Insert Generic "Lack of Update" Title Here

Yes, I haven't posted anything on this blog for nearly 2 months. And for good reason. Yes, I still plan to learn Houdini, but no I haven't done anything with it for nearly 2 months. There's a couple of reasons. First, while we have a copy of Houdini at my school, the IT department has been dragging it's legs in getting it up and running. Yes, I am a month into the semester and Houdini still isn't accessible at school. I'm a little pissed. 2nd, I can't run it on my Mac since I was cheap 3 years ago and bought a 1st gen MacBook Pro used and don't have 64bit processors. My windows 7 hasn't running Houdini very well. Which brings me to my last hurtle. I just got an internship at Black Sun Entertainment, working on Azurues Rising. This has soaked up most all of my time. I do have Houdini ready to install on my Windows XP and begin working with it again, but it may be awhile.

Still Life Progress 3

I've finished my 1st project in Houdini. Yay, me. So anyway here it is. I'm going to continue on with more lessons.

Still Life Progress 2

OK, I only have 6 more pens left to model. Then I will have finished my 1st project in Houdini. Yay! I have to say modeling in Houdini is quite different than in Maya. I guess they each excel at they're own things. Maya makes it easy to just work with the GUI and grab points, extrude, delete, etc. Houdini makes it easy to make a procedural model that can be tweaked in different ways. Kinda like a mini program. It's more suited for mechanical shapes I think. However the Paste SOP is just a brilliant NURBS modeling tool.

Still Life Progress 1

So here is my preliminary mug model. Not only is this the 1st time modeling something in Houdini, but this is the first bit modeling I've done in 2 years. It's also my 1st model that I've done using NURBS. Yes that's right NURBS. I figured since I'm learning one thing I might as well stack on some other elements as well. Of course obviously the basic shape of the mug was pretty easy to pull off with a few NURBS curves. But the rest of it, specifically the organic lips were pretty tough. I eventually found a pretty need OP to do it. By using a Paste SOP you can paste geometry onto the surface of another piece of geometry. It's kinda like a combination of the merge and project SOPs. Anyway pretty cool. I'm rather cooked for the day. I've been reading mountains of Houdini help files and forum posts. Tomorrow I'll start on modeling all 23 pens. I should have just filled the stupid thing with #2 pencils.

Still Life

I've decided to retract my original plan to model a hand. Not that I can't mind you. I just figured that since I had this little guy sitting next to me, it would make a great exercise. Time to break away from the set-by-set tutorials and work on something off the books. Hopefully Red turns out OK.

SOPs

So since I'm led to believe that you have no idea what Houdini is or how it works, I'll give you a little back ground. Houdini is the 3D FX program. It can do just about anything. The big part about learning how Houdini works is learning how to use a node based workflow and procedural workflows. Basically a node is a self-contained program that preforms a specific task: e.g. extruding a polygon plane. This node has inputs and outputs that allow you to connect it to other nodes. So you could make a node that creates a box, that box then gets outputted to an extrude node that extrudes one or more faces, the extrude node outputs to a smooth node, etc. This allows you to change any one of those nodes and you will see results down the line.

Anyway SOPs stands for Surface Operators. It's the network in Houdini for modifying geometry. Anyway very cool stuff, my first project I'm going to be doing is modeling a hand in Houdini. I'll post more when there's something else to say.

Introduction

Well, I mighty "Hello" to all of you. I thought I might start out by declaring what this blog is specifically for. I have one semester left for School and this is where I will be post progress on my last two projects. One is Rock in the Road which has been going on for a long while. (I'll be posting on that blog as well.) And the other is a new project that I'll be undertaking as well. I can't share the details of that project yet as it's not quite ready to be talked about.

The 2nd part of this blog is to relay progress on my learning of SideFX Houdini. I'll be sharing my learning experiences and hopefully some useful knowledge to help anyone else that might be learning this daunting program.