Built In Nodes vs. VEX: Voronoi Morph

the guy who shares his office with me benificial is a very talented designer and for a few style frames you needed to setup which turned a hexagonal grid into Voronoi cells and I think this is a really neat setup for a beginner for a person wants to get into adeney because it requires very little to no scripting while at the same time it shows basics of how you tackle such a setup in a procedural 3d apps such as Houdini to get started I will drop down a grid and dive in there let's disable this viewport grid and increase our rows and columns to say 40 by 40 I want to duplicate this grid copy it over here and want to set this to only have two rows and two columns so one big polygon and what I can do now is drop down a below now fracture node and wire up both grids in here with this grid providing the Voronoi fracture points for this grid so those are really regular and the Voronoi fracture will spit out a very regular grid as well so basically the position of these points here will drive how my Voronoi fracture looks so let's highlight this grid again and modify it to spit out a hexagonal subdivision in the Voronoi fracture and for that I want to move every second line of that grid to the side let's do that by first dropping down a group by range so I can select every second line basically and what I want to do is I want to select 40 points out of 80 and our primitives about points like this and let's call this one move so the group of points that I want to move now let's use a transform wire this in here underneath the group and in the group tab just select the move group that we created here and then increase the translate alone X and of course I have to highlight this first so I can see I'm now translating every second point here so in a holla Tibor annoy fracture now and keep dialing the points here you can see I can set up something along the lines of a hexagonal that needs a bit dialing in there like this so let's set this to zero point 125 and I get this hexagons here so in order to get this typical boron oil look I'll have to randomly move those points that are feed in here so I can do that we see point jitter node which I'll wire in here highlight it and you can see this messes it up a really badly assaults dial back scale and also when looking at from the side I want to scale the y-axis to zero so it's only moving in the X and z direction again decrease the scale of it further like this I'll at the Voronoi fracture again and when I move the scale slider now you can see we're pretty soon getting these typical or annoy cells here which basically just originated from randomly distributed or annoy center points that I feed into the border my fracture so let's control this to give this a point around which my Voronoi fracture points will start to get jittered and when I look at the point jitter I have this checkbox here it's called use P scale and what that says is if I have a point attribute written on those points that come in to the point jitter here that's called P scale it will use that to drive the overall scale of the point deter effect let's try that by creating a point attribute we'll see how above the attribute to create Wireless in between here and let's hit our attribute to have the name P scale be a point attribute by default it should be zero but for now let's set it to one going to the point jitter and check us P scale and nothing should change because we just set our PCL attribute to one however if we dial back the P scale value now you can see the overall effect gets controlled by this P scale attribute so let's put that to use and let's set its value to zero for now and what I want to do in here is I want to wire in an a trip transfer which will accept a second stream of points and we'll try to match their attributes to our current geometry which is this here so let's add a single point for now at the origin copy over this a trip create here yr this into our point and set the points P scale value to 1 and then wired in the average transfer here so it's hot like that no error again same goes for the point jitter here however that only partially work because all my points are kind of uniformly jitter so let's have a look at the advert transfer again drag this down and go into the conditions tab here so under the distance threshold if we dial that back we can see the radius around which are points attribute get transferred it gets smaller so let's set this to 1.5 like this and again highlight up or another fact we can see now we have this area in which we have this typical porno cell look versus this area where we have the regular exact and I'll rig and if I move around my at point here I can move around that whole effect I can scale it of course with the distant threshold but what I want to do now is have it kind of fall off here this is kind of harsh and to visualize this let's drop down a visualise node where I trip transfer in here highlight this and under the visualizers tab let's hide out the P scale so we can see this is really harsh here and there are several ways of dealing with that I like to use a new a trip which will just blur out those attributes that we feed it in in our case P scale that's why the visualizer underneath the a dribbler and we can see already this has been blurred out quite a bit and if we increase the flowering iterations it'll get blurred out further like this so now if we at the point jitter we can see this fall off to the sides and the Voronoi fracture we can see the Voronoi look just fading blending with those exact non rid cells again let's increase the blurring iterations to maybe thirty two and we now have this really smooth transition from our hexagonal grid to our Voronoi cell look so that is building your basic transition from a regular grid to a for my cell look using only Houdini standard cells so no scripting involved here would I typically build it like that well likely not instead of doing these four nodes here I would just simply drop down a single pointer angle and write this index so let's just quickly say this and let's have a look at how I do it using a pointer angle so drop down a pointer angle and let's maybe copy this whole tree here paste it so we can see what's different alright let's get rid of all of this here instead wire the pointer angle in here and wire the ass off in the second slot and the visualize goes beneath it like this and in the pointer angle what I want to do for each point on this geometry I want to find out the distance to this point here so let's get this points position here and we know this is the point coming in through the second slot start with the ID one and this is the single point on this stream so it's got a point number of with that let's quickly vector call it n pause and just load up the attribute out of the second input attributes called P and the point number is zero like that let's create a float called a D for distance let's calculate the distance of my grid point so be at P to our single point here let's create two floats and also create sliders for those call one max for maximum distance create a float slider call this one max on the school distance just copy this paste it call this one minimum distance and called float min create those sliders so have a minute max distance set the max distance of two next I'll remap my distance to be in the range of 0 to 1 using those Max and min sliders so I'm gonna write D equals 2 let's use the fit function and we want to fit D which ranges between min and Max and we want it to be in between 0 & 1 finally let's add a ramp to it to control the fall-off of this one see edge ramp will give us a ramp interface call this one fall off and we want to remap D itself let's create the interface like this which by default is said to be a linear ramp okay finally let's write D onto our P scale attributes so ffp scale equals to D and it's P scale not peace class like this and now I can see a visualize attribute here and I've written this the wrong way around of course where the distance is 0 I want the piece get to be 1 and where the distance is 1 I want the piece get to be 0 so let's just switch our remap range here set of ranging from 0 to 1 less range from 1 to 0 like this and now I have these simple sliders where I can dial in maximum and minimum range and also this neat curve interface where I can dial in the fall-off behavior and from there on it's just the standard set up chittering the points and then feeding this into a or annoy fracture so these are the two setups and yes I sincerely mean that this for me Poynter angle is easier than these four notes here and it's not because I want to minimize my note count by no means it is just with this pointer angle all I have to memorize is vex and vex is pretty close to standard C or C++ it's a C style language and vex permeates every aspect of Rivini so if you know vex you cannot only Drive points you can also Drive primitives you can drive shaders volumes you can also drive the compositing with it and also use it to create animation curves in chops also vex is logically structured because it's very close to C it's a sea style language and it's very well documented if you know how to read a programming language documentation a reference so whatever style you choose this is the simple straightforward setup to turn a regular grid into this Voronoi cell look as always I'm excited to see what you guys use this for what you guys come up with if you want to learn more about vex or the intricacies of Houdini or in general if you want to support us head over to our patreon where we have some in-depth courses on topics like vex volumes vellum or in general transitioning to Houdini adding adeney to your arsenal and if you're already on patreon thanks so much for your support and a very special thank you goes to Kyoko sacani important-looking pirates Joseph Howard Derek a Johnson Nick Nick Chris a bear Rebecca Nadal Rob Brian jr. and Mohamed alabbar II thanks so much guys and with that it's Cheers and goodbye

Channel: Entagma

Views: 3,694

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: hX3hbm7gkm0

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 26 2019