Houdini Isn't Scary - Part 3 And a Bit: FAQ

welcome back to you Deanie isn't scary this isn't exactly part 4 this is more of a faq Q&A kind of thing where I answer a lot of questions that may have arisen and help you with anything that may pop up along the way that are unintended so this is more of a clarification part rather than a part in its own so we're going to go over a few things that may confuse you and things that I may have overlooked in the tutorials that I should have covered so let's get straight into it [Music] when you're working in Houdini you're often clicking around you know you're doing things you're getting things done you're making great effects but then sometimes bad things happen you end up clicking on who knows what this over here and this over there and all of these awful things have happened and you don't know where you are anymore and it's all just a mess right you don't know how to get back to your scene view from here you don't know how to get your original setup back and the way that you can just fix this if everything looks like a mess is to go up over here where it says bold and this is what is known as a desktop this is like a setup so as it went over in part one you have your scene here your network view and your parameters but there are other ways to set it up that's just the default one and that's called bold now there are others for example I like to use technical technical is nice if you're working with attributes a lot but if you've done something and you don't know how to get back to the way it was what you can do is you can say reload current desktop you click on that will take a moment but everything will come back to normal right and you won't lose any progress like if you had an object and yeah it wouldn't change anything we just bring you back it would just be like opening Houdini afresh right so that's a great way to reset things the other thing I want to mention are these things in between panels so as you can see there's this very thin bar between the scene view and everything on the right now what this does is it allows you to click and drag and adjust the size of Windows but if you go to the center of this bar you'll notice that says left mouse button click to minimize left pane and then it'll say the same for right so you can minimize the left pane or the right pane you minimize the left pane it pushes everything to the left it basically removes the scene and you can find this new thin bar on the left hand side to restore the minimize thing and then you can do the reverse and once again bring it back and this works in all panels and you can just do it like that you can also switch around your panels by clicking on the middle of the bar so now our network views at the top parameters at the bottom switch it again all right quite useful the other thing you can do is in a particular window if your note setup is getting quite busy you can press control B and this will maximize that window so if you press control B again will minimize control V control B probably right that's also useful if you want to focus on a particular panel and you want to just hide the others you can make one of them fullscreen and then another thing is we have these tabs you know you have your different tabs that do different things and if you close one by mistake so say you closed your scene view you can just create a new tab it's a new pane viewers see view right and then you can drag them over and put them where you want so just keep all of that in mind that's just to clear up any confusion that you may have because I remember when I started in Houdini sometimes I would click on a random thing and I wouldn't know how to get it back to normal and I would just close udg and open it again but really Houdini has stuff in place to help you when things like that go wrong [Music] this is a bit more of a technical one we talked about vertices points primitives now in Houdini a point is a position in space right but simply just a position in space and then you place a point at that position so now you have a point at a position so that point can hold all sorts of information that can alt attributes and that's the basis of what is known as a point attributes we've created those before then if you have two points or more and you connect them once they connect that you end up with what is known as a primitive so those are multiple connected points you can connect two points to create a line primitive or three points to create a triangle or four points to create a quad now what that means is that multiple primitives can share points however that's where vertices come in each corner of a primitive as a vertice so that means that vertices are unique per primitive in a basic quad you have four points making up one primitive with four vertices all right and we can if you take a look at this if we go into Houdini we can create a grid I've inside that grid make it a one by one with only two rows and two columns right so it's just a single block but what we could do here is we can also share primitives so if we activate primitive numbers this is primitive number zero as you can see if you activate points we have four points and then we can also display vertex markers as you can see there's one in each corner right pretty basic four points one primitive or vertices what happens if we increase this to three rows and three columns now what you'll notice is that we have three points across three points down that means we have three six nine points but with one two three four primitives and then as we've said before vertices are unique per primitive so each primitive store has four vertices although we have nine points and only four primitives we have 16 vertices so what does this mean well this changes the way that attributes work for example if we have to add an attribute so let's add eight color and that's only added to a particular group so what we're going to do is we can to drop a group node and I'm just going to duplicate it you can duplicate but holding alt clicking and dragging so I have my three groups over here and then I'm going to do the same for the color so holding alt click and drag and then just plug a group into each one of these so now for the first one what I'm going to do is I'm going to group by primitives have the default so I can click and drag over some primitives enter then I'm going to go to the next one I'm going to set it to points click and drag over some points enter right now we have that group where I'm second group and the third group will set this one to vertices click and drag press Enter now let's go on to our color nodes we can select all three of them at the same time let's make all of them blue and in the group that we want for each of them is Group one in all cases so now we can take a look at the difference so for the first one when it changes to a primitive group because that's what our group is and as you can see it makes sure that the color does not bleed over into the other block it is maintained only on each primitive if we go over to our second one over here where we have it running over points you'll notice that it sort of bleeds over right it bleeds from the points and then as you go across the primitive it blends between the one value to the other points value and finally if we go over to vertices we can make that last one a vertex attribute now you can see that is held by only a single vertex that vertex over there bleeds between that one that one and that one so the attribute that you have on there blends across and as you can see this makes quite a difference depending on what look you're going for you need your attributes on different parts of geometry so take note of that it's very easy to switch between so you can easily change from flowers primitive to point and you can also use things like an attribute promote and that can promote it from one class to another you plug those in and then you choose the attribute name so we know that this is cd4 color and then you can change it from a primitive to a point or a vertex and detail we'll get back to that at a later point as we noted in part one we have three axes in Houdini we have the x axis the y axis and the z axis x axis being horizontal y axis being vertical and the z axis being your depth and you may have heard a compositing term known as