity and actually just want this to be in a mission. So I'm gonna make this white, but I want to turn this down, so I'm gonna check this Admission eliminates objects. So this means that this is gonna actually illuminate our objects. I just want this to be a solid background for us. The other thing you could do is you could always have no background. Just render the's just render out your milk in your cereal. And then you could always render out with an Alfa Channel and add your own background later . So I just want to bring that down a little bit. It's just the intensity. And you could make this any kind of want you are pink can make it pink. And with that diffuse, she couldn't get a little bit of a good look to it. I'm gonna keep it white. Nice and clean. Actually, I trade like a nice orange. Yeah, I'm liking that. All right, so that's our backdrop Let's go ahead and add another principle, Shader. Now we're gonna call this one milk and let's apply it in a different way. So I want to hit one, and under our particle fluid, we're gonna call this Gonna rename it. So right now, in this render tab, it's set to basic liquid so we can control a and delete that and it'll go to just that base diffuse. So here we can open up and we're going to select this milk. You'll notice now it's the shiny gray. So let's jump back to our material tab home our view and let's work with this milk. So we know our base color. I wanted to be white, you know? Bring this down. I want to be just a little yellow. So for this roughness, I'm gonna bring this down to about a 0.1. Milk tends to be pretty shiny, but I'm gonna bring this to a 1.3 for our speculator hands. Just gonna bring her reflectivity down. So, for our subsurface scatter, I'm gonna bring this up to about a 0.7 and I'm gonna make our subsurface white so you'll notice now as we start to kind of build things for materials. This is taking longer and longer to render. But we do see a little bit of that depth of field. Are these air? It's kind of zoom man, Can I noticing that these seem really fuzzy because they're actually out of focus. And that's look, we're going for So we just want to add a texture now for our cereal. So we're gonna do the same thing late on another principle, Shater. And we're gonna call this what? Okay, And my caps lock on serial geo serial, and I'm just gonna drag. We'll drop that on those. So I want to bring this down. Serial tends to be pretty flat and not very reflective. So in our diffuse, we can pick any color we want. And let's try that like that green. So I want to bring our reflectivity down. Transparency. We can leave all those subsurface I want to turn up just a little sure that's on weight, so you'll notice. Now try and send this to render again, starting to move a lot slower. So what I want to do is what we build our serial geometry. I'm just gonna hold down shift and click and drag, and we have this little bounding box now, So this is only going to render out this small area. So we want to add a little bit of a bump to these. So we could do is we could always go find a bump texture, and we could can build this in here. You can add this into the bump. We have a bump in a normal. So we're gonna enable that. And then we could load our texture here. But what we want to do is we're gonna lay down a note. We're gonna use this bump noise. I'm gonna drop that here. So let's to start. I want to open up our surface. But then I'm also gonna drop down our bump. Does it all end up using that? So you'll notice that these can have similar colors. Everything in Houdini's kind of color coded. So where things should go are color coded. So this kind of scion color should go with ease. Science. If we were to plug this into the green, it'll be a dotted line. So it's not the right note, but it can reference it. So that's actually what we're gonna do is we're gonna hook this amount into this base color , and this gives us an idea of what our bumps gonna look like. So it's select this bump noise, and let's just try turning our frequency up. And I just I want to get a good kind of texture. So even though this is still rendering out and it has taken some time just looking for a lot of variation So we want this to just look bumpy and where this black is and where these grays and this white are so that the black will be the lower portions and this white will be the higher, so I'm pretty happy with that. So what I want to do is I'm gonna pull down why, and we're gonna cut that. And I'm actually just gonna close this surface down. So in this bump noise, we want to take this and I'm gonna plug this amount into our base bump bump scale, and this will have toe update. And then I'm gonna take our display normals, and I'm gonna plug that into our base normals. So now, in our serial material. So I forgot to switch this. Let's switch our texture type to bump. All right, so I just kind of turned these up Turner frequency up a little bit higher. And her bump I said to five. So while this renders let's go and take a look at our render settings and we can kind of start to dial some things in So I'm just gonna click on this open output driver parameters and this is actually your mantra note. So this is the same thing in that context, and usually we'll just kind of hover this window here so I can work with this. So let's go ahead and get this set. So these pixel samples so that they're gonna be samples that air coming from your camera, so to dial these, and I'm just gonna turn this up to six. This is kind of a filter that affects everything. It affects your speculator, your diffuse everything in your scene. So we're okay to kind of leave everything else. But now let's just turn these up. So our reflect limit I'm gonna set to to We'll set that to to Is that these 23 in this volume limit? I'm just Seto won. I don't really