Natural Destruction | David Adan | Houdini HIVE Worldwide

[Music] all right next up we've got David again welcome David thank you thank you nice to be here look at this little background on yourself and your experience with Houdini sure sure well I started with computer graphics early on I got hooked with computers and graphic programs since high school and after that I started using professionally some 3d software so I started as a generalist doing mainly television work a lot of illustration and some multimedia and since I lived in a small city in Mexico that wasn't that much production especially television which I really liked so I started getting architectural visualization work because there was a huge architectural boom so a lot of construction on hotels restaurants and I did a lot of visualization and I I continued with that for almost six years and after a while I really wanted to go back to production and specially the effects I really liked film I think deep down I really knew I wanted to do the effects for film so I started working on that route again and at some point I started hearing a lot about Houdini and there was a huge bus and I just downloaded the educational version and I really liked it I started studying was kind of difficult at first but after that it was just really fun and really flexible I think I really liked that and I was also doing a lot of freelance work so it really helped me to have everything in one single package and start doing small stuff television local stuff some national television and eventually I got into a big studio in Mexico City Orly movie effects and I think my first film there was Jumanji welcome to the jungle so I started using Houdini for VFX it's been Houdini all all for me from that from that day so I really loved it it's my current leads my main to excellent so what's your presentation gonna be about so the presentation will be about natural destruction so initially I thought about its destruction because Houdini is very I think it's known for for the really body dynamics and valium and all that stuff but then I kind of read it was not only about destroying things but also creating things for destruction and how destroying things make makes your creativity like live and go so I will also talk about creating stuff procedurally and some were clones to really use the strengths of who they need to to go through the entire pipeline I think I find interesting about destruction is that is that you need to understand the physics you need to understand the construction of materials in order to destroy them all correct correct and that's an interesting part because every time that I'm going into a scene it may be simple or complex I go first through the process of how this thing would be created and how would it Bend how that would crack with it just shatter and this initial creation process and creative process helps me a lot to create the other destruction excellent we're looking forward to it let's jump in okay thank you very much and hope you enjoy it hello and thank you very much for being here with me in this presentation natural destruction in Houdini first of all I'd like to say a huge thanks to Alan Mackay whom I consider my mentor and friend and probably I won't be here without his help and all his teachings I would also like to say thank you to savage Alessi whom I consider my Houdini mentor and also huge thanks to Alexandre Islay who is my head of department and who usually gets me out of trouble when vixx coding gets very tough or when I get stuck with any gaffer or pipeline situations so that being said let's get started first of all I'd like to present myself usually when I speak to someone in the VFX industry I'm very curious about how they got there how they learned or in general know a little bit of their background so me I started as a 3d generalist mainly doing local television commercials I was always passionate about 3d and animation so I started learning by myself and professionally I did a lot of multimedia a lot of illustration eventually I got into architecture because I lived in a small city in Mexico and really television work was not that much so there was a lot of architecture going on and I had the chance to do a lot of visualization for restaurants for hotels and I started to get noticed in this industry so eventually I got the chance to travel to Qatar where I worked for almost six years doing visualization but I think that since I started learning 3d deep down I always hoped to get into the film industry so I started to look for a job specifically in the industry and had a chance to find work as a compositing artist in a small studio in Mexico City called flip book studio where I did mainly work for national television a few Netflix shows and I started practicing Houdini a lot I really loved the package and I really liked the flexibility and the possibilities that it opened to me so I started studying a lot and eventually I had the chance to work in all in VFX which is a very big studio in Mexico City and there I started again as a comp artist but eventually made my way working with effects and nowadays Houdini is my main tool and I'm doing full time for films and television so currently I'm working in cinah site Montreal as a leader of xtd and mainly of course working in films some television shows and some of the projects I've been involved in since I've started working in films our Godzilla king of monsters Jumanji welcome to the jungle terminator Dark Fae Angel has fallen Asura American Gods lost in space and a few other Netflix shows so let's get started with a presentation so here are the topics we're going to be speaking of today first of all I'm going to talk about the problem-solving approach and this is something very personal this is how I try to think in order to solve a problem specifically a VFX problem we will also talk about procedural modeling tools and how hd8 creation can help you a lot in streamline your workflow we will also talk about generating asset variations with top networks this is very useful especially when you're creating a huge amount of assets in the way I will