Houdini Beginner Tutorial - Make an object follow a path

hello friends my name is Theo and today in this exciting recent video tutorial we taking a look at how to make an object follow along a path inside Houdini now this is an essential sort of motion graphics staple that you'll always have to do so it's a good thing to know how to do and it's not the most intuitive thing to do in Houdini but once you get the hang of it then you know you've got the ability to do it in Houdini and you can do all the other magic stuff that Houdini can do so inside Houdini the first thing we'll do is create a path now like everything in your Dean there's a million different ways to do this but I'm gonna show you two the first one is sort of the quick and easy way that's a little bit dirty and I don't really like but you can go up to your shelf tools go to create path and you can click around you see it makes this really nice path and you can of course go and edit it afterwards so let's say we'll move this guy hit T for transform and move it over here so that's pretty nice looking this totally works and it's great for quick stuff we've look at your object manager over here this is just a mess so you know you can tell they do this there's ways to organize this it's totally fine but whenever I make a path I normally reach for a different option so drop down a geometry node and dive in here and add in an add stop so in here we can add a bunch of points so I'll turn on our point visualization here and it will enable this first point you can see we're getting a point right in the center of our origin there and I'll hit D and go to guys and then turn our point marker size up so if we move this over you can see point markers getting bigger so I got this nice big marker to see just in case you're on a small screen so I've got that and now we can add a couple more so let's add like six points and I'll go ahead and enable all of these and we'll just move them to some random locations for now and it'll make them look cool in a bit and there we go nice so now I've got some points going around and the next we will do is connect these so we make a spline so right now you can see there's already a much slower way but you know choose whichever one you want but in order to connect these we just go to polygon and then click by group and so now they're all connected and let's move them around some so if we hit enter over our viewport then you see we get all of these nice transform handles so now I can move these around so maybe we want this to be sort of flowing up and around and out and we'll move this maybe here and this one up a bit so now you've got a path for our object to follow that is looking just fine and dandy so now we'll smooth this out and we can do that by adding a convert node and dropping this in here and we'll view this and now we'll change this from convert to polygon - we'll do a NURBS curve in this so now you can see the path tries to fit these points if you want a different sort of control you can of course do a Bezier curve also and bring the order up and change it around but for this one I'm just gonna do a NURBS curve cuz that's nice and easy so I've got our nice swooping curve done here and it's all you know in much fewer nodes than before when we had like 8080 things there all these points are of course addressable as before so if we turn on our point numbers and they're very small in the viewport so we'll go ahead and set our font size to large they can see you've got zero one two three all of our points available if we want to do anything with them at a later date so now we're ready to start moving an object around so we'll set this to path just so we stay a little bit organized and we'll drop down another geometry node and we'll put a sphere in here because why not and we can leave this as a primitive just bring the scale way down that's totally fine and now here comes the tricky part once again there is a shelf tool to do this so and the results are basically the same so I say go ahead and use the shelf but we're gonna build it anyway just so you sort of understand what's going on in case cuz then once you understand what's going on under the hood then you can expand this out and do all your Dini magic and do more than just make it follow a path because any idiot can make something follow a path in another application but here we can do so much more and that's very exciting so we'll go over to our constraints tab and here we've got a follow path so we will select the object that we're going to move and then hit enter and then we'll select the path that we're gonna constrain it to you it and I've also got a look at objects so if we wanted this to be like an arrow pointing at something we could add that in and we've also got a lookup object in case you wanted to keep this oriented a certain direction and it's automatically automated with an expression to have it move along when you do it this way so very cool but let's go ahead and rebuild this from scratch just so we've got it so you saw it that whenever we add that shelf to it edit in a constraint network in here so tab straight network and see we automatically get this get world space node which is great and now in here people drop down a follow path node just easy as that now I'll drop this in here and we will set this to output and we will set our saw path to our path node and I see our geometry snaps over to our path and we can move the position along just like that so we've got this built let's go ahead and talk about these parameters a bit so I'll jump out of here and I donate box instead yeah yeah jump this in will visualize this and we can bring this down and we don't need these point or number visualization so we can turn those off now yeah jump back into our constraint Network and here we've got our file a path node and the first one is normalized distance and this ranges from 0 to 1 for 0 being the beginning of the path 1 being the end and all the values along between so this will scale as our path scale so if we go back to our path node let's go ahead and just set a quick key here say control 1 equals here and control 2 equals