Houdini Beginner Tutorial: Steam From a Hot Cup

hey guys welcome to another Houdini tutorial today let's make a nice steaming cup of coffee or tea or whatever hot beverage you prefer so first I'm going to create a project and save my file [Music] okay so first let's go ahead and model our cup I'm just going to drop down a Geo note here we'll call it cup and I'm going to drop down a sphere geo let's make it a polygon mash let's make it really smooth so let's say like 150 by 150 and let's cut off the top so I'm going to hold space B go to my front perspective click on this cursor here and make sure that I'm selecting my primitives and I'm going to highlight the good to fits of the sphere or however like if you kind of want your cup to curve in at the top you can do it less I'm gonna do about there so once I have these polygons selected I'm just going to click delete and that's going to create a blast note here and that basically just deletes our primitives let's go back to our perspective view and now let's make the bottom of the cup flat go back to my front now I'm just going to select a little bit of the bottom and go to my scale tool and make this flat [Music] go back to perspective I actually kind of want it down so let's go to our move tool here and move this down just a little bit more it's looking like a cup already now let's add a poly extrude to make it thicker however thick you want your cup to be and don't forget to output the back as well okay this is looking pretty good to me but I think I want the top to be smooth instead of flat so I'm going to select all of these polygons on top to do that I'm going to hold shift and a and just click once and then you can kind of go around this perimeter you might that's it yeah yeah you have to click it again halfway while you're holding shift and they go all the way around and now that I have these polygons selected I'm going to hit tab and type in a poly bevel and you can see that it selected all these primitives for us and we're just going to smooth this top part out you only really need to do it just barely like a point zero one and that'll make this a little more rounded okay now let's go ahead and make the handle to do that I'm going to the front view and let's trip down a curve and just start drawing [Music] so right there and you can hit enter when you're done and here you can select any points make sure you click right here and go to your points and here you can transform it and make anything smoother this is looking a little janky to me okay I'm liking that now let's hit the display flag on our line here and go back to our perspective view and let's drop down a sock called poly wire and this is going to extrude our handle and here you can adjust it if you want a little bit thinner you can add more divisions to make it look smoother [Music] maybe more segments and let's strip down a merge node so that we can see both the cup and a handle [Music] let's rip down a smooth on that handle let's put down a transform [Music] let's just bring it in just a little bit right there make this bigger [Music] all right I think I'm happy with that we'll leave it there for now don't worry about it cutting into the cup we can take care of that with a boolean node let's do that now so let's wire in our handle and we're going to go up here to our sphere our data and we're going to hit the display flag there and let's subtract B we're subtracting the handle from the sphere so the sphere is cutting into the handle and now let's wire that into our merge and if you hold Y you can cut this tie so now when we click on the merge you can see that it's cut off the handle that cuts into the cup that's looking pretty good to me now let's go ahead and drop down an OL [Music] and go out of our cup geometry and let's make a simple plate because we are not savages we do not set our drink directly on the table call this plate drop-down a circle ZX it's lower go back to my perspective view my front view sorry and looks at a poly extrude make this bigger and said this a bit more just so the cups resting right on there add some more divisions nice and smooth make the distance okay let's make this plate come up just a little bit that goes down a lot doesn't it it's up its down just a little bit [Music] all right we created our plate we have our cup let's just go ahead and drop down a null here we might not ever use these nulls but it's just good practice to make them so we have our plate we have our cup let's go ahead and start creating the steam coming off of the liquid so we'll jump on a Geo we'll call this steam source and drop down a circle make it a ZX and because the cup size is already one unit this circle should fit right in there unless you made your cup bigger and in that case you can just adjust the uniform scale and depending on how full you want your liquid to be you can transform it on the Y to make it go down and shrink it but I'm looking the level of that fluid right there so let's go up one level and we'll go up to our pyro effects and click on this wispy smoke it says what do you want your source speed this circle and press enter it's going to compute that for you and we're left right here and first thing I'm first thing I'm noticing right here is our smoke goes outside of our cup so I'm going to hurry and hop back into our steam source here and let's make a transform node and shrink this just a little bit there okay all right so when we use the shelf tool Houdini made two things for us it made us our top Network you might be