Introduction to Modeling Operations – Getting Started with Houdini ep. 4

hello and welcome back this is a rice works and this is episode 4 of getting started with Kadena workshop so this video will be about modeling operations you know working with extrusions poly bevel wire poly wire and other things that will be useful for creating geometry so let's see what we can do first of all as per usual we'll start with geometry tab inside and the first things first I will just show you after creating a box how well Holy Bible actually works so I drop a bevel shift enter and if I start now modifying the poly bevel as you can see something is definitely happening so we are filling our geometry using the poly bevel and of course we can control the profile now in Houdini 18 going further we can now control the profile and make it more concave convex inverted and what have you so basically you can also control the profile ramp so just just using one bevel you can do well a lot of interesting operations on the geometry this can be useful for creating the moldings for windows and things like that of course everything stays procedural if you increase the amount of divisions it will adjust accordingly if you increase the distance it will adjust accordingly as well so nothing like super-hard here if we let's say have the sphere and make it a polygon and connect it to the poly bevel as you can see we have some sort of sorts of interesting ish looking geometry almost like getting ready for some motion grafica stuff it will just tweak the distance as you can see it goes like this and starts to destroy itself it's kind of interesting I mean it's not always you need to destroy your geometry but what if you need for the sake of your let's say short video just to have some sort of effect like that okay now I will drop a grid and we will talk about extrusions for a second now extrusion creates new geometry it says P P exd Pollux - it creates new geometry by pushing geometry on the normals of the faces and by the way it works on the faces it will be important and possibly sometime later when we will talk about attributes in another session but for now let's just see what it does so if we extrude the thing as you can see it moves up and down you can also do it in the viewport nothing super interesting here if you move your mouse button I will I'm sorry it moves as well the inset now this is not particularly intriguing in our case because I wanted to show you how to do not just a connected but individual elements as well so as you can see if I just disable the viewing well we now have everything extruded on its own now where it gets sort of interesting is that we can actually poly bevel not just faces like on a sphere right or on a box in our case not just the edges of the faces but we can actually also Bevell points so this is exactly what we can do I dropped the poly bevel after the greed and nothing yet happening but if I increase the distance as you can see something definitely starts to happen right um so we can do this so late we can the decrease chamfer there's a bit different for different scenarios like for a 70 bundling in our case let's say we want the distance like that and mmm divisions like that and if we now pulley extruded as you can see we have I wouldn't exactly call it like sapphire floor or anything but almost if we draw for normal just to fix the normals they can't spangled a bit low so now it looks kind of correct and yep as you can see we have some sort of mm pattern on our floor and of course if we decrease the amount of robes as you can see this kind of looks like kinda looks like sci-fi floor okay just let's pretend okay next up I'm gonna show you working with curves I'll create a curve by the way I think I forgot to tell you that's to go let's see the top view you can hover over your viewport and hold down space and press to spacebar to will go to the top spacebar 3 we'll go to the France space by for a space bar 4 will go to the right and space bar 5 will open up the UV so spacebar spacebar 1 goes back to the traditional perspective camera or orthographic if you enable that ok so we go to the our right view I'll enable our curve that I've just created press enter and I will start oops drawing if it doesn't start drawing hold down shift and double click sometimes it helps if it if nothing helps just delete the curve and create a new curve that should help anyway so we have the curve right and you're looking at this and thinking yeah all right curve this is very exciting right what we can do is poly wire the curve so it immediately oops immediately becomes geometry so if I increase the decreased my radius a bit and increase the divisions as you can see we immediately have a tube mmm no that's you a pipe so this looks kind of a bit janky so apparently we have to make it look better and we can basically another poly bevel I hit the tab start typing poly bevel I insert it before the poly wire and as we learned previously we can babble the points and if we make it round you will see that our curve looks much more soft and battled and our resulting pipe looks pretty good as well so there you go the beauty of this solution is that if we select the curve press and whoops select the curve press ENTER and now if we move around our points they will retain the bevels and the geometry will be automatically rebuilt for us this is really useful I'm very useful for procedural modeling obviously and any other modeling corporations of your choice okay next up