have any volume in the scene since this is actually geometry now. So these air the limits of money raise everything in your scene can use, So that's going to take some more time. So while this kind of builds out well, come and we'll look at actually rendering this out. So if you wanted to render out of sequence, what you could do is you can click this and then we'll set our folder. What? Except and then you could name this whatever you want it to. So the important thing to do here is to been pit period and you can do dollar, but dollar f and then same thing we're doing before so we can hit three. So they give us three values in the frame value, so frame one will be 001 and then all the way up to frame 120. Since we're working with basically five seconds, we have over 220 frames and then we'll do dot e x r. In that X are, but that's going to do is that's going to give us a good image to work with. So on this we could do 16 bit floats Good. You could set up extra image planes. So in your e x are you could actually package these ao weise. I'm just gonna leave this off while you're under this. So this output device you can use open e x r will set that with this infer from vile name. With that set, it will just pick up whatever you set in that Dottie xar or dot tiff dot p and G. So we'll let that render. But what we wanted to do is let's just try rendering at a still frame so we can also come into this controls where we can just surrender to em play. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna remove that dot dollar f three dot t x r and then with this valid frame range render current frame just clicked, rendered in play. And this will pop up RM play window all right, and then are in place running and we'll just let this right. This is just gonna progressively right out the image and will come back once this is done. All right, so there you go now are still frame is done rendering so you can see For me, this took a good amount of time. It took 52 minutes just to render this one frame. There's still some things we could touch up, but that is start to finish. Let's how you would create particles. And if you wanted to render out an image sequence, all you'd want to do is just come toothy end and make sure you add that dot dollar F three and then switch from Brenda current frame to render frame range. And you could set this. Make sure that your output settings everything looks the way you want, and then just go ahead and click render, and then that would start to kick off on image sequence for you. You could pull that into premier after effects your video editor of choice and then render that out. Put it up online and you're ready to go. So what you need to do now is just use the same basic workflow and go ahead and create a 3 to 5 second spot and just create a shot using particles and fluid dynamics. The ah one last thing I'll show you. So the power of what we set up is if you ever wanted to run another sequence, you could come into this serial geometry. And instead of this tourists, this will break some of our stuff. But you could later, in a box attach. This will come back to our seen view and go back up and instead in here where we have this file, we don't wanna look at that. We'll disconnect that one. And now if we look at this, no. Now, instead, we have a bunch boxes. So we would want to run this fluid Sam again and just detect those collisions. So we get something that looks good with the collisions of the fluid. But you could plug any piece of geometry into here and then just rerun that sim, and you're ready to go. All right. If you have any questions, I'll be, ah, unskilled share. And definitely feel free to reach out. I hope you enjoyed this course, and thanks for taking it. I look forward to seeing what you make
12. Bonus Class - Redshift Setup and Render: All right, everybody, welcome to this bonus class in this lesson, I'm going to show you red shift and Red Shift is 1/3 party renderers. So I have this shelf tool appear with red shift. So we're gonna take a look at this because red Shift is a GPU render. So GPU rendering is going to go through your graphics processing unit, GPU, and that's gonna be your video card. So a lot of times is gonna be a lot faster. It's just you could make an argument that sometimes CP rendering could look better, But Red shift has gotten really good and this is kind of my GP render of choice. I just really like the look of it. And I think it's super fast. It looks good. So that's my choice. Another one that I have, Um I have tried his octane. It's another GP render, and you can get on instagram or anything, Or just look, these renders up and you can kind of see what the looks you can get our all right, So that's a quick background. So let's go ahead and take a look at our scene. So first thing I want to do. Just select all these lights. We can actually just delete those is we're not gonna need them. So are quick marks. Should still work. And I'm just gonna delete thes out real quick. So I already had those red shift nodes inserted. What I want to do is I'm just gonna click on this red shift button on the shelf tool, and this will create that Rob, and then this I PR note. So this I PR note is just going to reference this red shift. Rob is Orender operator. So here will have some settings, and we kind of go through these. Um, we're just gonna do a quick overview of a lot of these so you can have rendered to em play the main output so you can select your camera override camera resolution so you can set it to be a specific. Since we're actually using 12. 80 by 7 20 I'm just gonna uncheck that it's gonna be a pretty good resolution for us. It should be pretty quick. All right. So, output, this is where we can set up our file path to name, and we could change this to dollar F three and We'll actually set this up later. Um, just like we did in the mantra known. This will just be your path where you'll render out all of your image files. Um, opening xar have float, you can do full float. 