our path here enter in the viewport again to add and I can see if we move these around and let's actually go back to 1 and we'll set this all the way to the end too if we move these around you can see that our box stays at the end so if we change this maybe you want a different effect go back to our constraint network I don't set this to control three as a quick mark if we change this from normalize distance to to normalized spline this is the same sort of deal here except I believe this is based on the number of points instead of the distance so now we'll go to distant from start and now this supposed to get you the actual distance along the path so if we change our points around like we did before you see our box will stay the same distance from the start so even if we added points here so if we added one to the end we'll go ahead and add another point and turn it on you see now our box stays in the same place so that can be very useful for all sorts of stuff I'd move this up for something just for fun jump back to our constraints and now we've got distance from the end which is the same sort of thing but from the end believe it or not pretty crazy and then distance point attribute so this way we can set attributes along the paths we could set our point number is to be you know various amounts on there a little more advanced stuff in this beginner tutorial we'll go into but just know that we have this distance attribute available and you could of course change the attribute here so we'll keep this to normalize distance because that's nice and easy also a quick note about the distance attribute is this takes a vector but it will only use the X attribute so just something to know then we've got our look at mode which we've got a long path so right now you can see that our box is sort of facing along the distance of our path as we move it around which is very nice we can also change this to none and you see it just sort of floats along so this can be a different sort of effect and then we've also got once again direction from point attributes in this case it will use all three components of the vector and it will change this to a long path again just because that's nice and now I've got the up vector so you know we just keep this at Z minus and y plus B if you see if we change these around some our little axes around here are changing and you can also of course change this to affect your attributes from path and a long path so we'll just keep this as our normal standard up vector and we give sure it's changed this around here you can set that there and we could of course rotate along this vector and we can change this around some so all the stuff that you probably won't use most of the time but it's good to have and they've also got our channel tab I just have a lot more aligned alignment options that I never really have to deal with there's some stuff on the documentation if you want to go check that out I'll put a link to the documentation for this note in the description if you want to check that out as well we've got our common which it's pretty common so there we go now I've got our simple thing we can do a quick little animation so zero no good frame 36 take this one ctrl alt click create a keyframe and we'll set our timeline length to something like 40 and we'll set this to real time there we go very nice and of course from here we can also have our box emit particles or do all sorts of other stuff in fact you know this tutorial is over if you like you for like you can give it it's like except etc no matter what leave your feelings down the comments below are there any questions you have about Houdini I know sort of an enigma to people just getting started with it and most of the tutorials out there are for geniuses so as I come up with these little ideas for simple things that are you know a little less intuitive than maybe they should be I'll make a tutorial about them but you know anything's you've been wondering about or if you remember if you're more advanced user and you're some for some reason still here you know let me know of things that sort of gave you trouble that you think other people might want to see also subscribe to me Smita youtube channel if you wanna see more stuff like this hopefully I'll be doing more motion graphic stuff along with normal color grading and other sort of stuff that we do check out me ste Mediacom / products if you're here for the su Dini tutorial you're probably into motion graphic stuff check out the stock footage that we have there which is good overlays for stuff to just spice up your animations it's a nice way to just sort of on top of something and make it look more expensive quickly I use it a lot for titles the lens junk pack the atmospheres pack check that out I think that's all the housekeeping now let's go and just make this emit a couple particles I know we'll hop up and we'll add out another geometry node and we'll call this one particles and I will drop down an object merge and we'll change our transform to into this object so now we get it following our transforms and we'll drop to a quick little pop Network drop this in here view this now if we play there we go we get some particles going around nice very cool is that just a little bit of turbulence or I guess I should say pop wind and now that's not very much going on so we'll add some amplitude there we go now I've got an animation happening we can bring our birth up like 10 or so there we go and now we've got a thumbnail look at that make an object follow a path very cool so thanks for staying around for the end part I know that doing it like this probably kills my watch time but who cares about YouTube we'll just make cool stuff right [Music]

Channel: MiesnerMedia

Views: 28,606

Rating: 4.9034481 out of 5

Keywords: miesner media, tutorial, post production, houdini tutorial, houdini beginner tutorial, houdini 17 tutorial, houdini 17, houdini 17 beginner, houdini follow path, houdini constraints, houdini motion graphics tutorial, houdini basics, houdini basic tutorial, houdini for beginners

Id: oHAExjXldkg

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 18 2019