Intro to Houdini 18 | Part 1 | UI and Navigation

hello everyone and this is an introduction to Houdini so the idea is that if you if you're using any other 3d software and you always wanted to learn Dini then this series should help you get started so with the first video we're going to take a look at the absolute basics which is the user interface and the navigation within the software and a few other concepts alright so where do we begin the first question is what is Houdini right so Houdini is a 3d animation software pretty much like max or Maya or blender or cinema 4d or Lightwave you know any of those there are two major differences between those software's and Houdini the first one is that Houdini is entirely node based so if you look at it this is essentially what Houdini looks like okay it's essentially your building using nodes so that is the first thing the other thing is what is written directly over here which is it is fully procedural so what does that mean like what do you mean by procedural so what that means is that rather than having just taking an object and starting to manipulate you generate a set of rules or commands and these rules or commands can are kind of independent or whatever input you have and they can be transferred to whatever other object that you want and you can keep replicating the same effect so for example let's say I've just created a rule or a set of things like I want to take an object and I want to twist it and then I want to bend it okay this is fairly simple you can probably do this in you know like any software but let's say this is my rule this is a twisty Bend rule so then whatever input comes in here it will keep doing the same thing so this is effectively a procedural approach okay on a very very basic level this is a procedural approach wherein you are creating a set of rules say and saying that whatever comes in this is what you need to do with it to do a slightly more complex version of it let's say I want to create I want to create a set of rules saying that select you know the top faces and then you know add some points so you want to scatter some points and then copy some plants on this okay and so what you should technically get is if this is my object then I want to select this much and then I just want to you know grow some plants here so something like that and so this is again like a set of rules so no matter what I put in so whether I put in you know a sphere or a box it will always select the top and it will always grow the same thing on top of it so if I do something like this and then it will again select the top and just you know do that so this is effectively what a procedural approach does okay so that's effectively it so once you install it and you know all of that process is done and you start the software this is what you will be faced with this is essentially what Houdini looks like alright so the first thing we are going to do is we are going to take a look at the basic user interface and the navigation and in order to do that I just make a couple of objects so I will go back to that and how to create objects and all of those things but for now just that we can navigate in the viewport and I can show you a few things will just you know look at we just make a few objects so on the Shelf on top so this is in if you're coming from Maya this is kind of familiar to you Maya has shelves on top you know so I can just click here you get a box and you can create a box and then I will create a sphere and I'll create a torus okay so this is effectively what you have so the interface is pretty simple it's not a very complicated interface you have your shelf on top which has a whole bunch of you know you can create objects you have deformers you have tools for rigging for character animation then you have like particle stuff rigidbody ocean tools Houdini is properly known as as an FX as a VFX software so that's effectively you know that's a big part of meaning so anyway so you have all of your stuff on top over here there are other ways to create objects in swell and create tools as well but you have the shelf on top you can always use that now you can also close it okay so wherever you see this this black arrow if you click on this bar it will close you know everything so it is a nice way to just you know if you want to open up space you can just open up space and then you can click on the bar again to sort of reopen it okay so it's not it's not gone you can just it'll close and you can open it up again the other thing you can also do is you can click on this bar in the middle and you can adjust the size you can click here and you can adjust the size you can also like you can see these small arrows here in the middle you can click on that to expand or contract and you can go in in either direction the other thing is if you click here in the middle you can flip the entire interface so you can click here and will flip it if you keep alt pressed like if you bring the mouse on it you'll see it gives you options if you keep alt pressed and do left mouse button it will actually make it horizontal vertical and if you click on it again it will make it it will split it half way this way so this is essentially you know the basic interface now it's broken up into three sections as you can see here so you have your you have the 3d viewport you know which is standard to most software's on the top right you have the parameter window so you will see the parameters for you know whichever object that you have selected and then bottom right you have what is called as Network view but this is essentially your node view so all the nodes that you create all the objects that you create will seen here as represented by nodes okay so Houdini as I said being a node node based software this is effectively what you will see okay this is as far as you know the basic interface is concerned now you also have these other two toolbars on the