talk about some very useful hidden gems that sometimes we just lose sight of and the meat of the presentation will be centered on different techniques for simulating natural destruction specifically volume procedural animation wire solver bullet solver and these are not all the techniques that can be used they are just the ones that I explored in some specific projects I'll talk about them in a moment and lastly we'll talk about handling large amounts of data that this is a very common thing when working with nature so in general trees bushes grass flowers all these natural phenomena really require a lot of data to be generated and handled so real quick why I chose this topic first of all nature is very beautiful of course but it's one of the most complex things to simulate and to replicate and it's not very common to see tutorials or information about this and still it's a common thing that we get in production so we usually have in a set extension some kind of tree or a bush or at some points interaction with this kind of objects and I think it's very to have this kind of knowledge in your arsenal so one of the very interesting project I was involved in a few years ago was Godzilla king of monsters we're all in VFX was in charge of creating a few time lapses of natural growing through decaying cities and this involved a huge amount of nature trees plants growing buildings collapsing with all this vegetation and we had a very small amount of time so we had to find a way to very quickly not only create all these assets but then destroy them in a convincing way and initially we thought that this being a time lapse the animation wouldn't be that complex but I think it turned out to be the other way around since we had to convey a huge amount of years going by we needed to create plants that grew that died that withered and all this happening very quickly so all these elements had to be present even if you weren't able to pick them up in a very obvious way so let me show you the final result and the breakdown of the shot this specific shot is in Las Vegas and then we will move on with the technical stuff and I'll be diving into Houdini to show you some very similar setups so there you could see some of the trees growing the vines creeping onto the buildings the vines collapsing with the building's themselves some of the trees die some are growing then bending or withering so it was a quite complex scene and overall I think we did a great job not only because of the very small amount of time we had but also the result we really liked and it was a very fun project to be in so a huge shout out to the Olin VFX team very talented and very experienced team so real quick before we dive into Houdini I will talk about my personal problem solving approach and again this is something that I try to do in every single project you may find different ways of doing it but I'll try to quickly explain my approach so first of all I analyze what we want to achieve and this may seem a bit obvious but sometimes we overlook certain details especially with nature so I usually start with the generic problem and then try to break it down into smaller pieces so let's say we want to break a tree probably have it Bend then break and then crash into the ground so that would be the more general task but I would also start to think in more specific problems for example if the branches are bending if the leaves are detaching or if they have their own specific movement and then I would start to gather reference for example if I need to break a specific tree or if I need to animate it in a specific way so the more reference you can gather the better and it can be pictures it can be videos so now I'm going to show you a few videos that I gathered for bending trees falling trees this is more specific for larger objects this is a very good reference for the bending of the branches all the leaves flying the debris the branches smashing onto the ground another very nice reference of the trees bending with the wind all the leaves again although they breathe that giant tree falling to the ground so all this reference is very important and very useful for us so once we've gathered all this reference and we've analyzed a problem what I usually do is try to take on to consideration how much time I'm going to have to create this effect and how much detail I will be able to put into the animation or the effect and this is a very simplistic way to portray it but in every single project that you will be involved in you will have to balance and to play with how much time you can put into the effects so next I would try to identify every possible obstacle that could arise be it lack of software lack of knowledge in a certain aspect of the software probably time constraints or budget constraints so the earlier you can identify all these obstacles the earlier you can address them next comes R&D and this is very important and a very essential part of the process so usually here I would start to think okay what technique I can use to probably make the breaking or the bending and I start trying different possibilities so I would try valium solver and see how that looks then probably try a wire solver and compare both results then go into rigid bodies etc etc then the implementation so once I've decided what route to take work in the implementation of the effects to full detail and lastly comes iteration and especially when you're doing simulations it's very important to have time to iterate and to try different settings and the more iterations you have the better the effect will look okay so now let's dive into Houdini so first of all I will show you a few procedural modeling tools that I've created I will also explain how to generate several variations of models very quickly using tops networks and I will also explain how to handle external 3d models in this case SpeedTree models or probably trees from libraries that you have bought or that you acquired so even before you start destroying you need to create something and it is very important this process of thinking how I'm going to break this object or how I'm going to destroy it and