Houdini Tutorial - Abstract Particles in Houdini & Redshift

hello everyone a while ago i created this abstract rendering houdini and thought it would be interesting to make a tutorial to show you how i achieved this look it's actually really easy to create particle simulations in houdini and then further enhance them with different attributes that can be used later for rendering so let's start by presenting how i structure the scene on the left there are two nodes one with the main particle simulation and the other one with the background particle simulation then we have some simple geometry which we'll use to instance over the particles the material network then we have two nodes that will actually go into rendering and the redshift settings robnet we have the camera and the camera focus rig and three lights so let's go inside each node as you can see here we start with the sphere and do some other processing on it this is the main emitter then we have the particle simulation then we are caching the particles and do some extra post processing over them next we have the background particles where we just have a big cube scattering some points inside it and then do some small cross processing to get the final particles next as i said we have the main instance geometry that will be used over the points as you can see it's very simple but it will catch some really nice reflections then we have almost the same geometry for the background particles i usually like to use custom geometry instead of just simple spheres over the points even if it's harder to render but it gets a more detailed result next we have the two render nodes that actually go into the rendering one it's for the main particles here we just grab the particles we instance uh the first geometry over them and then we use a ratchet proxy which we'll talk about later and then we do the same thing for the background particles then we have the redshift settings here which are very easy as i said the camera focus rig which we'll talk about later and three simple lights the center light that you can see here and the background light which is after the particles on the direction it's actually they're emitting also volume light okay let's start building the scene from scratch of course if you want to support my work you can find this ready to use houdini scene on my gumroad page along with other houdini assets and tutorials the link to the page will be in the description of this video so thank you for that here is an almost empty houdini scene i just created some placeholders for each steps that we need to go through and of course we need to start with the main particle simulation so i'll create a geometry node name it the main particle simulation or fx dive inside and create a sphere i would need to use a polygon sphere with a lot higher frequency let's say 100 and let's make the uniform scale a bit bigger 1.5 next what we need to do is to add a noise in order to be able to delete some parts of the sphere we can do that with an attribute drop we plug it in dive inside and now we just create a turbulent noise so the turbulent noise needs the position input and then we can just use the noise into the color channel here i would want to promote the offset parameter so i can use it later okay here we can just reference the x-axis of the offset to the other axis and here because we want to animate this noise we just need to type a small expression that would be at time maybe multiplied by 0.1 let's see how this looks so you see the noise right now it's animated i think the speed is too high so maybe we need to go even lower 0.05 and now if we play this again you can see the noise animates a lot slower okay next we would add a mounting displacer this is a very useful node and it it allows us to add a lot of variation over the surface of course we would need to change a bit the parameters and i think the maximum octaves are too many so i'll just go with one okay and also i want to animate this noise so here i can write the same expression it will be at time multiplied by 0.5 let's see how it looks so right now you can see there's also the displacement noise that's moving over the sphere and also the color noise in the background so already this gives us a lot of complexity for the emission next i will need to delete some parts of the sphere so of course i would use a delete stop and here i want to delete by expression use primitives i want to use the color to select how many primitives to delete so let's use cd dot x that would be the red channel uh let's say it's if it's bigger than 0.02 then we delete everything so right now you see there's just a little amount of polygons that remain if we play this you see the animation is already pretty interesting okay next i would like to delete the color because i don't need it anymore so i'd lose an attribute delete also we can check the geometry to see how much information it has so this is only the position and the color so the color i no longer need and i will delete it here because it's a point attribute i can just go here and select cd so now you see the polygons don't have any color anymore this is mostly an optimization step next if we look at this polygon we can see there are not so many subdivisions over it and the edges are a bit jagged so let's try to add a subdivide maybe it helps a bit yeah so it helps a bit with rounding some corners not all of them but i think this will be enough okay next i just need to add some normals that will drive the particle direction so here we are the normal slope and i would like to add points normals i can also visualize them here so as you can see all the normals are headed so as you can see all the normals are heading on the opposite direction and we want those emitters actually to emit inside and there