side okay off the 3d viewport so you have some basic things here like you have move rotate scale okay you have options here what you want to select okay so if you right click here like if you don't want to select the camera if you don't want to select the lights you have options to not select and then you also have like snapping options here you know so in this toolbar you have basic move rotate scale and snapping and then on the right side toolbar you have options for you know what kind of lighting do you want to see in your viewport so let me just let me add a light okay just so that you can see something again I will come back to this but this is I just wanted to show you you know stuff so I'm just going to take an environment light and I'll create like one more right here so you have options as to what you want to see so if I click here on top it will be headlight only you know so it is you're going to see the viewport you won't see any other lighting you know coming in from anywhere and then if you click here you get to see like the basic lighting and then it gets more and more advanced as it goes on okay so let me also create a grid just so that you know you get shadows or something yeah so if I click here you can start you know it will start to cast some kind of shadows on it and then you can if you come here so it's basically just it keeps improving quality see so now you're getting shadows and then you can also select this light if if you turn it into let's say I'll turn it into like a grid and I can right click here and I can say do area shadows so see now you have like area shadows instead of you know like this hard shadows so you can do stuff like that so you have different options for you know seeing your lighting and because I took an I meant alight and I put an HDR you are seeing the HDR having effect as well if I you know sort of rotated around you'll see the hold on there is my environment like thickness okay so if I rotate the environment alight you'll see the effect of the environment light see so it's a pretty decent view book like you can see a lot of information being shown in the viewport itself okay so this is as far as the tools over here are concerned and then you can also a let's go back to headlight for now and then you can also see like down here you have options for you can see points and you can see normals you can see point numbers you can so basically this element data right like the things that make up your 3d object so you have your points and primitives faces all of that stuff you can see here okay so you want to see face normals you can see that you can see face numbers if you want to see that so you have you know options for that over here and then the topmost one is to see the grid so if you don't want to see the grade in the viewport you can turn that you know on and off from here okay so this is these are as far as these tools are concerned now let's look at you know the basic navigation so the basic navigation is fairly simple when you will drop into Houdini for the first time it's usually navigate mode like you will see that the mouse will be a hand and without having to press any button you can just start navigating so if you left mouse button then allow you to orbit okay middle will allow you to pan and right will allow you to zoom in zoom out if you want to get out of the navigation mode press enter and then you're out of the navigation mode now you are in select mode so it'll like at the bottom you can see like it shape it shows you select the geometry and then choose an operation to perform so now you are in selection mode which is where you generally want to be so navigation now the shortcuts are still the same except you need to keep spacebar pressed so if you keep spacebar pressed and you can navigate around and you can just you know do the same thing so spacebar left mouse button orbit middle is pan and right-click a zoomin zoom-out pretty straightforward okay and the same rule applies in the node view as well so you can always just you can middle click to you know pan you can right click to zoom in zoom out and left click is select over here like you can't orbit in the node view but the middle and right still works okay now other options that you have is if you can notice like I can't select anything at the moment okay and that's because in the left hand toolbar there is an option here would say secure selection okay and you knew you didn't want to turn it off so that you can select more objects but sometimes you can't like if you selected a bunch of vertices or points and you want to keep them and not want to lose the selection you can turn that on but it's on by default so usually you want to turn it off so the other shortcuts that you have if you select an object and you want to zoom to select it you can press spacebar G that is zoom to selected and spacebar edge will zoom the entire view okay so when you want to frame the entire view that is spacebar edge and when you want to zoom to select it you press spacebar G the same stuff applies in the node view as well so if I select a certain set of objects and I press G it will zoom to that you don't need to press spacebar over here and if you want to like zoom to the whole thing press edge and that will do the same see it shows you like at the bottom you can see like when I braced edge it said H is for home and then if I press G it will say G is for home selected okay so you can do navi you can navigate like that now along with that you also have a few organizational tools for the node view ok the simplest one is L L allows you to like just organize the entire node tree you can press ctrl-z if you want to go back and if you want to organize just a few selected objects like maybe I want to select these three and organize them you can press shift L okay so L organizes the whole thing and shift L organizes selected objects so you can go you know you can begin so if you