Houdini Concepts for the Maya Artist | John Moncrief | SIGGRAPH 2018 (SideFX)

[Music] [Music] hello hi everyone how are ya awesome how's your SIGGRAPH going woo here we go there's some energy in this room who had more than one drink ticket last night oh yeah there we go well first of all I want to thank you all for coming back we had a little snafu this morning I'm so happy that you're all here with me today to talk about Houdini concepts for the Maya artist so just a show of hands how many of you are this is probably a dumb question to begin with but wait I'll work it out how many of you are Maya efficient would you consider yourselves my efficient right so how many people have been using Maya for more than five years how do people been using Maya for more than 10 years 20s not quite okay all right 97 ish that's solid that's solid yeah so I first started using 3d studio max and Maya Autodesk products back guess 2000 no 98 2000 somewhere in that era and I had no idea what the idea of procedural ISM was or how it could benefit me or what Houdini was or any of that stuff and the first time that I saw what Houdini was doing I was in grad school and I thought to myself that's awesome I want to do that and then I opened up the interface and I was like I don't want to do that there is no way I'm gonna do that there's no way I'm gonna be able to figure that stuff out it's crazy town I just want to make my stuff and move on but I had a wonderful professor that actually kind of coached me through some of the basic ideas that we're going to cover today which is sort of how geometry is just geometry right points or points faces or faces and and if you know how to manipulate them in one way you actually already know how to manipulate them in another way it's just a matter of taking the skill set that you have and translating it into a new way of thinking so that's kind of what we're gonna talk about we're gonna do some one-to-one comparisons of actual interface elements in Maya and how they translate directly to the interface elements into Houdini so some of that very basic level stuff and then we're gonna talk a little bit more about the actual ideas of building what you have what is that your building and what it is that you're creating in one package versus the other and for that we're gonna do a little bit of a live adeney demo but I don't we get into that don't be as concerned about what buttons is he pushing what nodes is he laying down and what are the exact settings think about it more as how am i working through this problem in this software as opposed to how I would in another software and we'll talk about that a little bit so first off I just want to introduce myself and my team just for a brief minute I work on the education team so I work directly with colleges and universities to help them develop curriculum to promote houdini education in schools so if anybody is from a college or university or if you have any questions about the school that you may be attending and how we can help them get houdini going please let me know I've got business cards up here we can definitely talk and move forward this is my wonderful wonderful boss Julie loitering she handles more high-level things like school certification and whatnot this is me I'm the idiot with a green background I used to work at Pluralsight for a while I used to work at digital tutors before that and effects PhD before that and before that did a bunch of broadcast stuff and on-air graphics and all kinds of different things mainly in 3d studio Max and Maya my Houdini start training didn't start till way after that this is our support team anytime you have any issues with Houdini if you're downloading apprentice and working we have a free version of Houdini that you can start to explore the concepts we're gonna learn if you have any issues with that feel free to contact support now let's talk more about exactly what we're gonna talk about today so first off I want to talk about menu sets oh my not loud enough they couldn't be louder oh yeah rock on is this gonna allow me to jump back out and in and out of software at the same time Oh Oh gotcha so we're gonna talk about menu sets and contacts so again this is some of that one-to-one idea of how my ax handles working through data and working in the interface and how adeney handles working with data and working through the interface we're gonna talk about tools versus nodes as well so one of the things you'll notice in Maya is that you have all of these things up there and you click them and they do something and that's what we call tools like you use the polygon mesh our poly extrude tool or the Sham for tool right it's how you talk about it and Rudy knew we talked about that a little bit differently we use nodes and node networks but you'll notice and some of the examples that I'm gonna give you there one-to-one correlations it's very much the same concept with a little bit different GUI nots it also it's very important that we talk about attributes versus parameters ok so some of the way that my ax handles manipulating geometry in the attribute editor that knowledge set of thinking about changing attributes to modify geometry is a little bit different in the way that Houdini handles it so we're gonna kind of do some translation between what attributes are and what parameters are and then at the very end we're gonna talk about the idea of construction versus procedural ISM which is the whole concept of building one thing or building a thing that makes those things ok which is a little bit different way of approaching the problem so one of the biggest obstacles that we find when we're working with schools or with teachers that