are multiple ways of changing this i can just go here and say reverse normals so right now you can see all the normals are pointing inwards okay this is the emitter part i will just color this as green to know that this is the entire meter and then we just need to create the pop net we'll put down a pop net this is a dynamics network that's already configured for particles and plug the emitter into the first input dive inside and here we see there are several nodes already configured for us this pop source defines the source of the particles here we see that it already uses the first context geometry and if we just play this something should happen so you see there are some some particles emitting on the inside not really doing anything because they don't have any velocity but something happens okay now we would need to create some motion and if we don't want to see those guides we can just come here and disable the guides so now we just see the particles the pop source has a bunch of parameters so if you go here to the birth tab we can see that we have the constant birth rate which are the number of particles that are emitted and the life expectancy i won't dial those too much because the default options are good of course i just need to get a lot more particles going on so let's add another zero here [Music] as you can see right now we have a lot more particles we will need to add a way bigger number here in the end now let's create the forces that will move our particles as you saw in the final image we would need to move those particles to the center of the scene so for that we have a very useful pop node which is called the pop attract and we can just wire this here into the merge we can wire as many forces that we'd like here this pop-up track will attract the particles to the center actually here you can see the goal is set to zero which means the center of the scene and also here we have some parameters i think we just need to move the fourth scale to around four and let's see what happens so right now you can see the particles are getting attracted to the middle of the scene but they also do some funky stuff and they try to they try to pass over the attraction and come back so of course we need to to change some parameters here another thing that i would like to do uh not to have this right in the center of the scene i would like to move both of those uh maybe upwards a bit so i can just copy this parameter and reference it here and if i just uh maybe put here 0.5 what happens is that the actual op attract you can see it here it moves a bit so it's not no longer in the center it's upwards a bit so this makes the simulation a bit more randomly distributed you can see the particles get attracted not to the center of the scene but more to the upwards part i would like to also add some random movement in the particles and we can do that with the pop wind node with this we can add like a turbulence so let's plug it into here and here we can just uh make the serial size a bit bigger 2.5 we can also use a guide to see oh yeah i need to switch the amplitude to at least some positive number so this is the swirl size and if it was to one you see there's uh smaller swirls and then we can just use 2.5 maybe and also the amplitude maybe 1.9 let's say and now you can already see what the force is doing to the particles okay so let's see how it looks i will just disable the guides and now if i play the simulation you already see that we have a lot of interesting movement here maybe it's a bit too random and no one would understand anything of course you can still use this so you can see there are a lot of parameters and you can tweak a lot of stuff so you get a lot of randomness here i think what we should do is to add like a drag so the particles are moving are having a harder time to move in the air so let's do that it's like the node is called pop drag i can add this here and let's try with a bigger air resistance let's say three and now let's see what happens so you can see uh the particles are still being attracted to the middle they have some swirls to it uh but they're not so fast and not so chaotic so i think uh we are already getting very close to what we need in my example i just simulated 60 frames so we need to get around here and as you can see it's pretty similar to the example that we had we also do some post-processing over this okay now we just have a one big problem which happens with the particles so as you can see after they start moving you could see some stepping so here are some particles emitting then this is the previous one then the previous one and there's this is really annoying you could see there's like a computer simulated thing uh so in order to get rid of this we need to increase the sub steps and actually what happens here is that one row of particle is emitted each frame and the frame numbers are not enough for having like a constant flow so we need to emit emit also for from the subframes so this is what the substep does it's emitting also in between the frames particles okay let's go back we can go here onto the popnet into the simulation tab and we see here we have the substeps i think i used 15 here so let's see what happens if we increase this to 15 we should already see a massive improvement of course the simulation is a lot slower now we no longer have that issue where you could see a lot of stepping okay the last thing that we need to do is to increase a lot the particle numbers i think in my example i use like 5.5 million particles i know that that seems a lot and it's a bit heavy to calculate but that gives a very realistic result so let's try to use that number so we will put here another five and then three zeros so then we have five million five hundred thousand okay as you can see already from the