what I want to show you is let's actually again drop another sphere and make it Paul again because I like political spheres for no reason they're just kind of cool but what is even more cool is that they are great for these effects we can drop poly wire on our geometry and as you can see we have some sort of actually I'm not sure what we have but we have geometry all right and if you are maybe maybe you are coming from let's say cinema 4d and you're thinking I'm not sure I think team oops I will just drop another sphere I think the modifier is called something polygons or eights um I don't remember so basically what it does it creates some sort of spheres on the points and it converts edges into wires so this is exactly what we're gonna do so again we have our sphere and the sphere obviously comes with the points that's are highlighted by the blue after I click this button now what we're going to do as we learned in the previous section we can copy two points I start ctp enter and if we geometry this sphere and the target points that we already have here and of course we make our spheres polygonal and super super small something like this I will disable this and when we merge the result with our initial sphere what we'll have is this now actually my bad I didn't want it to merge with our sphere I was holding down Y which creates scissors and I want to merge it with a poly wire and now we have the effect just like we would have in cinema 4d if I'm not mistaken and I'm pretty sure there is a thing that does just well this effect so you probably are maybe have heard somewhere or have seen this effect where you can sort of creates a blend using the conversion to volumetric data this is what we're gonna do we can convert our polygons into V DV for a volumetric data and operates it as if it were volumes now you don't need to be hung up on the terminology it's not important that this rate just know that we will creates the polygonal representation into vocalized representation which is like pixels in 3d okay so it's called VDP from polygons I start typing VDB FP and as you can see we different polygons here we go and it looks horrible this is because the voxel size is too big now if we make it 0.05 still not enough 0.02 still not enough 0.1 kind of better now the result is that as you can see it became it sort of became one geometry that kind of intersects with each other you know in a very organic way so to speak now what I'm gonna do is smoothen the result V DB s for video a smooth shift enter again what I want to do is reduce the voxel size even smaller now be careful it takes a lot of computational and resources and it takes a lot of RAM to do this so if you are not exactly having a supercomputer there it doesn't take a supercomputer but if you are making this number smaller and smaller it might hang your computer so be careful with this because right now as you can see we have how many 2.15 five million voxels that's a lot of voxels so each time you decrease this number it means there is the number of waxes will increase dramatically alright so finally we have this video a smooth iterations let's increase the radius let's increase the interations to mmm something like this and now we can convert it back to polygons it's called VDB convert shift-enter convert to polygons and as you can see we have this kind of effect that's the our spheres got melded with our wires and they look like I don't know like add some more or less something organic and of course if you increase the where is it now if you increase the sphere it will automatically propagates and it will recompute everything so you will have a good results after all okay next up another extrusion now we'll start with another greed and I'll make it so rows 2 bytes in size one by one because I think it will be enough so what we'll now what we will have now is another curve I'll drop a curve I'll go spacebar 3 to go to France that this is our agreed and this is gonna be our curve so I start drawing the curve mmm sounds like something like this press Enter converted to NURBS should be good move these points a little bit the rights maybe this one to the left just to illustrate a point a bit better now why am i doing this is I'm gonna create another extrusion pxt and this time we'll be extruding through the curve so here's how it's gonna work we increase the divisions let's say 54 for now the distance should be let's preview the curve the distance should be much more sort of like two seems like an okay the spline control let me see oh no my bad a spline shape is curved from second inputs and as you can see yep it does what it says we can now control our extrusion by just wicking the curve which is super useful again which is I'm saying it's all the time but trust me it's super useful okay probably you're a bits like this is all sort of procedural things I don't care a lot about procedural things right where is my box modeling here it is drop another box and let's see we can go to we can go to chef tools to model some things we can go to polygon but maybe I'll just show you how the pie menus work so I goes here and I change from main to poly modeling what it will do is convert my see menu which is happening when you hover over the viewport in the press the C key as you can see I now have edge loop poly barrel public Street all the good stuff okay let's see how it works I first select s and I select as you can see I select just the face I can pull extrude if I um middle Mouse scroll middle mouse key