are trying to teach Houdini is that people say it's hard it's difficult Houdini is hard and it's not so much that Houdini is hard as much as it is you already have an established way of thinking that you have with Maya and you have to unlearn your Maya in order to learn the Houdini part so it it's not that it's hard but it's painful there's a second step of having to sort of stop thinking about things this way and totally rethink the way that I'm approaching this and it doesn't have to involve a lot of code and a lot of math people have a misunderstanding that Houdini is vector math in a box and you have to know all of the geometric equations and vector math I need to know linear algebra before I can do anything in Houdini and it's it's not true it's not true at all understanding some basics about programming constructs and by that I just mean what is an if-then statement I mean basics what is a for each right basic knowledge not even like how you code it and what the parameters are or what the syntax is just those concepts of how you think about logic and processing information that little shift is enough to get you get your feet wet and get you in doing some really cool stuff inside of Houdini so one thing that you probably have heard people that talk about Houdini is this really weird way of speaking where they talk about shops pops cops Rob stops and all that stuff and people always like what the hell is that what does any of that stuff mean well really all they are we call them operators so in Maya you have like I said a tool a poly extrude tool okay the way that the Houdini was developed the language again this is just nomenclature this is just words that we use it's not even hard it's just the idea that we call them operators those operators are segmented into specific sets of things okay so you have surface operators where you do modeling that's tops SOP s right ROPS rendering operators okay so when you hear all that term don't even think about the OP piece of it really just think about the first letter that you hear right hey I'm working in pops P particles he's working on particles right so it's very simply just whatever that first letter is pretty much translates into whatever that context is going to be now a little bit bigger concept water contexts contexts are simply groups of tools so we call them contexts in Maya you call them menu sets right it's a very similar concept I want to work with modeling you go to the modeling tool set there your your shelf changes and everything in your workspace the tools that are available to you the menus and everything else are geared around modeling things same thing as working in the SAP context would be selecting the modeling shelf from the menu set okay so don't again it's just a matter of one-to-one correlations there's nothing real complicated here it's just now that I know I can easily translate into that work style so if you want to work in animation you go to chops if you want to work in rendering you go to ROPS all right I believe it's true say that these presentations are being recorded and also if you need any of this information like these slides or anything that's going like this as a reference just let me know I'll have business cards appear and I'm happy to get you all that information so that you have it so contexts and menu sets ok cool we've got that down so Houdini works like an operating system ok Maya works sort of like an index of a book ok when you think about the idea of the outliner inside of Maya being your guide to the scene right it's a hierarchical hierarchical graph of everything that's in your scene right it's a collection of data of processes that are stacked hierarchy inside the outliner well Houdini handles that a little less like a book and more like an actual operating system like an OS so to show you that I'm actually oh wow go back go back there we go I'm gonna jump over in Houdini and we'll actually start looking at some of this so again don't worry so much about these nodes and what they're doing and anything is just about a visual demonstration so if I'm over here in windows and I want to go to a certain piece of data like a certain file that I want to get to I can dive into these individual folders and keep digging till I get to where I want to go up at the top here I have this path that shows me exactly where I am ok if I want to go up one level to the folder above it I can click this button and I go up one level if I want to go back to where I was I can go back all right I don't want to contemporize know how to use an operating system right well that means that you already know how to navigate around and get around inside of Houdini as well so in Houdini we have these address bars that are right up here this will tell you where you are in the overall network or the overall operating system geometric operating system that is Houdini if I want to dive inside here and see what's in here I dive inside and look at my address bar my address bar now gives me the exact path to the data that I want to manipulate in fact if you're familiar with Linux or UNIX or the command shell and you use a lot of lines of dot backslash dot to get around and navigate inside of Windows or UNIX or whatever you can easily come in here and edit paths as text and I can just type in the path of where I want to go and I go directly to it okay so let's say I dive inside this Network and then I dive inside this one and now I'm buried and here somewhere and I need to get back up to the top really quickly well same as you can do in Windows this is the layout so if I want to go back to the top I just click the first folder and it takes me back to the root if you will so this