have a long node tree and you just want to organize like D stand over here and those ten over there then you can just select and you know organize accordingly all right so before we continue let's also take a look at the various types of viewports so how do you access the front view and the back view not of that and also the various shading types in the viewport so the shortcuts are pretty simple you you do get an option at the top right in the viewport itself so if you click here you can set your view so you can go to perspective top front you know whichever one you want you also have different shading types which you can access from here itself and you can display a lot of different things so basically what you are getting in this right-hand panel is the stuff that you're getting from here as well so if you want to display points you can display points and you want to display point numbers you can do that the the shortcut to access the various viewports is spacebar and one two three four and five okay so spacebar one is perspective and then two is top and three is front and four is right and then five takes you to the UV viewport now the interesting thing also is that if you go to if you press spacebar - that will take you to the top view and then if you press spacebar - again it will take you to the bottom view okay so you can sort of the same thing applies with the front as well so spacebar 3 is front and then pressing spacebar 3 again takes you to the back view and then 4 is right and left ok so you can sort of you know access it that way now you can also you also have different shading types so those can as I showed those can be accessed from here or you also have this icon on top okay which says display geometry smooth shaded the shortcut is W so W takes you to wireframe or shaded ok you also have an option here with a smooth wire shaded so you can see the wireframe and the shaded object or you can see a wire frame you can see wireframe host which will sort of shave the back faces a little more lighter so it gives you better depth perspective then you have hidden line ghosts you have a bunch of options so you can sort of choose which one you want you can go flat shaded usually it's smooth by a shaded and you know if you press W it goes to wireframe course those are the two that I gently work with so yeah so that is as far as you know how you can access the various viewports and the shading types okay so this is as far as you know the basic navigation and you know stuff is concerned now let's also take a look at how to customize the interface okay so I'm just going to keep this and we will take a look at how to customize this so you have this basic interface in front of you but Houdini also provides you other interfaces or what is what is called as desktops so it's sort of similar to like if you used After Effects you get different desktops in there as well like I think they called workspaces so you get different workspaces and different panels that you can see or not see you can also build your own custom workspaces it's similar to that so what you can do is if you come up here you see something called build okay and this is the currently active desktop as it tells you so if you click here okay and then you can go to you have like multiple of them you can do animate so it will go to animate okay so this is the animation toolbar the animation desktop you can go to games you can go to grooming so you're a whole bunch of stuff that keeps happening it's a very very flexible interface like this is Wow okay so there are places where it might change entirely and you might not even recognize the software but yeah the default is build mostly I work within build and I just customized a little bit based on what I want but usually I'm just happy with that so what you can also do is you can start from scratch right so if you want to make your own desktop you can start from scratch so if I come into the build menu at the bottom or not at the bottom you'll get something here which is new desktop okay so if you click on new desktop and it will start you with a completely blah interphase with just you know one scene view okay so what you can do is you it's very very simple okay like the shells are also gone but they're still there like they restored the you can just pick up whatever you want now so if you click on this arrow at the top right hand okay and come to shelf sets and you have like all of this so the basic two shell sets are great and refined and lights camera action so I can say create and refine will give me you know all of that stuff and then I can come to shelf sets and say lights camera action and lights camera action has the lights but it also has all the dynamic stuff so this brings the shelves back now we want to start building the interface so what you can do is on top of any sort of pain these are called pains PA any and if you click here on this it says pain tab operation you'll get two options at the bottom you'll get split pain left or right or top and bottom the shortcuts are the alt and the square brackets okay so if I take alt and the left square bracket you split it vertical and then if I do right square bracket you split it horizontal and the interesting thing is you can keep splitting this so no matter how crazy you want you can keep going okay so it can go pretty crazy but yeah you don't want to do that much okay and then once you have sort of split the interface you can pick what you want so on the name over here you can right click and it will give you what you want the basic three are on top okay so I can say this should be parameters and then I can right click here and I can say this should be the network view so you'll get the network view see so you're back to basics but what you can also do is you can add additional tabs to this so if I click here then I can actually add a new pane tab or I can pick what I want so let's say let's say you were