first frame we have like a lot of particles on each primitive atriometer this will give us a really nice feel to the simulation okay to go further we would need to cache this out so let's drop a file cache node i like to customize this a bit here we would say just 60 frames because to simulate 240 frames would take a lot of time so here we just need 60. i connect this to the pop net i already take load to disk to make sure that it loads after simulating and here in the name you see there's a quite complicated name uh here i can just change it to something easier so i would leave this os actually this variable means the name of the surface operator and then we would need to use os again and something like this so right now what what's doing it's uh inside of the our project file it's already created a geo folder and then it's creating another folder called uh file cache one for now so we just need to say maybe main main particles v01 and if we middle click on this you could see a very long path so this is creating like inside the geo is creating main particles v01 then it's creating again main particles v01 and their frame number and this is a houdini extension actually before starting doing the caching uh i want to point out that we made two mistakes one is the constant birth rate i added one more zero and that was giving extremely high caching times actually the number is this five million five hundred thousand uh it's a bit annoying you know to see it here without the points okay and the second mistake uh is more for optimization it's actually that you see here that popnet has a lot of par the pop net has a lot of attributes that we actually don't need and we don't want to save them to disk to occupy a lot of this space so what i did i added an attribute delete and here in the properties this star says that you can delete everything and then i delete everything besides age life and velocity i don't know if i need velocity uh or life but i just want to have them there so then we can safely catch the simulation okay if we play the simulation around frame 60 we see that we have a lot of points now and it looks really good if i look at the point information we have 12 million points so you should have something wrong here if you use the five million points as you can see we just have the attributes that we wanted age life position and velocity now uh let's say we want just two random numbers we just want to fix the frame to 56 we can do that really easily with the time shift so we add this node here and what this does uh right now it does actually nothing because uh it's it has an expression which is calculating uh the frame where we are at right now but if we just uh delete the channel we just lock everything to frame 56 so right now if i scrub here nothing happens you can also see there's a clock icon and right now because we deleted the channel there's no clock icon which means we don't have any animation so this is really good for performance actually next what i wanted to do because we have 12 million particles i want to actually delete a part of them and and use the low number particles before doing the final render so i can do that with a delete stop i select points and delete by expression and here we can delete by modulo we say let's say at pt num monologue 10 i hope it works so now it's filtering the points maybe we need to yeah so right now we have a 1 million points instead of 12 million um let's see if we dial this down a bit okay two million let's go a bit higher so model of three let's say so this is taking the point number and deletes a bunch of points so now i have four million particles and what we can do we can just copy this main particle and right now we just need to cache one frame to disk to use this as a proxy okay so we say here uh proxy particles version one so we just save the current frame and now we can just add a switch node we can use the first input as a high geometry all the points and the second input as the proxy file so now we just need to select input one and now we have the lower number of the particles this is just an optimization that we will erase after rendering the final scene now we want to build a mask from the center to the outside of the particles to use the to use another material on it we can do that very easy with the attribute if we dive inside we can just use the age which is a the incoming parameter and export it as color before doing that i would like to use a ram parameter add it here and use the age as an input if i just connect the ramp to the cd you see something really nice happens um it's actually showing us the the age of the particles and what i would like to do also is to add the turbulent noise to be more um random also so at the turbulent noise this needs a position as you saw in the first example and what i would like to do is to multiply the turbulent with the age let's see if it works yeah so as you can see right now we start to have you know more denser color here where the age is uh really high and less denser here of course here we can go into the ramp and change this to a spline ramp this means that it deals only with luminosity as far as i know and what we can also do we can maybe change the amplitude of the noise i can just promote this and have it later so now what happens with the ramp by default it's actually defaulting to zero okay and maybe change the amplitude of the noise to let's say three and now you see it's a lot more powerful around here what i would also like to do is maybe to change a bit the ramp curvature to select this and select the bezier curve so it's a more we can have a more nicer control here so you can see it's no longer linear ramp but it's like curved one we can have some fall off here yeah and i just i want to do this like this it's easier