is like my computer okay so we earlier talked about contexts and menu sets and being able to isolate the workflow to get to the tools that we need so when you click on this you see here you can access all the different contexts of Houdini so instead of being a menu shelf up here on the top right hand side that isolates a giant collection of menus across the top of the interface we're working right within our geometric operating system and if we want to start working on rendering then we can go over to the rendering area and start working on that if we want to work in compositing we can come over and start working in compositing I like to think of these areas these contexts within the scope of the operating system in the same way that you would think about hard drives so you have your PC and if you want to work on documents you go into My Documents and you start working on your documents if you want to listen to music you go into music and you start working on music right so the same idea correlation of navigating data based off of what it is that you want to work on okay so Houdini is just an operating system for geometry you have the same navigational controls I can click the back button and go back I can go up one level I can go down one level or I can go into a subfolder think about it that way okay oh it's not all fancy and big let's see oh there we go okay so the network editor the next big thing that people usually freak out about when they jump inside of Houdini is what is this node-based thing with all these wires and these little dots and boxes over here in the snow dead etre now recently autodesk has released a node editor inside of maya so that you can actually visualize your data in a very similar fashion so that you see little boxes of things that are plugged into other little boxes of things that do stuff right the node editor inside of Houdini works from top to bottom as opposed to left to right no big deal we can get over that fairly easily but the biggest change or difference between the two is that when you're working in Maya and you're looking at the node editor each of those nodes holds the new data that it has and the data from before we call that history in Maya right so I have a sphere and I make an extrude to it and then I do a little sham 4 up here and then I add you v's to it and then I add a texture to it well the original geometry node is here the next node that does your poly extrude has the original poly and the poly extrude data the next node that you have has the Sham for data the poly extrude data and the original sphere data so as you build those up what happens everything slows down right you're told right off the bat delete history as much as you can and as soon as possible so you can keep uh steady work flow going that's that's efficient for what you need problem with that is is that it limits you and what you can go back and do you model something to a certain point you delete the history and then you decide you want to change the depth of the extrude you can't it's gone you have now cut off all of that history and you have a new piece of geometry right so I make a change to it and there it is it's new and it's done the way that Houdini handles information is you start with a sphere which is just a collection of points in space each one of those points has a position and XYZ if you want to change some information about those points the next node in the list ie the transform here in this example all it does is modify the data on the old set and it doesn't carry it through to the next nodes doesn't complicate or get heavier and heavier and heavier the more nodes you add the nodes are simply little computers that are doing a manipulation to the data in some way and that's it it doesn't necessarily need to reference the new data it's just changing what's there and sending it down the pipe well so I'll show you this as an example an actual example here in just a second so nodes are visualized operators are visualized as networks right when you work in Maya and you add the poly extrude and you add the sham fir and the attribute editor you get these little tabs that start to form over on the right and if you do a lot of complex processes before you know it you have this gigantic collection of tabs and each one of those little tabs is representing a different operation that's full of things that you can change about that operation well on Houdini instead of little tabs we have these little boxes okay that are operators or nodes so if I want to edit what's happening on this particular node this height field node I simply select it and the parameter view which is above me changes to show me just like the attribute editor would in Maya all of the data that relates to what's happening in that operation okay if I was in Maya I would simply be looking up here for the next tab that leads me into the next process of what I'm doing let's visualize then Houdini is simply being a little link that leads you to the next node and as soon as I click on that node now I have the parameters for that operation okay so instead of tabs across an interface we're looking at nodes in a network no biggie all right we can figure that out that's easy to get around now I know if I want to change any of these things I just go to that thing and there's all the things the attributes related to that particular thing I'm bad at PowerPoint clearly so we need to talk about the difference between attributes and parameters all right in Maya when you want to edit something you go to the attribute editor and you change an attribute right what is an attribute anybody have an idea of how you would define that in Maya like how would how would