because as you can see what's happening right we can we can have the inset if I drag the middle Mouse as you can see I can modify where our extrusion goes actually I don't want to modify the description anywhere next up you can press the Q if we just selected our poll extrude instead of just saying clicking see and go to poll extrude you can press the Q button which will repeat the previous operation and as you can see we now can pull extra and there you go this is your source of classic poly modeling same goes of course for edgeloop you can create edge loops press ENTER then you press by the way when you press Q on the edge loop it goes in this pola pola split sort of like the knife because it just so happens that the operation of edge loops is an instance of P poly split to right so if you want to repeats the creating additional edge loop it's better to go press the C and press the Pollock Street okay so I can now select I don't know let's say this edge and say poly bevel increase the distance as you can see well this is working right although that is working of course you can go and create a convert to subdivision subdivide and it will to look horrible because we destroyed our edge loops and Houdini crashed beautiful ok I will start it up another hoody thinking okay I forgot to tell you about bullying's I mentioned bullying's previously but we need to talk about balloons a bit more I guess let's give a second who do you need to restart you you all right so with three we go creates another box because boxes are very nice I select this edge and this edge and I select E and do something like this then I select this face and press T and move it downwards and finally what I want to do is actually creates a copy of this thing and to create a copy I will just do it by transformation so well do the transform now we keep this one in mind but this one the uniform scale I will reduce the uniform scale as you can see but I need to scale it's in the apparently in the y axis because it's green I'm not sure both in the z axis no I'm horrible at this what is happening anyway so you're you're looking at this same thing and what is happening right so what is happening is that if we're now boolean and boolean operations they can unify geometry they can intersect geometry or they can cut out one piece of geometry out of another piece of geometry so here's how it goes we take this edited geometry and get it into their geometry a this one that is with different proportions we'll get into geometry B and as you can see the operation is subtract and yep there is a whole and obviously whoops my bad obviously if we now just move around this one as you can see it procedurally and non-destructively just boolean spawn geometry out of another so the interesting part here you get with say poly bevel first and we select I press s3 and oops actually press group here then I start selecting roots a little bit then I'll press ENTER and now it will know that we want to fully bubble just this thing shape round is okay fine by me and now if we have this transformation as you can see it inherited from there and now boolean actually has the UM the beveled cutouts so there we go really really useful okay mmm I'm thinking what's good I might have forgotten possibly let's see let's create another curve go to the right view I don't want to see this I want to see our curve and start drawing something in in my case I had to hold down the shift in double-click because for some reason it didn't want to work another in NURBS I think and if I'm not mistaken it's called sweep some and we have to have at least greed I'm usually getting confused which input this which so okay here we go so basically this is as close to working with CAD data as it goes because you know honestly if you want to work with curves CAD dates like computer assisted design like in Rhino or in more 3d or maybe fusion 360 autocad's something like this you will be better off working with CAD data there it still can do the revolves like you would expect and everything like that but it obviously likes the precision of CAD so you know just something to keep in mind again if you reverse this you can then convert it to polygonal data because previously it was just nerves curves as you can see like 20 vertices 20 points and when we convert it and as well much more polygons and much more all data to work with and you can tweak it here anyway so general rule of thoughts when I am modeling things I'm looking for a way to speed up my modeling like any way I can by the way one of the final things I wanted to show you was just tube let's see what tube now the tube is nothing special I just wanted to show you how to pull a cap now you can create tube with caps but if we're some reason you end up with geometry we'd know with no caps and you can obviously say PC ap for a poly cap and it will copy it for you very useful a lot of options here and like triangles triangle at a fan it actually deforms the thing so you can insert so it's upwards outwards you name it yeah you got it now that we are actually talking about this let's talk a little bit about extruding and working with sub D now if you never have seen sub t in your life honestly this subdivision modeling is modeling through interpolation of the polygonal representation and making it more and more defined with each step what I'm trying to say in them in a non ridiculous way in the human way is that polygons they are vector representations of geometry they're not really like real geometry