for me i don't know why so you see here we can really easily control the ramp let's say yeah we like something like this let's say we have something like 0.96 here uh yeah so something like this that we have some nice fall off and also some a bit of noise variation so we can use a different material or definitely the center of the particles what would be nice to do because right now we are a bit lost in space around here let's enable the grid and also hit space h to go to the home position so as you can see what i don't like is that the entire particle simulation is somehow upside down i know it doesn't have a really up and down but it feels like it's upside down so what i can do is add a transform and i can just um let's say rotate 190 degrees like this so now it feels like it's standing somehow yeah i think i need to i i rotated this a bit let me just check yeah so it's uh it's minus 40 here right now we just need to add the p scale and maybe some extra variation as well what i would like to do is add another layer of let's say uh noise to the to the particles so i can add a attribute randomize or actually attribute noise i believe yeah it attribute noise we see by default it's outputting a lot of random colors i don't want it to output random colors i wanted to change the position of the current points so let's see here we need to type b instead of color as you can see right now something really strange happens and the particles are moving into the minus x position i believe also this is looking really interesting so you can use this one if you want but what i want to do is just center the noise so this moves back to the origin everything also i think what i should do is just copy this parameter on each axis and now let's say we go with an amplitude of 0.2 maybe and the element size is actually the noise size you see if i go lower it has more waves so maybe let's let's go even lower 0.1 we added some extra variation into the position as well of course maybe this won't work for animation but for static i think it works pretty nice next what we need to do is to establish the point scale for each point right now i believe it has a random scale i mean a default scale of one we can check that by uh hitting d and going to the geometry in instead of points visualizing everything as disks so what this does it actually shows the point scale of course it's a bit slow because it it tries to display every point so of course as you can see the point scale is very big right now so let's switch back to points and here i just need to create a parameter let's create a point wrangle here we will write a bit of code but it's very easy so we say here float because the p scale it's a float and we say f at p scale equals to so we need to do like a fit zero one this is a a very standard houdini function uh and then we just need to use like a randomize of a pt num so randomize at vtnum and for the fit we need to specify a minimum and a maximum value so we can do that writing here the numbers or we can just create some sliders so we say channel float and here min and channel float max right now if we hit this button we see we have two sliders i think let's say zero one and maybe point zero five here again we should display this as disks and again uh yeah they're really big even if we made them smaller so what i would do i would add like a global multiplier so we don't have to dial here really slow uh small numbers let's say f at p scale again and we can say we multiply this with another channel float so right now the p scale let's see it here in the geometry spreadsheet so i can just say p scale and right now it's zero everywhere because this multiplier multiplies it to zero so let's say here point two so now we have a very small p scale as you can see so ranging from uh maximum 0.01 to 0.002 okay if we display this as disks yeah we can see that right now we are let's say on the right track so we have some uh the points are actually bigger than what we see here but uh i think that will look really nice with the instances that we need to add so here we say p scale okay now there's only one thing left to do a random orientation for the points if i select this point and i hit the blast and then delete now selected we just do this for optimization what happens if we create a box and copy to points so we input the points and the boxes so you can see here we have the scaling of the boxes but the problem is that each box is oriented in the in the same way so this creates like a very you know annoying placement of each instance instead of these boxes we'll place some more interesting geometry so now what we need to do we need to create an attribute randomized for the rotation attribute randomized this is a really helpful node and it's really easy to do that actually we want to have this visible and here instead of the color we want to randomize something called orient four dimensions so we need to put four here as you can see right now what happens so this is without and this is width um we can randomize the rotation of each point and it looks a lot more natural and a lot more better okay this is just for visualization so we can put this aside and i think we are done we will just use a null and this null we will name it let's say out main particles and we will use this to reference the particles of course let's not forget about this blessed note i cleaned a bit the nether tree and let's go to the other steps i think right now we can set up also the background particles but before doing that we should set up a camera what i can do is just create like a camera and now if we go here and look through the camera i can just move it backwards yeah something like this what i also want to do is to change the ratio to a square we can go into the view and just copy this parameter