you define and there's no wrong answer here I'm just curious how would you define an attribute in Maya what does that mean yes a variable attached to an object that's an awesome awesome way to think about it anyone else have any a numerical description of something right there you go there you go so what is a parameter in Maya right okay so it's a language barrier again we're talking about nomenclature here you already have the concept of what an attribute is and you're correct so let's think about this for a second in Maya you have an attribute editor where you change data of that thing whatever that thing might be if it's a sphere or an extrude or whatever it might be you come in here and you make a change and it changes what's happening in the element in the viewport right in Houdini attributes are adjectives so think about it very similarly you say what was a variable that has data a variable attached to an object so in Houdini you would think about that more along the lines of something that describes something else okay just like you would an adjective in the English language right I have a cup of coffee my coffee is hot hot hot is an attribute right it's an attribute of my coffee so in the silly little slide it's ice cream but it does take us through a a little bit better explanation so if I have a dessert right I have this overall thing that's a dessert and I can use a couple of different things to describe that dessert I can say this dessert has a flavor and the flavor is sweet it has a caloric account and it's really high it's got 8,000 calories in it okay so the attributes of this ice cream are flavor and calories the data attached to them are sweet and 8,000 that piece of data is attached to the overall object of the dessert right however each part of the dessert can have its own set of attributes right in the real world it's the same way so the cookies up top may be really really crisp and crunchy while the ice cream is very cold and melty are cold and gooey right so the overall thing can have a certain way of describing it and then each little element inside of it can have ways of describing those elements as well so if we think about it that way and we know that Houdini is basically just a data manipulator right where it's a geometry operating system where we reading geometry let's make a single point and you do have to make those noises by the way that's a requirement okay so let's take this and make this as maya as humanly possible okay so here's sort of your outliner over here all right let's call it the tree view but you can get away on the exact same way right you can click on the individual objects that you want and there's even a way inside of Maya that you can view your shape nodes inside of the outliner very much the same thing here I can twirl this down and I can look at the individual nodes it'll take me to that part of the network but you're not seeing that right now because I've hidden the network editor this is a very Maya esque experience right now okay so I'm just clicking around on the things that I want here's my one single point right here now in the background all of those attributes that we're talking about these pieces of information this location right here of the point zero zero zero in 3d space actually exists in something called the geometry spreadsheet so I'm just gonna split this in half top bottom just a little interface trick and I'm gonna show the geometry spreadsheet so this is how we think about data inside of Houdini it's not necessarily just parameters where changing something and it's happening when we change something over here what we're actually doing is modifying those attributes okay so my dessert was sweet I could say I want a instead of a sweet dessert that I might want an alcoholic dessert right so imagine that I had a drop-down where I could switch from ice cream to brandy okay so we're all we're doing there is we're changing the attribute of the dessert to make it a little bit different so the same concept applies here we can see we have a single point okay that point is point number zero shown here in the geometry spreadsheet which works very much like an Excel spreadsheet it's just a list of the attributes on that thing for our ice cream we had clearness and opacity to describe the glass we have size and crunch factor to describe the nuts or the cookies or whatever it is well right now we have one point and the only thing we're describing that point with is its position XYZ right now you may say well right here yeah it's XYZ it's the same thing why do I need to look at this and the reason is because this area of the parameters view on the right hand side of the interface all it is doing is modifying the attribute so when I actually type 0.5 here and we move that point 0.5 degrees in X down the x-axis all this is is a reflection of the actual attribute data that exists on the point okay so that individual point is is carrying with it a particular position data I use my parameter editor editor right to change the attributes that exists on that piece of geometry now I'm gonna expose the network view again so we say here's our one point I added one point now the thing about the way the beanie works is I can make custom attributes and add those attributes to any type of piece of geometry that I want for instance what if I want a red point in the middle of my scene right well I can come in here and I can add a color node this is very much a top-level thing that you could do in my you could add color to an object however as soon as I that color look at what's happened inside of my attribute editor I've added a new attribute onto that point right that attribute is CD CD is