Modeling Columns, Procedural Selections & Groups – Getting Started with Houdini ep. 5

hello welcome back to getting started with Houdini this is episode 5 and in this section we'll learn how to procedurally select how to drive those procedural selections to our geometry operations and we will start with procedurally selecting poly extrude at 4 Pole extruding things then we will learn how to procedurally bevel the intersected geometry that gets created on the fly again another procedural thing to learn then we will discuss what's group by range is oops what group by range is how to invert selections of the group by range how to use that for blasting and pull extruding things and there's a final projects a little bit something more interesting we will learn how to model this these columns how to make this kind of like and should Rome setup using basic geometry operations procedural selections and it will be surprisingly easy so let's get started hello welcome back this is a rice box and this is episode 5 of getting started with Houdini and in this section we will talk about groups how to make procedural selections and talk about the race app and other interesting things and we will be modeling a column and we look something like what will be taking the top part from here make it with a procedural beveling we will take the middle part from here and you know solve a bit of a couple of things along the way now actually modeling the column theme Houdini will be surprisingly easy because we will be utilizing selections and we will be doing some procedural selections along the way so first let's talk about groups now groups are it sounds kind of funny or funky but actually groups are surprisingly powerful in Kadena so let's let's start agreed so we have the and agreed and as you can see we have size 10 by 10 and now if I want to select something now if I want to select something in the viewport I just press s start dragging around and start typing group ship enter and there we go we have the base group it has been selected the numbers of the faces which we can show by pressing this button as you can see number 18 is here and as you can see we have the number 18 so then we have 40 5 6 7 8 anything from 45 to 48 has been selected of course you can edit this if we delete these numbers and press Enter as you can see only from 45 to 48 has been selected now this is all good and such right but we have talked about keeping my normals and include by edges will calculate the difference of curvature of edges but now I want to talk about the keeping in bounding regions which is again a very powerful way of selecting things as you can see we have now a box that we can edit and if we just start dragging the box around it will procedurally select everything that is inside the box we can enable the partially selected or just fully contained inside the box as you can see whenever we cross these edges it gets fully selected as you can see otherwise anything that has been able to partially inside will be get will be getting selected as well now what is interesting about this setup is that if we increase the rows and the columns it will still work as a previous studied oops we can do the bounding box we can do the bounding sphere as well and what is interesting about this is if we go to poly extrude after that and remember this group is named group one group one as well we can actually rename it to anything we want and we can even name it dollar OS it means if we rename something here it will inherit the name right now it's called Group one but if we name it here say sphere selection it will be named dollar OS it will be named sphere selection here as well so before I go to our poll extrude and select the sphere selection and increase the distance voila everything that was in the sphere gets selected which is super useful now obviously if you start changing this thing around as you can see it it almost like looks is a kindergarten motion graphics setup but it kind of does look like that doesn't it okay so next up after the bounding sphere we can include things by bouncing objects and it will say that it will include points or vertices only so anyway we creates a fonts and we write something amazing like a race right with then politics truth so it's actually becomes geometry right then I want to transform it because again hold it down control because our grid is horizontally lines and this was aligned more or less vertically so this is what we get I want to make it bigger and if I connect it here as you can see nothing works surprise right but as you might have already guessed Houdini doesn't assume anything unless you tell it to do anything that you want so as it says like it includes points or vertices only so what we're gonna do is convert the cube type two points and there you have it now of course this brings another problem because poly extrude only works with primitives which you know which are phases and polygons in our case so what we're going to do now first of all I want to increase the resolution of the grid so we have like our selection and then we can group promotes and actually we can promote group from points to primitives and the group will be neens sphere selection now in our case it will not be sphere selection we now font selection okay just to leave this make the phone selection and unsurprisingly it worked so we converted our group from points here two primitives here because these are these are different entities within Houdini so we could any pays a lot of attention to the selection speed attributes or just grouping whether it points vertices so if something doesn't work it is probably because you forgot to change your grouping selection attribute selection whichever it is now I want to subdivide this create a little bit more and finally we go to our pole extrude and select our font selection and it works as well so if we type something else like