familiar with this from the melting chocolate bunny that we did this is for pyro effects so it's a little bit different we have a pyro solver now but the rest is relatively the same as a flip simulation and it also created this and this pyro import is mostly used for caching purposes but we'll go into that later so now that we have our smoke source if we hit we'll go to we'll click on real time and hit play and it will start rising one thing that you'll notice is this box that increases size with the smoke but you'll see that the smoke let's see like right there do you see how it cuts off right there it's not great practice to have that so if you go to this resized container and in the padding let's just increase that a little bit let's make it like 0.4 and see if that cuts it off or not yeah it's still cutting off actually so let's go to our smoke object and do you see our box here when it rises our box that is increasing stops right there so we need to increase the size of this but we can also shrink the sizes down here because our smoke isn't going to fall and reduce the size around it and just like the flip simulation we did it's calculating everything in this space so the smaller it is the faster your simulation will be but as you saw from before it will cut off if it reaches its boundaries [Music] cool no cutoff looks good to me so yeah this is basically if this brown box you see if it doesn't catch up with the simulation it can also cut off the simulation so you just want to make sure this padding is big enough so now let's look at the actual pyro solver itself and this is where we can adjust the look and feel of the steam so right here some things I would look at is the viscosity which will kind of change how thick the steam will look the cooling rate is how long it takes for it to basically dissipate like this student I want it to look like steam and for me this is rising just a little bit too much so let's increase the cooling rate like let's try point seven and guys a lot of this is just playing around with it and making what looks good to you work so you're going to adjust the parameter hit play see what it looks like address it a little more like seven point five and see what it looks like [Music] that's looking pretty good let's increase let's see what it looks like with the increased viscosity I might change it back that's looking pretty good to me but like I said just play around with it hit play maybe for yourself some tea and see what the theme looks like from there another tab that I would look at is the shape because the combustion is for actual flames you got your color you mean you don't need to worry about the EC right now the shape is what you want to look at and all of these different things will influence the behavior of the steam and to see what each one does you can just hover over it and it will tell you exactly what it does caused the smoke to disappear over time and you got your shredding let's see pushes and pulls the velocity field to create streak separation and likes typical fire sharpening you know so just hover over it and let's go ahead and mark the sharpening add some turbulence confinement adds curliness to the simulation so that might be good then you can adjust these values here or if you want to go even more in depth you can go down here and adjust these get a little more detail on them let's just see what this looks like right now so I'm going to add let's add a little more randomness to it and that will be under the turbulence tab here it's increased this world size try to maybe some a little bit more sharpening [Music] just make sure when you change the turbulence that it doesn't cut off your bounding box [Music] let's see what's kind of stopping right there I'm going to let's just make this a little bit bigger all right I'm happy with the way that looks like looks like a nice cup of steam okay and just like the flip sim we did the lower your division size the better it's going to look but the longer it will take to simulate the longer it will take for this time line to load so let's do it like point zero one and that's going to take quite a long time for it to cache yeah see all right for the purposes of this tutorial let's do like point zero five so it takes a little bit longer to load you can see that the steam is more defined so when we're happy with what it looks like we've adjusted all the parameters to our liking let's go up one level to our object level and go back to this pyro import and it's created two notes for us we only really need to worry about this one for now so let's click the display flag on this and we're just going to cache it like we did with our fluid sim so let's just call this let's just call this steam and we'll save it to our file and we're back and depending on how low you made your division size don't be surprised if this takes upwards of a couple hours I actually did the division size still pretty high just because I didn't have the patience wait for a to cash for that long so let's click on load from disk and now we'll play it without it loading make sure everything's good you probably should have done that before you cash though that looks good to me let's go up one level so we have our cup we have our plate we have our steam but we don't have the actual liquid because when we created that circle it created it into a pyro source basically so let's go ahead and drop down a null here right here at this initial circle and we're going to put this in its own geometry away from the pyro