you you do a lot of Python work so I can just click here and I can take Python shell or I can click here maybe I want the help browser so I can you know just get the help browser and if you don't want it you can just you know click on this and close it or you can also drag and drop it you know and just switch places you can also drag it to another one so I can let's let's see if we can do that see there you go so you can actually like they'll drag it on to an existing tab okay not into an open space like here nothing happens but drag it like you know on that name it will come after that so it is a pretty flexible interface you can sort of like you know mix and match and customize in many different ways alright so we're done with this now let's do one thing I'm going to delete all of this and we'll make some objects from scratch so we can just take a look at how to make object so we don't need this anymore so what you can do is just select all of these and press Delete and that's fine okay so we'll start looking at how to create object so how we can create objects is the simplest method is you can go to the shelf and even click on any object and then you can click anywhere in the viewport okay and that will make the object and make the node for it you can also you can also if you control click on anything it will form at zero okay so that is also another way and then if you click and then when you are moving it around if you keep control pressed you can snap it so if I want to go vertical or you know if I want to go in any particular direction okay you can actually sort of like you know move it around so if I want to place it there see so now you're you know up in the air so you can place it in you know multiple ways okay let me just make like three different objects here okay so once you've made the objects let's look at basic you know move rotate scale so yeah again this is on so let's turn that off the shortcut is the tilde key so you can just yeah so keep shift pressed and the tilde key okay so that will allow you to sort of turn it on and off but yeah it's right there so you can press it as well so it's not like if you don't remember the shortcuts right now you can watch the video a few times you'll eventually remember them okay so you can select an object and T is move R is rotate and E is scale okay so it's pretty straightforward okay so you can move it in any particular axis you can move it in two axis if you want and then if you want to rotate it again like if you click in the disgrace fear you can't rotate it you know in any direction that you want the outside circle is rotating from a viewport standpoint okay so your point of view and then of course you have the you have RGB you know in whichever way you want to and then finally you can also scale it so again you can scale in one axis or you can scale in two axes or middle will give you a uniform scale and then you can like you know stretch it or whatever you want to do so yeah so this is pretty straightforward like it's not very very different okay so this is this is one way to create objects so what we did was we created objects from the shelf now there is another way to create objects or create anything in Houdini as well which is generally the more standard approach which is you can press tab and if you press tab you get what's called as the tab menu and the good thing about the tab menu is you can just type the name of the object that you want or the tool that you want it will just create that so it might seem a little daunting but over time once you get used to all the various names and of the tools and whatever it's a lot faster you know rather than trying to go here and look for stuff which is it's not like the Shelf tool is not useful there are a lot of things in the shelf tool but sometimes we just want to move really fast the tag menu is a lot faster so I can press tab here let's say if I want a Taurus I can just create a Taurus okay so the way it works is fairly simple right so let's say if I want to create a sphere I can just press SPH okay it'll sort of navigate to that press ENTER it will connect to the mouse and you can move it around if you press if you left-click it will make it wherever your Mouse's if you just press ENTER it'll make it at zero okay so you can sort of pick and choose wherever you want to place it like if I want another box and if I have this press ENTER twice it will just created at zero and then you can move it around you know wherever you want to this is actually in general the more preferred way like after you've done with this series and you start watching other stuff you'll notice that a lot of people traditionally go through the tab menu okay because that is usually what is done okay so now that we've seen how to create objects and you know how to move move rotate and place them let's also take a look at one more thing before we continue which is how to customize your nodes because we saw how to customize the interface you can also customize the look of your nodes okay which is which is actually important like it might seem like a gimmick but it is important because Houdini is a node based system and what happens is most scenes are not going to be 6 nodes they might be a lot more than that and you want to be able to quickly spot a particular node okay like when you have a node tree which is like 200 nodes you want to be able to spot your important nodes as quickly as possible and to do that you want to have tools that you can that allow you to customize the color and the shape of a node because it's easy to spot so you do get those options here okay so on top in the network view towards the right you'll see this thing called color palette and shape palette okay so the shortcut is c4 color palette and Zed for the shape palette so the color palette is simple you can select any node and you can click on a color okay so it'll just you can also select more than one and give