hello it should rebuild and voila everything works perfectly great there is another I mean there are a lot of instances where they should work and there is another instance sorry where it can be helpful so let's talk about a procedural a procedural extraction of the intersecting bouillon edges okay let's create a box and let's create a cylinder which include Eenie is named tube maybe a little bit higher okay first we make the tube as a polygon second we enable the caps because otherwise it will be not a watertight geometry so this might cause a little bit of problem in boolean but never minds okay we create a boolean and what I want to do now is first let's see what it does it's subtracted as you can see we subtracted tube out of box nothing new here we already have done this but in our case let's start with Union in first now now they have a edge that they share which is indicated by the screen and if we go and enable the output edge groups which will be a B seams which means the seams that are created after we unions box with our two in our case I enable this and it's now called a be seams so how does this help us well I go to poly level shift enter and if I now select the a B seems increase the distance as you can see the geometry the beveling understands that we want to select only that and let's make it round and we have kind of perfect perfect connection between our two geometry elements it will it will work even if we subtract as you can see it works as well now tube is just sir a tube is just for example right if we move it here everything reveals itself is it's like a dream for our crease right you can already see that for example if you go to our babbling Crysta divisions make the profile via the ramp and do something like this you can see that we can create things that maybe for example may be used in the moldings of the Artemis scenarios so again this is done automatically if I were to add more columns it will recompute as well it can create like this geometry the geometry you can see the power of this already right so yeah obviously if we had let's say this will be a little bit smaller and we create another transform I alt slap dragged here move it over here and instead of bullying in just one elements we merge two elements like this we have two boolean x' I will move this away a little bit okay fix normals there you go boom perfect also it will work if we just intersect the geometry as well so now let's see intersects there you go this looks like bullets or some sort of launching elements for I don't know [Music] war themed video game right and the shutter of course as well it just creates the shattered intersections without actually deleting the geometry that's created to shatter so again magically everything works on its own it just moves around without you needing to change anything which is perfect okay let's use these knowledge and creates a column oops we'll start with a tube and this tube will be be a polygon and let's just let's just show these two heights will be Anna now let's see six seven ten let's say ten okay we will create a box and this box will be moved on top of this column but what we'll do it procedurally this time so how we're gonna do this we know this height right so if we move box to the half of the height like let's say five as you can see oops let make it exactly five as we can see this box fits perfectly here for some reason okay there we go it fits fits perfectly right actually I don't want the box I want another tube anyway the box it could be on the bottom but for now we will use another cube okay now let we'll figure it out that we want the tube as well as everything else moved to the half of the height of our tube that we are initially having as our column we can go to our height right click copy parameter then in the center we can right click paste relative reference and as you can see it says channel tube to height / - voila it's automatically goes to the heights to the half of the height of our - now what does it give us if we now take the height our top elements of the column moves with it automatically if I just left click here as you can see it's 5 if I make it somewhere around 8 you can see it's half of that value so this is super perfect right we can then mirror this one mirror and the mirror should look first of all let's connect it and see what we get and we should move it downwards as you can see it's a perfect mirror of this tube and they both stay in sync which is very useful okay next up do not enable I do not forget to enable the endcaps I want the radius be slightly slightly bigger like this column's I don't know let's say 42 now here in our colony let's let's start actually to name it let's say this is cap this is column buddy so let's drop a group group ops group by range we have not discussed route by range just yet because we were discussing selections by the group so group by range is super powerful another super powerful grouping right so what it does is we can for example let's let's discuss on the grid first create the copy of this one we it's for a better visualization okay so we can select each one of two for example or each one of three each one o for each one a five six seven you name it so you you increase the number of number of actual faces that we have you can see that we can immediately create some sort of patterns using this way of selecting things now this is useful next up we can select everything except for first let's say ten and the last ten as you can see we can enable the view of numbers let's say 15 by 15 so the numbers are a relatively low as you can see already that this is very procedural because I changed the amounts of the rows in n columns in our grid and it automatically selected everything except for first two and the last two okay what can we do with this we can group combine and we can select everything that was it's called Group wrench to so everything