in this sense how I'm going to build it so Houdini I think excels in creating procedural geometry and especially geometry that will be prepared for this destruction or the following simulations and of course you can always use existing 3d geometry but the better you prepare this geometry the faster you will be able to create or to dive into your simulations and the better the results will be so I'm going to show you this asset that I created and it's a simple tree creator so normally I would start by creating the trunk of the tree and then think of the shape by adding branches so here I can add secondary branches or level 2 level 3 branches and then I can go beyond that by adding more detail and on each branch level I can create twigs and on these twigs I can create leaves so the advantage of creating the own asset is that first of all you can animate all these parameters also the geometry will very well-suited in this case it is watertight I can change the level of detail so I'll turn off of you of these elements so of course I can add materials I can change colors here just for the viewports or even these colors can help me with the materials say for example the leaves can have a gradient and have the material inherit this color and here I can easily change every single aspect of course the height the number of branches and this is something that you will usually never have in pre-built models so of course they may have an extreme amount of detail and textures but you will have only one tree and it probably comes with a huge amount of Polly's and you're stuck with that you need to work with what you have and here you can very easily change an art direct every single aspect of the tree I also have a twig creator so this is a seemingly simple tool it's based on L system I think L systems are one of those overlooked tools that it can be very useful so I can start with a specific tree or twig type and then build from there and a very nice feature of the L system is that it can be easily animated for example I can change the generations and I will have more and more complex and more detailed objects of course I could also change other aspects of the shape for example the radius the level of subdivisions and I could also add additional noise and as you can see the possibilities are limitless so once you have your tool you can really play and art direct all these aspects and it seems that you will have to invest a lot of time in the tool but once the tool is there you can change it and you can use it again and again in different projects and in different situations so once you have your tool you can pack it into an HD a and publish it for other artists to use now I'm going to show you a very powerful way of creating variations so usually if you're doing a forest if you're doing a jungle any type of environment will have a huge amount of different assets so even if you have one single type of tree in a garden or in a forest you will want different shapes for that tree and this is where top networks comes in very handy so here I have my asset again so as you saw earlier I could change the shape the amount of branches how they Bend how they twist and what I have done here to the right is I have created a top network so I will dive into the top Network and in here I created a wedge node so what the wedge note does is it will create an attribute and this attribute can have several values in this case I'm using values from five to ten and this parameter here wedge count will define how many variations of this range will be created so let me cook this note I can shift V to cook or process this note and you will notice now we have these three dots and if I click on each of these dots I will get a different result so what is this attribute changing I will go back to my asset here and here under the trunk I have a parameter called bend and notice here I have the name of this attribute wedge Bend so this value the angle will be replaced with the values that are being generated with this wedge so let me show you I'll disconnected for a moment and change this angle so this is what I'm doing with a wedge so I will undo to get back to my attribute and again dive into that top net and here you can clearly see each time that our variation of the tree is generated the band goes from 5 to 20 and since I'm using a value of 3 the result will be a tree with an angle of 5 then a tree with an angle of 10 degrees and finally a tree with an angle of 20 degrees so after that I am wedging our noise offset so let me cook this node again shift V to cook so now I have my three variations of the noise then each variation will have a variation in Bend so this will yield nine different trees so as you can see this can very fast and it can very easily grow exponentially again I'm creating a wedge just below that will change the position of each branch so let me cook this one too and now I will have a huge amount of variations 27 to be exact and each one will have different positions of the branches different bending different noise finally I am cashing all these results so this note is similar to the top-level rough geometry node it will cache everything that's being processed upstream and then I can read those caches here with a single read file so I added this attribute just to quickly go between all these generated trees and probably you can decide that you don't like one of these versions and you can delete it and recache and change your wedging parameters so as you can see the possibilities will start to grow and you can real quick generate a huge amount of variations so in this case we will have 27 or yeah 27 variations of trees and of course you could spawn different variations for different kinds of trees and this can be very powerful finally I will show you how I handled speed tree models and of course many times you will want this very detailed kind of models here I'm just bringing in the tree I'm separating the trunk from the rest of the elements so here I have the twigs and then I separated the leaves and mainly the things that you want to be aware of is whether the geometry is closed for example make