source olestra anti-ag Oh and now let's drop down an object merge sup and all this is is hey I want to bring in geometry from a different geometry node so we have our object merge let's click on this button right here and find our seam source and outlet good and guys this is the main reason why we create nulls is to reference and pull from other sources into our new sources go to liquid hit accept and now we have our circle and that's really all we need to do for that we'll just apply a shader to that so we looking good let's go ahead and create a table because otherwise it's a ghost cup floating in the air I'm just going to create a simple grid [Music] wanna make this lower easy enough belts let's make a background also make this 2x2 find out where I want my placement to be make sure we can see these theme looks good so we have our table our background let's make a light I just did an environment light go to my HDR got our light and a camera just hope go ahead and hold ctrl and click on your camera and that will automatically place it where your viewport camera is or you can adjust it yourself so now let's apply some shaders because everything's just great right now click on our render view so let's go to our material palette here I'm going to create a background probably something so I can see our steam a little bit better something darker maybe just I just clicked and drag that and drop it onto the background here let's make it [Music] and we'll make our table and for this I'm going to use a texture just go ahead and drag that onto the table I just did like a wood texture let's see if we can see it a little bit better like a wood grain texture oh let's make the cup and the plate they are Houdini already has a white porcelain let's just drag that on to our plate and onto our cup and here you can change the color let's do [Music] and let's make our coffee you can actually apply shaders to your pyro source it might be easier for you to assign this on the geometry node so let's go ahead and call this copy or you can name it T or whatever you want your fluid to look like go to our object level and go to our liquid and here at the render tab you can assign the material here instead of clicking and dragging it might be easier to do it this way or you can also disable the display flag on your steam source and click and drag it that way will automatically apply it right there our material and let's make this translucent [Music] it's a liquid looking pretty good already I'm noticing that our rendered view looks a little dark so I'm going to go ahead and create increase the light let's make it there we go that's looking brighter see what that looks like also another tip is when it's rendering you can left-click and hold on a certain square you want it to prioritize and it will start rendering this square or whatever square that you're holding first alright that's starting to look pretty good let's see what this team looks like hi guys and there you have it like I mentioned before you can assign a shader to the Steam I'm liking the look of it already but if you were to go that route you might want to go down here to wispy smoke and assign that to your pyro import if you remember this is where it's cached go to our render view and go to our wispy smoke and it's going to be darker because it thinks it's smoke and not steam and you can brighten that up here Oh too much too much and here you can just kind of mess with the density and the shadow let's make it lower because it's themed you can adjust the parameters like the Wis penis and all that but like I said I just liking the default look of that so I'm going to delete that so we're all good there I think that we're ready to render this out so let's go to our scene view click on here go to pout and in the rendering tab like I said just hover over it and it will tell you what it does I mostly focus on the volume quality just looking at these real quick that's the one that I would adjust the most and play around with but I just like to keep things usually pretty simple and adjust the pixel samples if time is not of the essence if time is of the essence like you're on a time crunch and you your boss is wanting you to get this rendered out maybe adjust the volume quality higher first before you just do the pixel samples so let's do it like a like a 10 by 10 or 9 by 9 and the rendering engine I usually just do physically based rendering and I think you are good to go alright guys and that's how you create a hot cup of liquid with steam coming from it please let me know if you have any suggestions or recommendations like I say at the end of all my videos this is how I'm learning Houdini myself is through teaching because that's how I learned the best I found so if you have any ways of making this go by smoother or any suggestions please let me know and I really appreciate you guys watching it really encourages me to keep on creating more of these and thanks for watching bye ye [Music]

Channel: Erik Mineer

Views: 1,867

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: erikmineer, sidefx, fx, houdini, sidefxhoudini, vfx, sim, simulation, cgi, cg, video, videoeffects, effects, animation, animator, graphic, graphics, 3d, 3dart, 3darts, computersim, computersimulation, art, render, dailyrender, film, simulated, houdinitutorial, houdinibeginner, beginner, houdinilesson, tutorial, beginnertutorial, hot, hotcup, coffee, tea, steam

Id: ugAvXBMTbQs

Length: 26min 58sec (1618 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020