right so this is what subdivision takes into account when it tries to represent geometry so okay this is not helping at all I will select this face and I'll go to holy modeling here press C pull extrude do it like this then I press Q so it's like this when I press Q again middle Mouse drag middle mouse I'm sorry um again Q okay this looks sort of almost almost fine maybe it's a final thing I wanted to do it like this press E oops I press E and do it like this okay almost kind of like a rocket right so if I now creates it that make it subdivision by sub G subdivide mm okay apparently I had some sort of selection and I delete this selection or press Enter now I subdivide as you can see it becomes kind of smooth obviously right it becomes actually looking like a bullet but it comes with a little bit of a problem so this is where the previously-mentioned poly bevel comes into play I press the tab i press p ve v for poly bevel and sort of here and I will pull a bevel just these edges the edges that need more definition so what we're gonna do is make it Christian for ethic chamfer increase a little bit of distance here's a problem the problem is that it starts sheltering every single edge if I now subdivide this geometry as you can see it nots gets smooth around the diameter around this circular part of it so what we're gonna do is what will restrict the pulley bevel just to the angles that's our harsher then the angles of the tube okay so what we'll do is might enable on the exclusions ignore flat edges and as you can see it stopped evaluating these edges and now it will look just right there you go it looks crisp and sharp here and by the way you can increase the sharpness by making the distance smaller or making the divisions more divisions I think divisions of three is okay in the distance could be smaller and now it looks pretty much perfect it actually looks like a bullet now even more not sure why I mentioned rocket but anyway you get the point okay final thing as I previously mentioned I usually go about modeling things the easiest way possible right because Houdini has so many things to model everything and by the way this is just introductory introductory video to modeling to Houdini I obviously did not cover everything I could but more or less you get the point so what I'm trying to say is where when we will be doing our final projects every single thing that I am showing you in this video it will come into play with a 99% of 99% chance that we will use everything that I have mentioned here so this is useful or any other project in your mind of course because I suppose I covered more or less important things about modeling in Houdini okay what I'm trying to do now is x2 the curve trying to kind of showcase you the way I'm going about things spacebar for to get in the right and if you hold down control by the way and start drawing your curve it will be getting right angles of 45 degrees and snap into position but I don't want stats I want something like this and this okay I will convert sits in the Urban's I think go to space bar one - look it's from the side now I will pull extrude it and it will cause a bit of a problem and I will show you how to combat the problem later on when we will run into the problem now I will transform extra fronts okay and if I move okay nuts in the ex all right it was the y-axis now as you can see we have this kind of angled plane sort of thing and I will look straight again again pulling straight but now I will extrude it let's see our ports sounds about right yep let's see we want to output back otherwise if we don't output back it will not have all the geometry that we need to work with it now next part I want to pull a bevel and you already can see that poly beveling will be a bit problematic because these loops are a bit they're a bit too close to each other and I'm doing this because we will subdivide it oops subdivide it and at the last part of this exercise so if you remember from previous section we resampled our curve as we saw fit whoops oh very simple drop it here and if I enable the points now as you can see that that's a lot of points I want to do it by maximum segments and for sub D the less is better so I would say five segments is okay and interestingly enough it continues to work pretty well as a final thing when we go back to our pole extrude I dropped a poly bevel to give it a bit more definition and now well no actually round will be doing just fine actually when you have the divisions of one it doesn't really matter which one you use solid crease or round because they are all look kind of this it's when you increase the divisions they start looking differently as you can see in a second chamfer looks like this round looks like this so in our case round will be good the divisions of one again will be good so why I'm doing this is I'm going to have you some sort of a plank now if I subdivide this as previous dimensions we will run into a problem that this becomes a little bit too defined as you can see here this angle is a bit to define its looks it doesn't look smooth like we want so again we go to over a poly bevel um now I will not disable the view of some divide I will just go to poly bevel exclude only angles that we don't need which are this one two three four ignore flat edges and voila the poly bevel ignored the edges that we did not need and then we'll just edges that we did need and now it looks perfectly smooth because some divisions and if you want to know how to model with