32 bit xar compression. So up here we have the loaves. So in here, you can add an a O V with that. Plus you can delete. Here. You could then select what you want. If you want beauty diffuse, get your speculator pass depth passes, normal pass volume lighting any of these. So this is gonna be really good to set up a Avi's that then you could use in after effects . A of you processing. You have trace of gamma if you want. You could take this down. Toe one. Thanks. Let me get linear. Believe it. A 2.2 for the screens. Dino ways that already has a built in D noise. Er so you've got some options you can jump through these kind of Take a look at him on your own. Um for right now we are probably pretty good there. I just want to bring this over. All right? So I'm actually going to save a version of this, and I'm just gonna save over this one. I don't need that one, so I just hadn't underscore r s. So you know this the red shift file All post both of these for you. So let's go to our geometry. And I'm just gonna make thes so I can't select him and the serial geometry we don't really need. She might drop this day right here. All right, so in our camera. So initially when I made this, since I already have red shift installed already have this red shift camera. So this is where you will enable depth of field so I can check this, and then this will just use Houdini camera focus an f stop. So that will just reference everything else that we've already set up here. So, to start, we're gonna want to lay down some lights because otherwise we're gonna be able to see anything in her seen. So I'm gonna type r s on light, and this one will create this rs light. So, by default, this light type is gonna be an area light. You can make it a point distance distant light that should be more like the sun. I'm gonna leave. This is an area light right now, and let's go ahead and scoot this back because we want to kind of light are seen, so I'm just gonna option drag that. And what kind of dial these down a little bit? Bring this one over. I kind of wanted up here. I'm gonna rotate and I'm gonna bring one down, and I make this a point light, and we're actually just gonna have it back here. Okay? So let's come up here to have a couple options. So this I p r so that I pr node that's created That's gonna be your interactive preview. Render preview region so you can click this and this will launch it in in plain. So there's are in play window. I don't typically like this as much as three. Your interview. Isabelle er, seen. So once I build the scene, what it's gonna do is it's just going to continually update this in play. So part of the reason why I don't like this is it doesn't give you as much control as their interview, so you can see that it's rendering and this is actually going pretty quick for the scene that we have. I'm just gonna go and close that when I like to use is this render view just because it gives you a few more options. Because here you can actually look at just diffuse a beauty. We can start and stop the I p r. We can also refresh. So I just like some of these options up here. So this is the view that all typically use. So what kind of bringing this up here? We're gonna be working with limited screen space, so make this a little bit bigger, so you can see it. Bring it, uh, just try and match like that. Okay, so we've got our lights, and we can always adjust thes and want to kind of dial of these down, but let's go and throw materials on. So I want to I want to look through our camera. You shouldn't bring this over here real quick, and I'm gonna disable lighting. Let's just do headlights on the all right. So locker camera And I just kind of want to bring us down a little bit because we're going to set up our shot so I like that, but also what we're here we're going to do. So I'm seeing these kind of black squares. So what? That is, that's actually our light. So in this light, we can come over here and we can have some options. We have the area light. It's gonna be all of our G I diffuse speculator. And then we've got light samples for volume and then in the shader. So this is where intensity multiplier is gonna be. So if we wanted to dial that one down, let's move. Bring that one down to 50 and then so in the light, Tam, what we want to do is we just want to check this visible and you notice the disappeared. So then, same thing can check that visible, and this one shouldn't matter is much since it's back there and it's a point light anyways , so we can't see it are it's a Now let's jump over to our material network. So I just want to close this down. These air are old materials was what we were using for mantra. But if you're using red shift, he actually need to set up red shift materials so we're gonna go ahead and type Rs for red shift A material for Matt. But we want to use this rich of material builder button it enter will drop this down and then we'll dive inside. I'm gonna go back up. So this is a bop net. We don't really dealt with botnet fop nets at all. So this is gonna be vexed code, but in basically a visual form. So we've got different knows that we can lay down. So inside here we have choices on what we can lay down. So for this, we're gonna take a material and we could drop that down and then we could wire this up and let's make this a different color real fast. Let's make it red. And now I'm gonna go up and I'm just gonna drag and drop this on our background. So that's how we would get a different color on our background. So let's actually dial in our background. I think I might add in our essence for mixing here in the scene. So for a backdrop, I'm actually