sure that you cap the ends of the trunks and also probably you may need to change the poly count probably optimize the leaves or probably bring down the poly count on the branches or twigs but in general once you have the model ready the treatment for the animation and the simulation will be similar or practically the same so regarding the actual simulation for Destruction again Houdini has a huge amount of tools and one thing that I really like about the software is that every single artist will have a different approach to the problem and you can choose to use a procedural method or probably a valium solver or while solver each one will have its pros and it's cons and as long as the result is what you're looking for and it's conveying your idea it doesn't really matter what technique you use but what I usually try to do is go from simple to complex so let's say we have an animation of a tree and you don't need that much detail I would try to resolve it procedurally or with modifiers that are they're just created and at hand and only if I need much detail I would go into simulation or more complex solutions so I will show you an example where I used a combination of procedural animation and wire solvers to create a convincing bamboo grove so again here is our bamboo model and what I usually try to do is separate each task for example create an overall animation or simulation and then generate a secondary simulation for other details so let start with the trunk in this case I only wanted a very simple swaying of the trunk so I added a bend and create a very subtle animation using a sine function so all I had to do is create a simple expression here and as long as I play the animation the tree would be bending from left to right so that is very straightforward and very effective now regarding the twigs I separated the elements here I merge them with a few other tweaks that were separated from the trunk and then here I'm creating a very simple skeleton made with lines then replicating the bend that we had in the tree in the trunk so it was as simple as copying and pasting this modifier and then I'm feeding this very simple animation to a wire solver so if I dive into the top Network you will notice that the actual simulation is very simple I am only attaching this first point of the twig to the motion of the trunk and here with a wire solver and some simple gravity I'm having this twigs sway and bounce with the gravity and the air so you could add noise you could add turbulence some wind in this case I wanted something very subtle so I decided to turn off all additional forces and only the swaying and the gravity are doing the rest so here I'm caching the result of the simulation I added some color just to clearly differentiate the tricks from the trunk and regarding the leaves again here I'm isolating the trees element or sorry the leaves what I'm doing here is on each leaf I'm creating a gradient that goes from black to white and this will help me to add some noise and multiply this noise by the color of each point so again this will be procedural animation I'm creating a rest position and all these leaves will follow the animation of the twigs with a point the form so very simple solution this has no simulation I'm only using the animation that's been cached to drive with this point the former the rest of the geometry and here I'm adding the noise so again a very simple expression driven by time that's changing the offset of the noise so I will increase the amplitude so that way we can appreciate this more clearly so this will yield a much more complex animation and still I'm using very simple tools and notice how everything is processing very fast and in the end with all the elements combined we'll have a finished animation okay so what I did next was I generated a redshift proxy and this is just because I was rendering with redshift but if you're rendering with mantra you can always pack the object and the result would be the same this will let us instance this object a huge amount of times without having a huge impact on memory so let me turn this individual tree off and here I have an INT an instance ER and i'm instance thing i don't know it's a huge amount of trees let me see how how many trees we have so here I have 800 trees but what I did afterwards is I created three different variations of the bamboo and instanced each variation another 800 times so here we have roughly 2500 or so trees and since we're instancing a proxy even in the viewport we will be able to handle this information so let me look through the camera and I'll show you a quick flip book that I generated so one thing I really like about the instance err is that although you're seeing most of the bounding boxes you can also see a few of these instances and this gives you a very clear idea of the proportion of the trees how they're moving the speed of that animation so again we're handling a huge amount of trees in this shot and I will show you the final result so this is a final render and again in this case the animation is very subtle but it's enough to give life to the trees and make it much more natural next I'm going to show you how this dandelion was animated with vellum solver so first we have a very simple wind making the flower bend and sway and then the wind is increased and all the individual seeds are breaking off and flying through the air and one thing I really like about the vellum salah is it's usually very fast to set up and it's also very fast processing a lot of objects and in this case we have a very natural bending and flying of the individual seeds so let's take a look at the same as you imagine the scene is not very complex so this is the geometry everything was modeled with in Houdini so this is the stem to create the animation I added a simple line I bend it just to follow the shape of the geometry then I pinned the bottom point added some volume here constraints and then feed that to a volume solver and this is just adding wind super simple setup but it will give me a very nice bending and very nice motion of the stem so below I'm cashing this animation so with the result of