Houdini Isn't Scary - Part 1: Basics

welcome to vdd isn't scary part one basics this is a tutorial series which attempts to streamline the learning process behind Houdini when I started in Houdini a couple of years back I noticed that a lot of tutorials with too advanced and assumed a certain level of knowledge and even now I find my own tutorials I assume that you have a certain level of knowledge to actually follow a lot but I also found that beginner tutorials with too long and boring and really didn't help me very much that's why the series is going to cut out the excess and only give you exactly what you need to learn adeney each part will add something to your knowledge by the end of the series you'll be able to follow tutorials effortlessly and even find more efficient ways of doing things yourself so let's begin when you open Houdini this is what you'll see and I admit it is scary you know there's a lot going on there's a lot of buttons and a lot of tabs and things however fortunately you can ignore most of it when I started in Houdini it would have helped me a lot knowing what is and isn't important there's a lot you won't touch or likely won't need in your first 100 hours of service using video so what is important let's break it down so we have these three large panels and this is where you'll spend most of your time you'll be going between this panel and these two panels and they're all linked right this is your viewport this is where you can visualize things you know you can see what you're placing where they're placed in space and all of that then in the bottom right we have this network view now there's different types of networks depending on the process that you're currently working on you'll use a different network if you're putting things into your scene you're putting objects into your scene so you need to be on your object level if you're giving things materials and textures then of course you need to be in your material network or if you want to be rendering things out and you want to be adjusting render settings then you would be in your output network so for the most part you're going to be in your object network next here we have our parameters and these are closely linked to what's happening down in the network below so if we have a sphere for example and we want to change where it is in space we can change its transformation in our parameters in our settings so quick overview your viewport is a visual representation of your object Network your parameters are the settings for that object Network so these three are very closely linked and that's why you're often just be moving between these three so next we have these two panels at the top and bottom this top panel makes up your shelf tools so looks like a lot and that's because it is it's everything inside of Houdini everything that can possibly be made is here in some form or another so you can take things from you and place them directly into your scene basically it's just giving you access to everything in Houdini in a single panel now down at the bottom we have our timeline and our playback settings this way you'll find your frame rates your frames per second your number of frames so the length of the timeline your key frames and everything pertaining to time so just like in real life as this timeline progresses things happen and much like in real life they only happen if there's something driving them so we'll get to that later those are called dynamics dynamics of things driven by your timeline so that's what makes your timeline important is that it drives dynamics that makes up everything that is important for us at this point right our viewport our parameters our networks our shelf tools and our timeline these are the only things that we really need really just starting to get to grips with Houdini now that we have an understanding of what each of these are let's break them down a little bit further so that we can understand them a lot better starting with our viewport so on the left hand side you'll notice that we have some of these selectable tools these are our selector and handle controls so this is everything for manipulating this viewport if you want to move things around or if you want to navigate in this viewport you use the options on this side so to begin with by default you have this camera selected and this is your view tool this allows you to navigate your scene so when you have your view tool selected and you left-click you'll notice that you tumble around or rotate around your scene based on a particular pivots were pivoted at the origin and we're tumbling around that orange if you click and hold middle Mouse you'll notice that it tracks up down left and right and if you right-click you'll notice that you dolly in an out and this can also be achieved by the mouse wheel scroll and then if you ever end up in an odd position you know where your axes are mixed up you can press G to return to this home view and this is the home angle where X is your horizontal axis Y is your vertical axis and Z is your debt so if you're not using your View mode chances are you'll be using this transform handle so if you click on the transform handle you'll notice this blue text at the bottom select the geometry and choose an operation to perform so in this case we don't have any objects in our scene so there's nothing for us to transform or move around in other words that's why we don't see any transform handles however if we now try to either tumble dolly or track you'll notice that it doesn't work it now has a selection for left Mouse a selection for middle mouse and options when you right click to return to your View mode temporarily you can hold spacebar and that will allow you to do all those things again left click middle mouse and Dolly with the right click you can also press G while holding space so a space + G to recenter you can also press escape and that will switch you back to your View mode next we're going to move on to this right panel in our viewport these things on the right are our display options so these are things that change what is showing in our viewport for example how the lighting appears if our materials are visible whether our points are visible whether our point in normals are visible so this basically deals with visualization this is how things are visualized in the viewport for example you can switch off your reference grid your Cartesian plane by clicking on this display reference plane or orthographic grid and that removes it right these are all the options that you have over here over here we also have perspective and no camera we'll get back to this new cam at a later point because this deals with cameras and lights and we're not going to be dealing with that just yet however this perspective over here if you click you get a drop-down you can say set view perspective top front right Yuri bottom back left but you can also achieve this with numbers or your numpad so you can press one for perspective two for your top viewport 3 for your front viewport for for your right viewport or five for the UV viewport so most of the time for be in perspective viewport so just press 1 to go back to perspective viewport and if you double tap any of them you'll get the reverse so if you double tap your top viewport you'll get your bottom viewport if you double tap the front viewport you'll get the back viewpoint if you double tap your right viewport you'll get your left viewport so those are the basics of your viewport as we go through this tutorial series I'll be introducing you to more and more of these options but those are the basics for navigation now on the right hand side in our network view I told you that we have different types of networks so I'm just going to show you those quickly just so that you know they exist as you can see it says obj over here if we click on it we can change it image really changes the channels serials output shop each time you change this the parameters context changes with it so we're going to go back to object to just click on obj so let's actually