just gonna use a color absolute. And I'm just gonna go ahead and connect that. And now, here instead of black. I just want to get that orange. I like that color that we were using. So there you go. Because basically what this is doing is it's just saying, Hey, this is just the absolute color that I want for this background. And I could probably do this in after effects and just render out in Alfa. But I'm just gonna render it out of Houdini and try to get as complete as possible in out of the software. All right, so let's go ahead and hit tab again and let's go ahead and lay down another material builder. I'm actually just gonna go ahead and duplicate this now. So this one I'm gonna name RS Underscore Milk Matt. And for this one going to rename this one RS underscore serial mad all rights. Let's dive into the milk. And here is where we're gonna use this rich of material. So go ahead and leave this town. Let's go ahead and connect this up so we can actually apply this. Let's jump over here. We got our milk and then I'm just gonna use this picker and we use this RS milk, Matt and then for our cereal. Let's just go and connect this one up too. All right? It's not too space. Part age will get us back. Let's go back in here that way. Any changes we make here we can actually see in our interview. All right, so I want to make this a white and let's add just a little bit of yellow since its milk just kind of want that creamy yellow we want to refuse. Maybe, like 0.75 Let's try them. So this reflection we've got it white, let's set our wayto one. And I just want to turn up our roughness a bit. Just kind of looking for, like, this, not super bright reflections. I don't want too much speculator, but I do want a little bit, so I kind of like that 0.3. That looks pretty good to me. So incidents of refraction I'm gonna take down to about of 1.3. So we have a refraction. I'm just gonna leave this standard and then in the subsurface, I'm just gonna bring this up the absorption scale a little bit, and then I'm gonna come up here, So this is basically subsurface. Multiple scattering. So this will add different layers in here. So I'm just gonna dial this into about a 0.7 here so we can kind of start to take our samples up free one because 16 is gonna be that much. So I usually work a little bit higher since we are going through the GPU kind of handle it here. All right, so this is going to take just a little bit a little bit longer to render every time we make that change since we dialed those up. So first and foremost, I noticed or seen just looks a little dark, so I might bounce back over here and shouldn't move this off to the side, but I'll bring back up from us. So this rs late, that's our late one. I'm just kind of disconnect our camera and option drag transform. Here we go. And let's just bring this over. And I'm kind of looking at the render view so I could get a good idea. Don't bring that over. You see? Can see it. She might bring this kind of rotate it. I was gonna hit him, and that will change our orientation. So that way it's a line to the world. Just kind of want these top lip and you can kind of see what I'm looking at there. So I just don't want our cereal to be too dark on top. I just wanted to look like it's got some light coming from overhead, as if it were like kitchen lights or something are so we can go ahead and jump back. Tour came review. And, well, maybe fix these a little bit. Can't decide if I'm in love with him or not. Actually, I might just go and do that. Now I'm just going Teoh, just like Tartus. One. Grab that. So this one. Bring down sh rotated just kind of take away some of these shadows underneath the milk and candlelight the's in the background a little bit. I nominate him again. Could a cycle through and we're just back that off? Just a pit someone, things to be lit, but not that lead. All right, so it's gonna work with that. It's gotten close that all right, so let's jump back to our material network, so I think our milks looking pretty good. We could still work on our lighting, but let's go get our serial dialed in. So our cereal, I'm gonna use same thing. And when you use this artist material, all right, So immediately, Once we have that up, you can see that these change and these have that base color, and they're very reflective. So I'm gonna go ahead and change our color. Let's go ahead and select. Do? Yeah, kind of like that are. So we want this to be rough. So we're gonna leave this, maybe bring it down to about a 0.5, maybe and a roughness. Take up 2.6. Actually, I kind of dark and it up a little too much for my taste. So I'm gonna take that back up to one. Are her reflection. We're definitely gonna want to bring this down, And I might even do more, So we want to bring our roughness. So I'm gonna make this about a 0.6 to start. Let's see what that looks like. Um, Might do 0.75 It's looking a little better. I just don't want bright, really bright speculator spots, so I might take this Damn. All right. Looks a little better. There's a sense that the incidents of refraction under one for this. So those are starting look pretty good to me. Like in the way that's looking. So absorption scale. I'm just gonna bring this Teoh, say about a five. All right? So the way we want to build this is we're looking to build this with our own procedural noise. Kind of like we did with the mantra node. So we don't really have any options in this node to do that. So what we want to dio is we're gonna do a noise and we have this RS noise. So we can't really just take this and plug it directly into our bump map and get results. We can, But that's not exactly what we're looking for. So we can take this and let's plug it into the surface. Just we can see what this looks like so we can get it dialed in. So I'm gonna come over, and I'm