over here right now it doesn't really matter the resolution that you see here because we will override that into the render now if we have the camera in place we can also create the background particles let's create a new geometry and just copy this and say background particles ps from particles background particles effects color codies go inside and just create a box we can either scale it from here or we can apply a transform node let's change this to polygon mesh add a lot more subdivisions yeah so i need to move this around here so it's more in the background side okay something like this now i can add just for fun some mounting displacer just to create some variation and then we need to add like a nice offset this isof set creates a volume from the geometry we can just make it more accurate like this and now we can use a scatter node to scatter some points inside the so you can see right now if i look through the camera the points are pretty evenly spaced out what we can do is uh apply some position change to them so let's go to attribute noise of course we apply again some color noise but we won't need that we just need position in 3d space center the noise and right now let's see what happens with the points you see they begin to move around of course there are a lot of possibilities to grade this let's try to view the points a bit better and then what we can also do we can just delete some random particles from the background ones so then we can create a point wrangle and here we can just type a very simple expression we say if random at pt num it's let's say bigger than a specific number we're going to say remove points okay we have an error here yeah so we need another parenthesis so now you see the this function deletes some part of the points that's actually what we want i think this is enough for now we will see what happens inside the render so this is very easy to build up actually of course what we also need to do to the background particles is to add uh the p scale and the random rotation so what we can do can just go back here and just we can just copy the p scale and attribute randomize now if we visualize everything as disks and we can see they're a bit small now we can go to the p scale and just increase this multiplier 1.5 let's say too big let's say one we leave it like this for now maybe not so much 0.8 okay now we add another null and we say out background particles okay if we look through the camera and activate everything we see that we have the main particles and the background ones next let's create the instances i'll hide this for now just for performance create another geo node name this main particles instance dive inside and create like a plant tonic i believe yeah platonic solids here we would select let's say not this one yeah this one i think it looks really nice like a pyramid or something then we would add a poly bevel just to have some more nicer reflections on the render here we say maybe let's say point one and note or maybe yeah maybe we would add two divisions and something like this let's say or maybe use chamfer yeah i think this is the best one okay maybe two divisions yeah like this is perfect then we also need to add some normals so the edges are really sharp ratchet likes to at this point i know this versus normals to zero so now we have everything really nice and sharp and now we just yeah let's add an output node for now what this output nodes does it's it's saying that whenever if i have the viewflag here it always output this node we don't make any mistake of leaving a viewflag in the wrong position okay next add the background particles instances we just duplicate the node and inside here we will just change the part this one to maybe yeah let's try something like this we keep the poly bevel and the normals yeah and i think we're we are done with this okay next we will need to make the render nodes let's create another geometry node call this um rndr or at least this is how i like to call it we would need to dive inside create an object merge here we can just write it's very easy we just write obj and then we have a list with what we want to select then we have the main particle effects and inside we just write out out main particles so this is like a folder structure right now we should see the particles of course we need to go back to point because of performance so right now we have the particles here or we can just navigate through this list to find it now i will add a very simple node to instance the geometry to the particles the node is made by dynstudio i will present their work later so right now we can just search for them here and they have this rs point instance which is really nice so we connect it here and you see it's a very simple expression but it's sometimes hard to to remember it so we just we can just say this path here to the pointing to the instance that we want main point instance this is what we want to use and of course right now we don't see anything and this is the actually the beauty of it because this is happening only at render time uh probably otherwise it would have killed the viewport so this is really nice let's go back and here uh for redshift it's uh something like an optimization also i want to use like an object id of one this is for rendering uh for puzzle maps but uh in the instancing tab i should use redshift point clouds it it's faster when rendering this kind of massive point cloud data so actually what happens here is this node actually contains the points and we'll take this node here that we created and it will copy on each point actually at render time it will keep the b scale and the orientation as we saw with the cubes earlier but this happens only at render time and this is really nice and then we have the render background particles i