create an object for our object Network to do that we go up to our shelf tools and we can click on spear so when we click on the sphere you can see that we get this wireframe bounding box and this represents our sphere so if we click anywhere in the scene it will place it there or if I press ENTER it will place it at the origin so with a sphere object placed at the origin you'll notice a couple of things firstly we have a sphere and the sphere is this object that we see in our object Network we have this node over here this is a node and you can see it says sphere object one above it we now have parameters we have options and settings such as scale or rotation and translation we also have these transformation handles because we have switched from this view mode to our transform mode so if you click and move this along you'll notice that it changes its position in space but also on our parameters the translate changes right this is its exposition in space and it is now at minus 1.2 if we press control Z it will undo it and remember we can always just press spacebar to move around in our scene now that we have this object in our object Network how do we make further changes to it because community these parameters are quite limited and the best way to think of this is as if this is a container for everything inside so if we want to make changes we need to make changes to the things inside right so if we double click on the sphere object it takes us inside where we have a sphere so as you can see we're now in the object Network but the level that we're on is the sphere object one level as you can see it now says geometry over here if you go back it says objects if you double-click in here you'll see geometry so from here we can make changes to the sphere as you can see we have new parameters to play with we have rows columns primitive types all of these things and you can play around with these and see what they do but what we're going to do is we're going to add more nodes to our sphere object one so now let's maybe give this sphere some color so we can press tab while hovering over our network view and this brings up our tab menu our tab menu brings up every node that's possible to use in our current context the current context is the geometry level working at the geometry level so we have access to a certain number of nodes for example if we type color you can see that we get this color node we click on that and we place it over here and now our parameters have changed once again over here we have some options and we can ignore most of them because the only one that we really want is this color option so click on this white block and it brings up a color editor so we'll just select a blue color and then we can close it now nothing's changed why is that so now what we need to do is we need to connect our sphere to our color this is the way nodes work we connect the output of our sphere into the input of our color and if we hover over the input of our color we can see what it's asking for it's asking for a geometry to color so that's exactly what we've given it but nothing's changed the reason being is our display flag as you can see when we hover over a node it brings up a bunch of these buttons as you can see we have this blue one on our sphere now this blue one is what's known as the display flag it's what is currently being displayed and it can only be on one node inside of your geometry network but if we want to visualize our color we have to switch our display flag by clicking on the blue display flag so there we go we now have our color and so we can add things to this if we press tab and drop down a transform node we can plug our color into our transform node set our display flag on our transform and then we can scale it down so a really great way for adjusting parameters in Houdini is to middle mouse on the word so hover over the word middle Mouse and it'll bring up this and you can move up and down and what this does is it allows incremental adjustments so if we are over here and then move to the right it'll incremented out by 0.1 or down by 0.1 and if we move up it will increment it up by one or down by one and so on so you can make really fine adjustments by switching between these what we're going to do is we're going to middle mouse over the Y scale and reduce it so we're making you know a smartie so we have this flying saucer shape now now the amazing thing about Houdini is that it's procedural which means that we can change things higher up the chain and it'll still work so we can go to our culinary and if we don't like it being blue anymore we can change it to pink and we'll keep its transform but more than that we can even go up to our sphere and we can change this over here so perhaps we decrease the columns we end up with this triangular shape but it maintains the color and transform now that we have that you can go back up to our object level and you'll see that we have this sphere object over here and what it contains has now changed it now contains three nodes but because it just acts as a container it still shows as one node at your object level all changes were made inside of this node so that means that we can place other objects into our scene right so if we want a box we can either click on our shelf tools or even in our network view we can tab and type box that allows us to place a box and it places it at the origin and then we can go inside of this box by double clicking on it and change its size so maybe you want to make this a tall thin box and has he scale that down you'll notice that our sphere is thought ghosted it's still showing up and that's because of this option in the top right of our viewport we have this ghost other objects option so this sphere can't be changed from here because we're now inside of our box object right but we can still view it this just makes it easy to move things in your scene for example it would be difficult to know where other things are and if we wanted to say transform our box so let's drop a transform node how would we know where it should be that's why the ghosting is useful you can transform the surround and still be able to see all of the objects in your scene so this is extremely useful for visualizing both objects at the same time because at times you may have many objects on your scene you want to position them relative to each other so now as I've said before you can only have your display flag on one of your nodes in your geometry context however if we go back up to our object level you'll notice that we have to display Flags active one on austere and one on our box and it makes perfect sense if you think about it you can have many objects showing in a scene but each object can only represent one node right so for example if we go inside of our sphere object is a representation of the final node in this chain because that's what we have displayed and you can switch your display flag back up to the sphere your upper level and now it's displaying a completely different thing right so where your display flag is changes what you see and you can hide object the object level and so that's it for the basics these are absolute basics in the next tutorial we're gonna pick it up a bit we're going to be creating a donut that will be released soon I hope you enjoyed this tutorial let me know in the comments if you have any questions about get to those and if you like this tutorial please let me know any feedback is immensely useful so that I know when it does it's a worthwhile series to pursue and if so I'll keep doing it so thanks for watching please consider leaving a like and subscribing and leaving a comment and I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Nine Between

Views: 223,575

Rating: 4.9834981 out of 5

Keywords: Houdini, vfx, cg, cgi, houdini tutorial, intro to houdini, houdini basics, houdini learn, learn vfx, learn cg, learn, sidefx, blender, visual effects, computer graphics, digital art, maya, vfx basics, introduction

Id: Tsv8UGqDibc

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 12 2019