that was in Group range no actually let's rename this group our new selection so it would we understand what we are working with so our inner selection is equals all but so that way we can select everything but the first ten from the from the start and from the end and we can invert that selection using the group combined also there is a there is a no that's called blast and as you can see we can blast everything or blast everything non selected as you can see this is how you procedurally deletes the geometry also if let's say we had select each of P for like this and select our our new selection group as you can see we can delete those faces as well in a people extra days we have some sort of irregular extruded geometry as well so there you go we now understand how group by range works let's let's move this away let's move this away let's get back to our columns all right so this is why I was showing all of this so you understand that if we now select each every second selection we can Dan poly extrude by the way keep in mind that we just selected primitives and keep in mind we just selected primitives so Pollock's true it will work because it works with primitives now let's rename this group for group for extrusion and we select that group for extrusion to extrude as the name suggests and as you can see you can christine's and all a bit Christa's distance a little bit we now procedurally select every second column piece and extrude it inwards let's make the inset a little bit bigger now if we now tweak the number of columns as you can see by the way let's make it an even number that can be divided by two because we are selecting every second one and this is how we creates the main body of our column the main column piece vertical one um obviously we can tweak the inset we can tweak the distance a little bit so it looks a bit better then we probably bevel the results with small small small distance so it doesn't get destroyed or anything then we drop down to normal to fix the normal just in case press Shift W to see it without the showcasing of the wireframe of our topology again shape W to show topology or high topology or you can switch it using here smooth shaded smooth wire shaded that's basically oops basically the same thing okay now that we have this much let's see what we can do I think round should be a slightly bigger so it kind of looks a bit a bit smoother okay this looks okay next up let's work with our caps okay as a matter of fact I think we can oops we can increase this amount by a little bit so we type here plus 0.1 no 0.3 yeah this looks this looks better now if we merge this together you can now already see that we have something almost representing our columns now this turned black and this remains gray because we have normals here but we did not have normals here actually if you middle mouse click or just click here it says mismatch for example normals you put abnormals here it will be good to go so next up what I'm gonna do is before we do all the normals and merging I think we could pull it strewed just one face which faces exactly on the which is let's let's look at our cheat sheet which look exactly at the bottom so first we have to make a group discussed this previously but I think it's okay if we discussed this again again we have to find all the faces with normals looking exactly downwards and this means like if I deselect everything as you can see it looks everything at positive z-axis now where is that axis as you can see blue is that axis and positive direction of the z axis goes in our case from left to right like this from left to right from left to right and everything that looks from left to right in the normals gets selected we want things that look downwards in our case that's the y-axis and to find everything that looks downwards it's negative 1 here 0 basically we are handwriting the normals here okay if it were one it will be choosing the face at looking upwards so I could just go press s press 4 press select press group but this will be manual selection this one is a procedural one because no matter what we do with our to like change the number of columns it doesn't care about the number of primitives but it actually cares only about the normal so they're primitives this is why the procedural selections well in our case works for us because we can tweak everything on the fly ok so I will make it the height much smaller and I will tweak everything using the polar extrusion it oops I forgot that we should only select this one we will name this group one Bergstrom pillar or is it cap its cap oops let's call it the cap all right we select this group and only this one get it gets extruded I'm not sure oops okay I forgot to enable the visualization all right in said I don't think we will need it that much we'll need a lot of divisions though and the outputs in France and back will be useful and the thickness ramp is where we will be drawing our actual elements of our column I'm not sure if it's looking all that right but it's it's almost okay it's looking almost okay let's see how it looks here we should move it upwards to bits the initial of our cap okay by the way even if you have some relative references you can move it using the middle mouse button it will work without any problem now as far as I can tell we can use some more precision in our pole extrusion and it will take a little bit of time I apologize for making it's not exactly super interesting but just you know the grunt work is never all that beautiful oh hey sexually looks a little bit bitter like this you can tweak the value on the bottom as well no something like that should work pretty well I think okay I think if we increase the divisions a little bit more it will be slightly more defined and there we go by the way since we had the mirror in our case that works like just copying everything that wasn't top to the bottom it copied our well column