think this i could have instanced this manually background particles so we just write bj and here we have out bj particles so this is really easy i'll just delete this one and rs point instance again just to show you again how easy it is we just connect this one and search for the background particles instance and we are done so these are the render nodes let's color them with green and i think before starting to adding the lights we just need to create another very useful node to focus the camera at some point in order to focus the camera we will use a very nice tool that my friends from dynstudio did it's actually focus point and what this allows you to do is just very easily add here the camera that you want to use and it measures the distance from the camera to this point and very easily it outputs the focus distance here where we can just copy the parameter go inside the camera onto redshift camera depth of field enable depth of field and untick this and now for the focus distance we can just paste the relative reference so now it knows exactly where to focus this tour is really nice actually you can check dyn studio page on gumroad they have some really nice tools and they also have library which contains you know the point instance that i showed you earlier and a bunch of other useful nodes let's say we want to focus on these threads here so i think it's where it is right now it's pretty accurate to not have such a shallow depth of field we probably need to lower this down let's go to point two for now we'll see what happens i'll actually disable depth of field for now we'll start it later when starting rendering and we would need also some lights and some materials so before that let's just set up the redshift rob and and see what happens i will create a rob network place it here it's easier to find it and here we'll just create a regis render drop okay there was a small error there and in the rope here i just also need to create like an ipr and an aov maybe for rendering later so here i just need to specify the camera which is already specified camera one here i would want probably to override the resolution on my final render so let's go through the options really fast we have here the heap which is the location of the hip file it will create a render folder of course i need i want to change this one and do the same as we did on the file caching one so we create a subfolder with the os name it will have the name of the file here of the node so we say abstract blue v01 probably so here we are we are all settled now i would like to have a per iov multi-layer dxr this means that all the aovs here will be baked into one xr and you can access them very easily here i just want to drag this around to have the aovs configured here and for the redshift i would like to enable volumetric scattering because we want to use some volumetric light i don't need global illumination and for the optimization i will use the rather new feature which is enable automatic sampling this is a extremely useful feature i tend to use it all the time now this what this does it creates it optimize the scene for you to render as fast as possible so don't need to optimize any sampling here which can be rather confusing let's increase this maybe to 0.1 for for a faster rendering yeah i just need to to put this maybe to 3.5 this avoids some hot pixels and stuff because the particles are really shiny so i want to avoid that okay let's set up also some aovs i think i need around four to five okay and and here in the custom we'll change this name maybe to mask we need to remember this for when we create the shaders and let's hide the options so we have a nice list here we just need to create the materials and the lights and we are done i will create a material network you can also use the material context here so in the material network i'll just create a redshift material and this would be the main particles material and then create another one here we need actually to assign the material not to the render geometry which is a bit confusing we need to assign it to the instances so basically the instances are those who have the materials and place themselves over the points so let's go here and we just put this one and then to the instances we just put material two and now this one would be the main particles and this one would be the background particles also i think i need to enable here actually the object id so this would be one and this would be two and just to make sure for the attributes i want to specify that i want to extract the cd which is the color of the points well not for this one actually for the main particles i want to extract cd before starting the render view i would like to add redshift dome light it will take a bit of time to allocate the memory and everything because the instances are pretty big so as you can see already the render looks pretty good i think you can already leave it like this and you can see there's a lot of details over these threads of particles of course right now we are just using the lower version of the particles when we will add more of them it will look even better okay so let's see how we can enhance the lighting here add an error slide probably disable the dome light okay one other thing to note is that for for everything that i do i'm using the ocio mode not the srgb so i'm using ocio with asus you can check asus online uh basically you download this package with asus 103 and you're just loading the config and use the view transfer srgb and then you also need to use aces in the composting software yeah so right now i'm i edit this light we can just move around here because we have the camera locked to camera one and move it upwards i think i would do this with the render stopped because i already know what i want to do