Zeta that refers to how far along the z axis a particular object is so how does this relate to working in Houdini well when we create an object for example if we create a sphere under the parameters you'll notice that translate rotation and scale all have three components to them these three components pertain to our axes and in this case the order is important we follow it as x y and z and they relate directly to the three components you see over here as you can see we have this translate over here the first one would be X so if we move this a sphere moves along the x axis and if we move along the second component that moves us along our y axis and we can move along our z axis as well and when it comes to scaling you can scale along particular axes as well I would work with the rotation is you can almost think of it as a rotisserie so you would put a skewer through a particular side and then spin it around that direction so if you put a skewer in vertically in other words along the y axis and this would spin towards the x axis so as you can see if you spin it along the y axis it rotates like that and you can almost visualize the skewer down the middle as if it were a rotisserie same thing if we rotate around the z axis or the x axis so that makes up these components and you may notice something in the bottom left of your viewport you see that it has XY and Z and I chose it as red green and blue now if we go inside our sphere and drop down a color node you'll notice something interesting our color node also as these three components and more interestingly they correspond to XY and z as well except they correspond to a G and B red green and blue as you can see in the bottom left so if you make everything on here zero except for X unless it becomes red because when working with vectors as what these are called these values that have multiple components to them they're called vectors when you work with a vector most common type has three components to it they can be referred to as X Y Z 0 1 2 or RGB and in this case it's our red G green B blue so if we want purple then we want to add to B so our G B make that one you get purple and so you can figure out how all of this works of course you don't have to know this it just makes it easier to work with because you actually understand what each of these values are it helps making sure that nothing is obscure because now we have a very clear understanding that each one of these corresponds to a different color value so great how exactly as a vectors let's go to the next part when you go inside a node in Houdini and you want to drop down a new node there are multiple ways of connecting it to other objects so if we drop down a null the most common way is to click on this output and plug it into that input all right very basic however there are other ways so let's say we have our sphere so I'm placing a sphere here I click on the output right so now I can plug it in somewhere but then I press tab and type now it will connect it automatically switching is very easy if I want to switch which output is going into this input you can click on the output click on the input and it'll switch them right so that's very basic but you can also do things like cutting connections so you can hold Y and we'll bring up this scissor tool and you can just click and drag and it will cut anything that you cross they things are plugged in like that you can cross right pretty cool what happens if your network is becoming a bit of a mess so let's drop another now connect this to all of these and just move these you know in some weird way what you can do is you can press out and what L does is it lays it out it lays it out in a neat way for you and the other thing that you could do is if they are all a mess like this you can select a couple of nodes so say you only one select the nulls all shift-click on a null click on the next one and click on the next one and then you can do something like shift a which will align them or horizontally you click and move to the right and then you can distribute them evenly by holding alt and a and you end up with that nice little setup another cool thing you can do is you can add what's known as a dot in a connector so if you alt and click on a connector it'll add this dot and this dot acts almost like a midpoint as you can split from that's just a way of meeting things up and the cool thing about the dot is if you want to replace the input it almost acts like a null in its own so another thing that you may want to do is if this box is too small and you have a large node set up and you're very busy with nodes you don't really need to see the scene view or anything you could press ctrl + B in this box over here to make a full screen so we can write like this let's drop down a switch now if you have a switch you'll notice that they aren't separate inputs there is just this one bar and this means that you can connect multiple things in you know you can connect as many of these as you want but the thing that I want to show you is how we control which input is which so I'm just going to press Y click and drag cut all of those now let's say I plug my box in and then I plug my sphere in as you can see it considers the box as the first input and the sphere as the second input so you can switch between which input is coming through if we take a look at our viewport we can switch back and forth between these two and you end up with a dotted connector versus I saw the connector the solid one is showing which is currently being viewed so you know very easy to swap back and forth but what happens if we want our box to the our second input well what we can do is we can rearrange them in here you can press up and let's switch them around all right so just a neat little trick and you can do this with a merge node as well if you have a whole bunch of things merged in and your orders on mixed up you can switch them around over here so this is just a meekness thing basically because you're working with nerds a lot of the time you want everything to remain neat and you know there are other things that you can play around with such as Network boxes if for example all of these nulls aren't important to see you can put them in a network box right move them around as one unit and also minimize them and then of course give this a name of its own so you can call it something like in our box and this just neaten things up and makes it a lot easier and you have other tools you can press seed that will bring up your colors you can give different things different colors by clicking on them and then clicking on a color so doing it this way you can color coordinate various things and it just makes working in Houdini a little bit easier and if you have a nerd halfway between a connector a cool way to disconnect it his tacky just wiggle it around if your wiggler comes loose so that's a pretty cool thing that I haven't seen in other software no yeah something plugged in when lip comes loose and you can slide it in somewhere else and so that's all very useful just to make your life a bit easier when you're working with nerds your nerd setups don't become a complete mess I hope that this helped to clear up some of the confusions that you may have had with Houdini you know a lot of those small things that kind of pop up when you don't expect them kind of things are getting your way and you spend an hour trying to find on Google honestly it just ends up wasting a lot of your time so this is really just for convenience we'll be back with part four soon I do hope you enjoyed this if you did enjoy this please leave a like consider subscribing we are releasing these tutorials a lot more often than we used to and it seems to be the direction that this channel is going to take so thank you for supporting us thank you for supporting us on YouTube and on patreon so if you want any more content you can go over to our patreon and check it out over there and a special thanks to all of our patrons who make this possible they make it free for everyone else and so you know a huge thank you to them and here they are here's the credits thank you for watching I'll see you next time you

Channel: Nine Between

Views: 47,424

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: XZiDLTthieU

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 27 2020