color in RGB and the R value has a value of 0.9 so instead of just laying down paint or painting an object red and now I know it's red and I move on and do something else with it Houdini exposes that little layer underneath that says hey what you're actually doing is adding an attribute on top of this point you're just adding data to the point and you're manipulating that data to do whatever you want to with it right so I'm gonna stop there for a second because there's a lot of people kind of staring at me going what the hell is you talking about so does anybody have any questions up to this point as to how data works back and forth yes sir I sure can in fact I can make brand-new ones that don't have anything to do with anything so I could do a attribute create node okay so here's my original point I'm adding attributes here that are color that make it whatever it is now I can plug this guy in here and I can add a new one called dolphin and dolphin has a value of fifty five okay oh the default values fifty-five current value fifty-five if you look in here add geometry spreadsheet down here I now have a new attribute called dolphin with the value of fifty five you know you own why in the world would I want to do that what does that even have anything to do with anything right you can use those attributes and here's where we kind of get into the idea of procedural ISM so I don't I'm gonna we'll get to why you would do that in just one second we'll talk about that very very clearly so what is this crazy word that we always hear called procedural ISM right how do I use procedural ISM in Houdini versus how I might use it or try to use it inside of Maya okay procedural ISM is the idea of building a machine versus the idea of building a one-to-one tool okay if I was a stone carver or a wood however I might have a chisel and I can use that chisel to start with a chunk of wood and I could tear off a certain piece and do that two or three times and Whittle that down till it actually makes a shape that I want it to make right but once I've cut that wood off of that that chunk and I've shaved it away it's gone I mean I could glue it back on if I want right or because we're in computer land thank God you can do control Z and get it back but the idea is I have permanently modified that piece of wood okay and I can make it look like how I want one time and I get that one thing and that's awesome I have a thing but what if you need a hundred things or what if you need ten things that all look like they were made by the same person the same whittler the same artisan but I need a collection of artwork instead of just one piece from that one artist this is where Houdini steps up and really becomes a powerful tool Houdini becomes the machine that makes the widgets as opposed to the one person that carves out one widget so procedural ISM think of procedural ISM as a machine that has inputs that make something and if I change some of those inputs I get a different thing out of the machine right so let's talk about how we can use attributes to create procedural ISM so if I wanted to build a rock I'm just gonna get rid of this guy here pardon me again a noise that means undo so I have a sphere and close this guy here for a second there's my sphere and I'm going to turn on wire shaded view so we can see the smooth shaded so we can see our Polly's and whatnot so I'm gonna make sure this is a polygon to begin with okay I have all of my points out there and I decided wanted a little more resolution so I'm gonna make some more Polly's out there so now I have this nice little sphere and I want to add a couple of layers of noise and all I'm doing here is modeling alright you have the same ability to do something very very similar inside of Maya I can push points around right no big deal there so I'm gonna use this mountain node a mountain node is just the way that we call noise because it looks like a mountain when you add it to a plane okay I'm gonna select a certain type of noise and change one or two of the attributes that drive the point position on that sphere so now I have a rock and this is fabulous and if you were working in a non or in a linear package and on procedural package and you needed to make a hundred rocks you might save this rock out then come in here and make a change in our case of our noise we'll just change the time you can see that sort of offsets the noise on the rock so now I've got a little bit different looking rock and I could save that one out and I could change this time again and I could save another one out and I could eventually get a collection of a bunch of rocks that look like they all broke off of the same mountain okay but what you're actually doing is just manipulating the geometry then locking it down and shoving it out I made a widget now I have to go back and make another widget by hand if I want another widget right so how do we build a machine that makes widgets let's think about this if I want to scatter ten rocks across a particular plane like a little grid and I have ten points on my grid I want to put those rocks on that grid now here's the deal I want each rock to be just a little bit different I want each Rock to have its own unique look and its own unique Flair right so this is where you start thinking procedurally how do I build a rock generator well a new Dini you would just take these nodes and you box them up into their own little container I'll call this rock Jen because it's now my rock generator and you build your own little custom interface now has anybody ever used metal to build an interface inside of Maya a custom interface how was that for you was it entertaining and fun was it lots of coding and