pretty much perfectly okay as a final thing as per usual instead of drawing the curve I want to copy it on the line and I will show you another selection accusing the lines now we will just keep this in mind oh and by the way this is not one geometry as we speak this is to give three different pieces of geometry so what I want to do now is boolean it so it is unions together so these edges are actually not just one geometry penetrating another geometry but actually they're one piece of one geometry okay and since we already know that we can select the a B seams which are indicated by Iowa green elements what I'm gonna do now is actually I enabled the output back I don't want the output back so now that we have only these seams we can pull the bevel those as well so it looks a bit more cohesive and it says a B seems new and we select this crew baby seems new and distance increased slightly like this the finally drop a normal or you can drop not normal you can just drop and no it will work perfectly so we have our column looking all good and ready for action okay I wanted to copy these to the line and the line length will be let's say 20 and the points will be 10 10 sounds like it like a good number and we transform it's rotated in the x axis by 90 and now we see if I enable the number of number of points we will see that we have perfectly aligned line with ten points and if we now copy two points required geometry required copies as you can see if we make the line a bit longer perfect perfect so as a final thing we can create another copy of these we will create another line oops line drop it in let's see how it's a lot how it is arranged and again transform rotate by 90 degrees in the x axis and the y-axis seems like oh maybe it's an easy tasks okay Sarah okay we got this length would be lets say a nano 25 right and if we copy these again copy two points the results of copies of points will be copying to this line you can see we have a nice procedural setup of copying things to other things and obviously we can tweak the lengths and we can tweak the numbers of copies by just reducing the number of copies so this is really useful and it's all takes not a lot of energy it just takes in our case the twelve kilobytes so there we go as a final thing we can create a greed let's see where it is okay accidentally I think we moved a little bit far away anyway I will enable a breed I will make it signs like hundred by hundred oops my bad something like that should work pretty well and as we discussed previously we can fully bevel the points and then we can pull the extrude oops we extrude the individual elements and if we probably bevel our points on our floor let's say that these turns increase this a little bit something like this jumperer actually I like how round looks as well so let's skip it as a round this is very odd it conflicts a little bit anyway so we go to a pole extrude making individual elements extrude and inset just a tiny bits drop in normal to fix the shading decrease the cost bangle let's see how it looks all together we're married yet yesterday's here to that and it's almost perfect obviously we have to transform our columns to the designated place where we need them and by the way if you are transforming the viewport and holding down shift it will increase the accuracy of transformation dramatically okay this this looks perfect so there you go we have the warps it has this odd rotation is it just me or does it have this odd rotation okay I think I think our line is a bit messed up yep we have to rotate it by 90 degrees exactly oh that was close okay we translate this one so it's aligns perfectly I'll tweak it a little bit here some reason my mouse today is all over the place I apologize in advance okay you enable good-looking lightning and if we enable something like the let's say environment line just left-click and we have our elements set up I'll just drag and drop make the surface really rough and light no this is a bit too much okay so the there you go I don't like how it looks our shaders messed everything up anyway so this is our columns and as you can see it wasn't that hard right if I didn't make all the mistakes which were ridiculous it will be even faster but there we go we looked at how to create procedural selections and select those selections to extrude then we looked at beveling the intersections of the pullian's then we looked at more assets we looked at procedural selecting by range and combined and as a final thing we learned how to quickly and easily model in okay-looking column of course if you spend like not 10 minutes on it but let's say 11 minutes it could be 10% looking better so sky's the limit for to you guys hopefully this was useful again is it is very fast it is very easy to model anything that has repetitions in Houdini so play with is play with extrusions beveling how they look obviously learn the how to procedurally select group and link the groupings and selections and make those selections in the beveling extrusion calculate obviously this works everywhere not just for traveling or extrusions but in our case we were using this to model our columns so there you go hopefully this was useful groups are like I said in the beginning they are surprisingly they're surprisingly powerful and surprisingly they make your life so much easier for well procedural selections there we go if you like what you see press the like button if you don't want to miss anything that is coming you know further down the line and press the subscribe button leave your ideas and suggestions in the comment section below and have fun and I hope you learn something new have a great day and hope to see you later [Music]

Channel: Arise.Works

Views: 6,522

Rating: 4.984375 out of 5

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

Id: WRuD3PIP1zM

Length: 38min 10sec (2290 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020