it a color you know so that's also fine and then the other option is if you press Z and then you get options to shape them okay so you can select this you can shape it you know any which way you want so they had the advantage of shaping is that even if you're really far away you can still spot the shape so it's very easy to know you know what you want okay now because the great thing about this is that even when Houdini is making objects it also customizes shapes of specific nodes so like when I create a light it will make the light will shape like a light or if I make a camera then the camera is shaped you know roughly like a camera so it's easy for you to know that okay this is a camera this is a light it's easy for you to get that now other things that you can do with you know within the within the node view is you can also put them in folders okay so what you can do is you can select a bunch of these and if you come here it's called a network box so it will create a box okay and then you can name this box to something so let us call it objects one and then I can select this and I can click here again and I can call it objects too so it's easy for you to spot and you can also color this thing you know so I can click here and I can you know color this whole thing to something else so you can sort of you know organize things this way things can start getting very colorful and along with this you also have this option to put in post-it notes like you can put in like a sticky note so if you are transferring a file to someone else or you know you just want to remember something that you have done so you can actually create a note for yourself so you can click here it will create a note and you can type type whatever you want and just keep it so this is really good like again it's great as a self-help or it's also great as just if you are giving the file to someone else and they want to know okay which is the important note here where are the parameters that I need to modify you can just you know write on a small note over there so they know what they you know what they need to look for so it it's nice that way okay now as a fire if you don't want these like any selecting delete them now so like if I don't want the network boxes I can just select the network box and delete it it won't delete the objects inside but it'll just you know delete the network box and the good thing about Network boxes is also that you can minimize them so if you have a lot of nodes and you just want to want to minimize something you can actually just you know minimize it it's nice okay now this is as far as you know basic customization is concerned but you can also let's also look at one final thing which is how to navigate within this view okay because sometimes if if it spread out too much and there are lots of things that you want to look for Houdini has a new tool called a squid navigate okay which is which is shift and the slash key the slash above the question mark I don't know if that's the forwards I think that's the forward slash I get confused with that anyway so what you can do is if you do shift in forward slash it directly it goes to the first object that's been created but what you can do very easily is I can just type in the name of the object and you can see it's directly trying to go to like if I want to go to sphere object to so see it can go to like sphere object to or if I want to go to say now you can go to torus okay or maybe I want to go to tube see you went to tube so it's very easy to navigate like if you if you have named certain nodes and given them specific names you can very easily just open up the quick navigate and it will go to that particular place very fast okay so you don't need to exactly remember where it was as long as you remember the name you can just navigate to it very very quickly okay so that's effectively it so this is as far as you know the basic interface is concerned now let's do one thing already I'll make a very simple scene okay so we mailed a seal there is one final thing that I want to cover so they wanna cover this in a fairly basic way but it is important so we're going to cover something called contexts so what exactly are context so what Houdini does is Houdini has things broken up into different contexts so modeling or geometry creation is a context dynamics is a different context and rendering in a different context okay and based on which context or which area you are in the tools available to you will change okay so it's very easy to sort of navigate and organize things so the way they are named is fairly simple but it might seem a little weird because the way Houdini works so just to give you an idea I'm going to write them down but you get you get chopped which is essentially short for surface operators so opiez operators so as you start learning Houdini you will start hearing these terms a lot so whenever you hear like this if there is an O P at the end the o P stands for operator now some things have multiple names to them okay so soft is also called as geometry so if you if you make a geometry folder you are basically you're creating a soft folder so stop and geometry is the same thing and then you have dot which is dynamics pop and dope is pretty much the same thing they both go to the same area but pop is particles and then you get rock which is for rendering I have no idea why I am not typing this but I have great handwriting so why not okay and then you get other things so you have something called as chop which is channel operators which is good for manipulating animation curves and data like that okay and then you have something called cop which is for compositing now there was an older context called shop which was for materials or shaders but that has been replaced by what is called as a material net so I don't need to put the full form of this but it's the same thing it's just a newer context they both are still valid