scripting and I had to make sure that I knew how to call in the menu that I wanted with the slider then make sure it was placed in the right part of the interface and so Houdini knows that what it is it's aware of the fact that it is a tool building tool that it's a machine building tool it's basically a graphical developer's interface or a graphical developer machine right so this is how I build interfaces in Houdini I say I want to be able to adjust time and I want to give it different times so it makes different rocks cool I'm gonna grab an integer and I'm gonna drag it over here and I'm gonna call it rocks and I'm gonna say accept and now I have this new thing called rocks that's a slider and as I change it I get new values okay drag and drop interface I just built my own custom interface that's not really doing anything how do I actually link it up this is where people begin to think right I need to know code so I can script the data from this to be able to link it to the data inside my thing and I'm not a programmer and that's why I don't want to do Houdini well don't worry you don't have to you can right-click copy come in here and say time is what I wanted to change we sort of saw that when we were playing with our mountain as I do this it offsets the noise cool I right-click paste relative references it writes the code for you and it links the two parameters and now you've got a functioning interface so here's my interface and as I change this I get different rocks okay so now I've built a rock maker I haven't built one Rock I didn't go in and sculpt the geometry to look like one rock right I've got something that will spit out spit out a hundred rocks if I want in fact I can even take something really cool like say the timeline so the frame number down here and I can actually use it up here and as I hit play I'm just generating a thousand billion rocks based off the timeline okay I can put down an FBX node export FBX node and click play and point it to a folder and as I click play it's spitting out rocks just left and right so I could have a thousand rocks just as fast as the timeline could play a thousand frames so as opposed to the way that you might work in Maya where you think about building a rock and saving it in Houdini you would take that same idea only think how could I automate that process how could I build a machine that makes rocks for me right but it's not any different the actual creation of the geometry the first time around is the same way you do it in Maya use the same tools use the same sculpting tools or poly tools that you want we've got bevel and chamfer and extrude and everything else that you would think right so we've got all of those tools available but you can actually procedural eyes them you can turn them into elements of a machine based off of a random seed and produce a thousand objects it could be cars it could be trees it could be rocks it could be buses it could be people it could be anything that you need a bunch of to all look random enough that they look unique but all look like they came from the same place from the same forest for a tree right so I have like two minutes but I'll show you another thing if this is really handy for so in this particular case we just we use the timeline to create a bunch of rocks there's a rock machine and spit them out but you can also do this like with the terrain so I have a big giant terrain here of mountains and things alright and I decided that hey I wanted to scatter some points in a particular area so I just sort of selected that particular area and I said yeah throw some points out there for me that'd be great so I've got these points out there and what I want is I want a rock on every single point well I've already got a rock generator built so just come over here and grab our rock Jen and we'll copy it out and I'll do a copy two points and here's my points it asks me hey what am I gonna copy - and I plug it in there it is it even says as I hover over it where's that little red can I pop up hey required target points cool those are the ones that I just scattered all over the place the next thing it says or what are they required primitives well that's gonna be my rock Jen and I plug it in and they're tiny cuz they're rocks but I get a bunch of little tiny individual unique rocks scattered across my entire terrain here's my terrain and here's my rocks and I got rocks on my terrain okay now just the same way that we used dollar F to randomize those rocks so we got individual different rocks each time that we had a frame click by you can use the point number of the scattered points as a seed you could use the color of the terrain as a seed so the areas of the terrain that are green gets swampy blobs of foliage put on them and the colors that are brown get rocks and sand put on them that's because of attributes because all that that point is is a little dot in space that holds a bunch of data that we call attributes and I can use any of those attributes to drive any other attribute so the ground is green ok cool use color instead of dollar F to randomize my rock so I can pull any piece of data from anything and use it to drive anything else in the scene I've just hit my 30 minute mark so I think I'm gonna stop there and say are there any more questions because there's a lot more to cover but we do only have a limited amount of time so please come up grab a card contact me I would also say there are some videos on Vimeo and also available on a side effects website where I cover Houdini concepts parts 1 and 2 and we get a little bit deeper into this idea using point attribute data to drive things but it's more effects driven less modeling driven and