subdivision mmm there are a lot of other tutorials on YouTube that probably will do justice to this technique because I'm not to create this subdivision modular in the world sometimes I use it but usually I don't because I use a CAD for modeling things like that anyway and where is it if we kind of tweak this whole extrusion a bit more increase the divisions here so it kind of becomes more defined as you can see we already have some sort of a plank going on by the way as since we are in Kadeem ii and we do everything procedurally we can go to transform drop transform right after we created the curve we can scale it or we can scale a chest oops just in one axis make it kind of wider and whatnot so now if we create a tube that will where is it with less radius and more Heights something like this I make it they're pulling in with caps move it around okay move it around so if like something like this okay then I would say we can mirror it all right this mirror is not great and it actually is not great at explaining what is happening but obviously you can change the direction again if you hold down control it will do the right angles of 45 now as a final thing if you merge this into one as you can see this is kind of like the start of the torii gates that you can create and if you just create another box let's say here and make it look sort of like this hopefully none gets a lot of heat for making it so irresponsibly because it's not exactly from profane to enlightens on my on my side right here but anyway you get the point right this was created by tubes this was just a box this was extrusion of the curve I real-life using a really love using curves because curves are very very useful and they can you know allow you a lot of flexibility and wick ability so there is whoops there is another project with finished more or less okay looking to regain as you can see it looks much better than what we previously had this is what happens when you spend more than two minutes on on your model and as you can see I actually applied some materials that did some procedural UVs and exported that's into substance painter in the final oops the final result hopefully my computer will not crash this time again final result looks more or less like this that's pretty cool and obviously you can then use it in your short movies or in the game or what have you so yeah there you go it looks kind of scary right but honestly nothing nothing new this is exactly what we were using before like mirror things apply material then we merge everything together and this divide is to make it triangular for game engines and things like that so obviously things come from boxes columns for come from columns it's not hard right it looks like I don't know tarantula right but actually it's basically super easy to do and this it's just more of this that we already have done so don't be afraid to model in Houdini it's also it works polygons are just polygons there's a final thing obviously you can drop a mountain because who doesn't like a mountain I mean I have been talking about mountain so much that I feel like we just should do it or a bit of irregularity right okay anyway there you go a lot of information a lot of things for you to try out to learn if you want to push it a bit harder don't be afraid to go into the modeling try to revolve revolve usually works with just flat plains or curves it will create if you are evolving curves it will create a curved geometry that you will have to convert where they convert no I previously discussed this one so yeah go to polygon clip is something that you would use if you want to destroy half of your geometry then to make a mirror of it oops okay clip as you can see right now a clipping clip is clipping everything that is above but the direction should be actually where should it be and is that access I guess yep here we go and if you mirror that you would have a perfectly mirrored geometry even if you you vidiots as well the u-visa will copy as well so that's the thing clip and mirror really useful for anything that has any sort of thing that can be mirrored from left to right top to bottom you name it yeah play with this it's a lot of information but it's a lot of fun too don't be afraid to make mistakes right you can always go back and fix it because we are in the Hadean ii it's not like you're doing things and like oh my god there is no way I'm fixing this right because you can always go back and fix it so hopefully this was helpful if it feels intimidating don't feel the pressure to learn everything in how much is that in a 1 hour 2 hours it's not working like that you will not even remember every single note in one hour so don't pressure yourself or overestimate your abilities to remember everything it's okay to fail here and there no one will judge it's fine so yeah you have a nice day if you like what you see press the like button if you want to see more and get to that final project that I keep mentioning but we are getting there okay I think we're almost there so there we go subdivision pool gravel extruding curves bully ins crashing Houdini we need at all so have fun see you later and good bye [Music]

Channel: Arise.Works

Views: 12,324

Rating: 4.9685864 out of 5

Keywords: houdini, tutorial, free course, vops, getting started, beginner, intro, how to, environment, modeling, bevel, polywire, curve, resample, extrude, procedural, nurbs

Id: x_HBCQNwn8I

Length: 43min 52sec (2632 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 16 2020