you can use both of them but mostly we use the material net but if you have a good an older tutorial and they're using the sharp net don't be worried it still works okay and then now you have a brand new area called lops which is for lighting and then you get something called tops which is essentially for building dependency graphs okay yeah so there's a fair bit of stuff here now as far as naming is concerned as I said top is also called geometry top is called dynamics you ready to worry about that the rendering is also sometimes called output so if you if you see the term output it's basically looking for a rock network and then compositing is also called image because you're manipulating images and chops is also called motion effects yeah the rest of it is pretty much you know the way it is so knobs is currently like if you want to look for videos there is a very nice video which was done at SIGGRAPH you have to look for solaris so solaris was the codename for locks like when it was in development so if you look for solaris you will be able to find lops video but yeah so this is everything you know that is there so if you come in here and when I create you know if I start typing in geometry you can create a geometry folder any object that you create is technically making a geometry folder and then I can press tab and I can type in dynamics also see it it gives you a top Network I can create a shop Network which as I said is now not used as much I can create a material Network hey I can create okay I can create a rock Network okay and the interesting thing is I won't create all of them but these are all the you know basic ones and as you can see like when I first am here you are getting this you know list of tools but when I go inside any of them okay and over here towards the top left you will see it says objects okay so you're currently an object level but when you go inside any of these you'll see that this area changes so this is essentially a folder okay like when we pressed quick navigate it showed you like see this is a folder you know like if I start typing in obj smash hey see so I can actually like as you can see it basically follows like a directory structure so you can sort of go into those so these are all technically just folders okay so I can just come in here and now I'm at geometry level and what you see is if you press tab now the list completely changes and similarly if I come if you want to come up you can just click here and it will it will allow you to come up you can also press and select something in press ENTER to go inside and then you can press you to come up okay so that is that is something that works as well if you come into dotnet so now you are in dynamics if I press tab again like now like you have Fe M you have pop networks and you have you know different kinds of solvers so you are now in dynamics area if you come into material network and press tab so user now you are in the material area so you can make materials and if you come into Rob Knight and press tab you'll see that now you have you know rendering options so if you want to take your renderer you can make a renderer from here so these are all the various contexts and we will get into this in a little more detail but this is a very important thing in Houdini because what it does is that depending on what you are working in you have to make that specific context and it allows you to sort of you know segregate and keep things more organized rather than everything being in one place okay so now that we have seen the basic user interface and navigation and customization of Houdini let's make something okay so nothing complicated I just want to make a simple scene and I want to add some lights and a material and just render it okay now the thing with rendering is that in Houdini 18 the rendering system has changed pretty drastically so the older technique is still completely valid but there is a completely brand new area for doing lighting in rendering I'm not going to cover that right now okay because that's a completely different thing I will be covering it in this series and there are quite a few videos that will allow me to cover that for now we'll take a look at the older technique there are a few older techniques that I will cover in this series for a simple reason because there are a lot of older tutorials that are available which naturally will follow older techniques so the point is knowing the older method is good so that you don't get confused when you're looking at older tutorials like you'll still be able to learn from it and then you can also adapt it to the newer method yourself okay because if you just look at it and you don't know what the older method is and you just get thoroughly confused then there's no no use of that tutorial so you might as well know the old method just you know that you can still get information from the older older tutorials okay so let's just make something okay so we'll do a simple scene setup so what I'll do is I'm going to press tab in the viewport and I'll take something called as test drama tree so Houdini gives you a bunch of test geometries like in blender you get that monkey you get like a bunch of test drama trees here okay so you get something called as rubber toy i like the rubber toy because it will just create the rubber toy and press enter and you have the rubber toy now by default the rubber toy comes in with you know with a shader applied to it but if you don't want it you can click here and get rid of the shader okay and then we will also create a grid so I can you know control click here on the grid it'll make a grid for me so I'll just scale it up so I'll just come to the uniform scale and I'll make it like say 5 hey now there are other ways to manipulate these numerical areas but we'll do that once we come in - you know properly modeling something okay so this is my basic see it's nothing fancy I just have something here