more effects driven but it really does get into how you can use data from one point to drive another set of data and create a ton of different objects so definitely check those out feel free to come up and grab a card questions I'll open it up for a minute for questions yes sir haha they yeah they have used you ask me again with the mic I think they're trying to record the question so yeah sorry my question is how do I get that rock builder from Houdini into unreal so I can build rocks and unreal gotcha so the answer is it's very simple in fact I'll try to show you here in the last few minutes we'll just do a little example and I'll see if I can get one out live demo cross my fingers right nothing's going to crash but the idea is that it's not just an unreal it can be unreal it can be unity it can be cinema4d it can be 3d studio max it could be Maya up to this point we have a product called Houdini engine an engine works in any of those pieces of software and the way that it works is let's go back to where our Rock generator is so this is our no it's not my rock Jen or dig oh oh here's one my rock maker okay if I right-click that and I say create digital asset it says awesome where do you want to save it so this is the tool that I built that makes rocks okay and I just give it a location on disk where I want it to go there's my desktop I'll make a new folder and we'll call it demo and I'm gonna call that HDA by the way is Houdini digital asset HDA so I'm gonna save that out and I can just say okay and it'll take me a little bit to load unreal what else could I load really quickly to show this in possibly Maya it's the same process in unreal as it would be for unity I'll try it let's see if it loads up in in in unity in the next few minutes while we're talking but once I've saved it out to disk you literally drop it into your oh I know I borrowed it from the office from the home office once you save it off to disk you can go into unity look inside your assets folder and literally drag it into the scene it will ask you for inputs so there's a little area where you would drag over points if it was a model of a person if it was points scattered on Iraq whatever those that input might be and the interface looks exactly like unities interface only with the sliders that you created with a drag-and-drop from Houdini so it's literally as easy to save it out to disk drag it into the interface and Houdini engine in the background loads all the modules that it needs from Houdini to be able to operate right within the live interface of unreal unity okay well I didn't expect that oh because I don't have internet in here yeah I was not prepared to do a beanie engine demo for you today but the answer is we have tutorials that will show you exactly how to do that on the side effects website and the process is like I said you right-click create digital asset save it off to disk load up unreal there's a Houdini engine menu where you can click find that digital asset and now it's a piece of a plugin okay yeah yeah it's literally you just right-click it and save it as a digital asset give it a disk location and then load it back into whatever that other software is and then now keep in mind Houdini engine is not run time okay so you're not gonna be able to procedurally generate a billion rocks as the character runs through the scene but for digital content creation as far as like level population building a level and needing a thousand rocks and level you don't have to build it in Houdini export it as an FBX import it into you just grab the tool that makes walls or rocks or trees and you gather them and you're good to go yeah okay okay say you make 10,000 rocks in unreal can you just bake those rocks and then go in and pull some out where you don't want them to be sure that's exactly how it works okay yeah you're just creating you it's basically like the same thing as creating them in Houdini saving them out as an FBX and then going back and editing the FBX but you don't have to make that loop you know to make that trip you're doing it right with the tool right there inside of unity or unreal or whatever it might be other questions yes so I just like to know like since we are spending a lot of time on you know spending a lot of time on creating all these graphs can we create this SN kind of a library for us you know a single tool where you know every time we can use that as a default for any objects well yeah I mean that the idea it's the same idea of like digital assets so we were just talking about if you had a particular graph that was really complicated you just bundle it up give a couple of sliders up to the top and now you've got that as a tool that you just built inside of Houdini but not just for Houdini like we just talking for Maya for unreal for cinema 4d for 3d max whatever it might be and if you want a collection of those tools yeah the shelf at the top of the interface you just drag the tool up to the shelf and now it sits on the shelf so if you wanted to build your own shelf just like you would in Maya you can build your own shelf and drag scripts Mel scripts whatever up to it it's the same idea you would build it bundle it up and then drag it up to the shelf and now you've got your own custom shelf tools that you built that you just click a button it'll lay it in the network and you're good to go awesome thank you okay guys we got to wrap up I think we need to reconfigure the room for a panel but thank you so much for coming and feel free to contact me you can even

Channel: Houdini

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Id: GgSAUrpIkiE

Length: 42min 2sec (2522 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 24 2018