actually i want to rotate this light and have some light above and in the preferences i will make the resize to two like this and now just move it around here let's say just to have some some light from above let's see like this okay i think this is it then i would also add i would like to add a light from the center which would be blue let's name this top then i just duplicate this and make this a sphere uh reset the transforms name this as center of course this sphere is too big i just want to scale this down around this and because the simulation is not ready in the center i will move this light just eyeballing it so i think something like this would work now i just want to use a temperature for this light and if i increase the temperature it will become blue but let's start the render and see how everything looks right now save the scene maybe before starting the render okay so this looks really nice already i'll just disable the background particles for now because i they're pretty huge so to do that i can just uh you know type like a delete something okay uh yeah we'll actually we need to set up the render node and we can do that inside the render uh swap so we go here and go to the object so right now it's rendering everything that has a blue flag what i want to do instead is just to render everything that has some rndr in the name so i can just delete this candidate objects and put rndr here underscore and design so what means is that everything that has rndr underscore and some name will be rendered so this meets the you know the the rule but this one doesn't so right now even if i disable stuff from here it doesn't render only this node renders so this is helpful i think because sometimes you may just leave by accident this one render render flag on and it will crash the whole scene let's make the top light invisible and save the scene actually and start the render again okay so i think i also like this black and white well this is really interesting actually and when i did the scene i just tested it with materials already so i never saw it like this okay so i think the top light it's looking nice let's see the center light okay so we can see what the light from the center is doing uh of course i don't want it to be visible i just want it to affect the particle somehow so yeah it's a bit slow but uh yeah this is how it is with particles i think it's too strong now and maybe okay i think we have a really nice start the third light would be a spotlight for the background so let's create an rs light again but this time uh here we would say spot another interesting thing that we can do is uh set the camera as our target so we can position it looking at the camera okay and right now as you can see it's looking at the camera so i can just move it around here another nice trick that i did with it is and enabling the texture and inside the texture i went here in the there there will be the in the hip folder you'll have like an abstract emission texture so i just place this here i think i rotate it randomly also the contribution scale should be one because this is a should be affecting the volume so let's start to render again and see what happens this light is in the background we should maybe put it here okay so as you can see we have a really nice volume light maybe we can just dial up the exposure a bit okay and i think this center light is too powerful but we need to also add the textures to see how it behaves now let's create the materials for the main particles we will add two materials so let's say rs material this one would be the yellow one and i think i used the preset for copper copper and then i used i think the gold preset and i changed this it was let's say we need some blue here so we need to take out the red and here we would say maybe 0.5 0.25 and 0.9 so this was the combination that i used and now we have this copper and blue gold let's say we would need a material blender this allows us to blend multiple materials together so the copper would be the base material and then we would have the blue gold as being the second layer connect this to the surface and now we need to bring this color information in so we would add the rs point attribute and here we need to say cd with capital c we will also add a ramp connect the input here and connect the blend color here so right now this acts like a mask between those two materials i think we can already start the render to see everything what happens so as you can see there's something happening let's just create a render region around here and i think we need to tweak a bit of parameters so looking at the ram here let's see what it does we can debug it i think we need to make this a lot wider so we have a lot of blue particles coming in yeah something like that maybe more i think we're pretty fine this uh center light it's messing up a bit some stuff now we also need to create a special aov for the mask so there's a node called store color to aov we need to plug it here in between so this is the beauty input and the aov input would be this as a mask we just need to name it mask as we did in the aov so we put this here and now everything this mask will be rendered separately on a separate layer so we can use it in comp and here we will just create we'll just duplicate this material and use this kind of copper yeah maybe with a lot more roughness yeah something like that open this one and copy the color code set this to ior so we can control a bit the reflectivity and put the same code here in the reflection so something like this this is very simple material okay let's start the render again maybe disable the center light so we can just see what everything else is doing okay so after some small tweaking what i did um i just change the center light to be color not temperature