gonna change this to turbulence instead. And let's try. Let's try 15. All right, so the amplitude gain, it's gonna leave that, But let's take this up two am kind of like in that five just looking for some variation, so distortion. And let's take that scale up. Can't like it. Zero actually are. So the rest of this we should be okay to leave, as is so I like this look. So let's plugger material back in. So now we want to do is we want to get a bump map, and we're gonna take this will drop this Here, take this out color for our noise. Plug this into the texture and we want to put this into the input. So now that we've got that, there will take this and we'll plug this into the bump map and we do get some results. So we'd be fine to go ahead and render this but another option. If this isn't working his that we could we could go back to our geometry, come into our cereal, a mentor, and in this red shift O b j. That is gonna break everything. We're gonna come into this test elation, Tab Lou enable test elation. So you notice everything's gone and we'll want to bring this down, and I'm just gonna die list down. It's a pretty sure these ship work so still nothing's happening here, so I'm gonna go back. We'll go into our Syria material and in this rs noise under coordinates instead of object position on a changes to Vertex AB tribute. So that gives us basically the same result. But by doing it this way, we're actually using I'm gonna set my quick mark for two here because we can always go up, come back over here. So this sets are minimum edge length. So since our objects were actually, in theory, pretty small, we could set this pretty small. And we need this to be small in order for it to show up and then these maximum subdivisions . So this is the most that will subdivide with Camel Clark. And this is just gonna be capital Clark, and then it's gonna loop. You can also set it to just capital Clark. But for this I'm just gonna leave it there. So outside of that, we are pretty much set. Were you kind of dialling are lighting a little bit more. I'm gonna bring this over. I think you're gonna move this off screen so that we can kind of take a look at our lights . Let's see, Like to ones over there. Three actually think for and one these air, actually, pretty much in the same place. All right, so I just want to bring this over. Kind of trained a light. This better the milk up here, so I don't want to point it up to too much, but we do want a nice, bright scene. We want this to look like it's ah, like TV commercial or something you might see on a cereal ad. So our camera, I'm just gonna bring our It's maybe a bit much. It's trying to kind of keep our step the field pretty shallow here. All right, so I think that's looking pretty good. So I'm just gonna go out and close our interview. We can always and these preview different frames. So I guess one last thing we should do before we start to change everything is we should in our lights, make sure were turned into par samples. So, red shift, a love of the control of being able to affect everything. Just wanna train removal out of that noise. That's a point light. Something to change the name of this one. So this bucket rendering If you shut this off, this will give you just the squares and That's gonna be a little bit better. Way to render. So it's not gonna render everything all at the same time and just be progressively better, but it will just render until it's complete. Are you all right? So let's go back to to you. I just want to turn up samples on so this as well. So I'm gonna push three, and that'll take us to our now context. And I'm gonna close this. Can I get her little bug there? That might be coming from the recording on my end. All right, So are red shift. Rob. Wanna come in here? And actually you want to bring this over, so I'm gonna select it a drive. And for me, I'm just gonna set it to D. That's one of my internal drives. Make a new folder and accept. I usually like to do the one just in case. A lot of times, once I've dialed it and it might only be a V one, but just the editing brain and then amenity dollar f three that he xar had, except All right, so now we've got a path. Give me a file names, three frame numbers and e x r gonna be good with a 16 bit. And once we're ready now, we can just go ahead and hit Render to disk. Could do controls can have the same controls here. You could specify just the frame range. If you maybe started Orender and finish, it could dialling just the frames you want. So for this committee, render frame range 1 to 1 20 and render with take. So we're just gonna use our main. We didn't set up any takes, and I will go ahead and hit and render to disk, and then we'll just let this run and we'll come back and we'll check this once it's done. But I'm just gonna let this run right now, okay, So our renders done, and now I'm actually in after effects, so I'm just getting ready to importer footage. So if you're gonna import into premiere or any other N l e, this is what you'd have. So you navigate to your folder and you should have an image sequence goes all the way up to 1 20 or whatever your last frame, the use of waas. So I'm just going to start at frame one and we want to open the X R sequence. So if I select all and we just import a mall, But if I d select and just select one, it'll open is a sequence. So that hit import. And now we have this image sequence looking Cymbal. We'll go and click on that where we can always drag it down to a Newcomb. Just make that full screen. And then if we preview there you come. So then you can just go through and kind of pick out your frames. You could do any time remapping you wanted to in after effects. Just depends on what year in goal is. And outside of that now that you're done, because dread this bonus on red shift.
Jacob Frink