so the next thing I want to do is I want to create a camera okay so I can click here or no camera and you can just click new camera and what that does is that it just from whatever angle you're looking at it creates a camera okay so it's pretty nice and then if you want to navigate from the camera standpoint you can click here okay so this will allow you to lock the camera to the view because otherwise like right now if I try to navigate it leaves the camera view okay like you can see that if you made a camera they go but if you want to lock the camera to the view you can just click like select the camera here you'll see like it will show you camera one and then I can click here and now I'm navigating from the camera standpoint okay now the next thing we want to do is we want to add some lights so we can add that hue so I can press tab and I want to take an environment light so I'll take an environment light and we'll click it to like high quality lighting so we can you know see that and then like in the light option you'll have something called environment map from where you can take an HDR okay so again very basic stuff if you come in from any other 3d software none of this is confusing this is stuff that you pretty much done everywhere so it will take an HDR I'll take any XR you know whichever one so I have like a ready-made HDR you can take anything that you want most of these are downloaded from like HDR havens so you can just you know pick them up from there you can come to transform and let's make it like 45 degrees yeah so you have some light coming from there and then let's also create another light so I can click here and yeah let's just move this to this side yeah and we'll change it to like an area light or let's let you send it to a sphere okay and we lower the intensity it's too bright okay this is fine hey now I want to create a couple of materials just you know to make something so I'll press tab and we'll take a material Network and what you can do is we can take something called a material palette in clip+ over here I can go to paint tab and come to legacy rendering and you will find something called material palette okay so you can click material palette and you the basic material is called a principal shader so it has multiple folders where we want to go is material net okay or we can rename that let's rename that to my pillows so you'll see that here see it says my materials so I want to open that and I want to be there okay so you can just take principal shader drop it in and we'll take like two of them okay so let's call this as greed and let's call this as toy and you can just drag and drop it okay an assignment so pretty straightforward and you'll get these you know once you come back you'll see that it is it's inside that particular folder and you've created these two materials that you have and then I can just let's give it some color so the grid let's make it red and then the toy let's make it slightly brighter and then you can click here to come back to your geometry we'll press l2 now to just you know organize it and then lastly I want to create a rough Network which will allow me to create a render engine so the default render engine in Houdini was mantra there is a new one now but we're not using that at the moment so you can just double click in here press tab and take mantra so it will create four render engine I'm not going to go into parameters or anything at all like that I'll just create this and that is fun and then lastly I just want to render it so I'll just this is fine so I can just come in to windows and we create a new floating and I can right click here go to legacy rendering and something called drain W so the camera default goes to 1280 720 so if you select the camera and if you come into view you will see that the resolution is kept to 1280 720 let's make it small for now so I will make it 640 480 and then up here it will ask you now go P which is the rendered node so that is mantra which is the camera so I can say camera 1 okay and that's basically it so if you press render it will essentially just it will prepare the scene and it would render it yeah so there you go this is interactive okay so if you move the object around or something you can actually like you know interactively adjust it and if you want to do a final render you can turn this off so now it will do a final render so yeah that's essentially it so once you've done the final render if you want to save it you can just right click here and you can say say frame and you can save it to whatever format you want to say we so you want to save it as a jpg or you know whatever you want you can just save it from there fairly straightforward and it's still an interactive mode so if you want to stop rendering you can stop it from here yeah so this is nothing special I just wanted to you know end it on a note where okay this is how you render something in Houdini because at the end of the day every 3d software is primarily about you know you want to get a final result out of it so you should know how to get a final result out of it alright so that's essentially it so this is how this is what the Houdini the phase is like and how to navigate and how to make objects how to customize the interface how to customize the nodes and finally the various contexts in Houdini and basic scene setup so starting with the next video we are going to take a look at how to do basic modeling in Houdini and how to utilize you know procedural modeling so what is the advantage of you know modeling in Houdini and how procedural ism helps so that's what we'll start so that's the next video I hope this one is useful and yeah keep watching

Channel: Houdini

Views: 22,749

Rating: 4.9057817 out of 5

Keywords: vfx, visual effects, visual effects software, vfx software, cg, cg software, fmx

Id: omQq03X5YZE

Length: 45min 59sec (2759 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 28 2019