and set like a dark blue also the top light i changed the exposure to six and right now it's a bit confusing because um of course you can see that there's a lot more light coming from the center and that's because a lot of particles are actually erased also a thing that we can do to make this a lot more beautiful is to enable the depth of field so right now you can see that it's making quite a lot of difference here of course the render is very slow and we can also enable the background particles yeah so now we have the background particles as well i think they're huge right now we need to make them a lot smaller let's go here into the background effects hide the other objects visualize this as a disks and in a p scale we can just change this to maybe 0.08 or something to have some really small ones and yeah i think something like this what's also happening is that you see there are a lot of we are focusing around this point here and there are a lot of particles that come towards the camera and they are in focus so what i can do is actually delete some points with this function i can just copy it wherever i want let's say here and say if the position on that at p that z is bigger than this number we should remove the points so yeah you see something like this so right now we are just leaving the background points that are all out of focus so actually no point it will be on focus right now and we will just have some depth of field a nice data field to them i think we are really getting there now we would need to switch to the dense point cloud we can do that very easily and here remember we have this switch so we just need to put it here remember we have this switch we just need to switch the input from one to zero and of course we don't want to leave the points as disks so now if we check the geometry spreadsheet we have 12 million points and let's pray the redshift doesn't crashes we can just view them here and one extremely important thing would be that we can export this as a redshift proxy so to do that you can use my utility that you can find on gumroad it's called why ares proxy this is a really easy utility where we can just add it here after we instance the points we can enable it and here you have the same hip folder we can just type here geo probably and let's rename this to party particles proxy and now what i can do i can just render to disk and then it automatically loads up the proxy the benefit of doing this is that the viewport will be really fast redshift loading times will be faster and also rendering times will be faster so please make sure you check this utility on my gumball page in the description of the video now i hit use proxy file as you can see what happens it replaces the particles with this box you see the viewport performance is extremely good now if i just go back and start the render view okay so as you can see we have um a bit different image than what we had in the call for example this is because we used a lot of random expressions and you know building this uh randomly but i think this one looks also really good i just maybe need to tweak the center light to be even more less visible minus four here so this is the core of course uh this particle renderings abstract renderings have different results each time so i think i also really like this image of course here we also have the mask which we can use in the the composting software then we have the specular the reflections the puzzle map we cannot really see now and also the volume that we cannot really see now so those are some useful aovs that we can use and the last thing would be that we also use a denoiser so let's go into the rob net and here in the redshift output we select the noise and here we select altus dual pass delta denoiser it's integrated with redshift now and it's really really good i like the dual pass mode because it gives better results here i would also save additional buffers and do not denoise aovs for now and what i can do is i can just start the render to see how everything works i think for the settings here i can go maybe 0.085 and now let's see if i start redshift in bucket mode i will only test it on a on a partially zone and let's increase a bit of resolution also override camera resolution and i can specify the resolution here so let's use something like this and now let's start the render again now we are in progressive mode we need to change it to bucket and see what happens if we are okay with the denoising results this is the render with the denoising as you can see it produces a really nice result actually if we have a look at this aov which is the noisy beauty we can see how noise it actually was if we render this without the denoiser so now it's a lot more cleaner of course what i usually do i tend to add a bit of uh this pass over just to have just a bit of noise in the end this is the final result from the tutorial that we did live as you can see it's a bit different from the cover image but personally i like both it's also because we use a lot of different random parameters and with this kind of abstract stuff we always get different results if you found the tutorial useful don't forget to subscribe to my channel and check out the links in the description of the video for future content until the next time stay safe

Channel: Yan Studio

Views: 14,788

Rating: 4.9851575 out of 5

Keywords: houdini, free tutorial, particles, abstract, redshift, volumetric, denoiser, altus, attributes, masks, shaders, lighting, camera, focus, copper, blue gold, depth of field, bokeh, sidefx, learning, beginner, source files, gumroad, getting started, houdini indie, 3d, cgi, fx, yanstudio, nft, tokens, non fungible tokens, crypto art

Id: 3H-aiItUoDM

Length: 50min 25sec (3025 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020