this line I'm point deforming the geometry then I'm cashing this animation so there's the base now I'm generating some areas where I'm going to scatter the seeds here on copying the individual elements and again feeding this into a volume constraint and a volume solver again I cashed the result of the simulation and this is a different approach what I decided is to simulate only the lines and afterwards I'm generating the model of each of the seeds so I'm creating a for each loop that is generating the geometry so let me show you with a single iteration just to make this faster so here I have the simulated line from the volume solver then I'm creating some depth or some thickness with a poly wire I'm extruding some pieces adding a subdivide and then looping through every single element and this is creating the entire geometry so finally what I did is merge both geometries together to have the final result for rendering so I really liked this approach because it gave me the flexibility to handle only simple lines very quickly have some feedback on the animation and then worry about the colors the actual geometry the shape of the seeds and this made it easy for me to generate a huge amount of iterations and very quickly decide what I liked the most so finally I want to talk about rigid body dynamics and in my opinion the bullet solver is one of the most powerful tools to create destruction and even if it's organic and natural destruction as this where the bullets over would seem somehow awkward or or probably wouldn't be your first choice one thing that I really like about the solar is it can handle a huge amount of objects and it's very flexible in terms of how you want to control specific aspects of the simulation for example you can create different groups of constraints and change the flexibility of each constraint you can make the constraints break with more or less strength in different areas of the geometry and I personally really like the solver and I'm very comfortable using it so for this type of natural destruction soft constraints can be very useful and can be very convincing and the way how the geometry moves and reacts to forces so let me show you real quick what I want to achieve so this is our detailed model and I'm adding some wind again it's a wind that's increasing every time and eventually that trunk will break and it will snap but I wanted it to bend so if you remember the references they slowly fall down it's not like a very impactful thing first the wood will break and splinter and then it can slowly fall down and bounce so I want to feel that flexibility of the branches and that kind of slow reaction to a forces so let's see how this scene was built again I'm starting here with a tree generator and I'm separating two elements again the trunk and the branches and first of all I want to show you how I'm splintering the wood so this is a very nice trick I'm transforming the tree I'm shrinking it down then I'm scattering some points exactly where I want the tree to splinter and this will also help me define an area where the constraints will break then I create the typical Voronoi note and I'm inverting back the transforms of this note so I'm copying this value the scale and channel referencing to this other transform and here's a healing option invert transformation so really you don't need to do the math you just click on this option and you'll have your tree back to its original scale now what this will do is we'll create a very nice splinter look so here you notice it's not just your simple cell shape this is much more organic and then I will feed this into the constraints so first I will merge it with the branches and create the constraints for my rigid body dynamics simulation so everything fairly standard here I'm creating a rest position for the geometry I'm packing the pieces or the fragments and then I'm creating a group called inactive I'm selecting the lower points of the geometry and setting the active attribute to one for every single point in the geometry and then converting this value to zero to the inactive group that I created up here so what this will do is will prevent the lower part of the tree to be blown with the wind or pushed away with collision geometry and just allow the upper part two bend or break so here to the right as I mentioned I'm creating the constraints then I'm creating a group of the constraints that will be breakable the rest of the constraints won't be able to break I'm setting some stiffness parameters and then I'm feeding this to object the fragments and the constraints to the top Network so let's dive into a network so pretty standard stuff here I have a turbulent force just to make the trees sway a bit then this animated wind to push it back and forth interact force and down here all the magic is happening I'm creating a constraint Network and I'm attaching bullet soft constraint relationship so this is a soft constraint that will allow the tree to bend so usually a hard constraint won't have this bending look to it it will just break when it reaches the break point but the soft constraints will somehow allow some play in some motion and will look much more natural so here to the right I'm adding a sub solver that is telling the constraint it's generating a limit of force that the constraint can handle so once the torque is over 1500 the constraint will break and surely the tree will fall so let's take a look at the cached simulation and you'll notice how we have this individual motion on the branches of course we have the bending of the tree and all this is due to this soft constraints it's looking very nice so now let's put all this knowledge in a much more complex simulation so what I will do is scatter a bunch of this trees so remember I showed you we cashed a few trees I will open that seam so here I have my caches all the different variations that were generated in the top Network and then I'm scattering all these variations into a very simple forest so here I have a grid I scattered a few points and copy the 27 variations of trees so every single tree on the forest will be different so that's really cool and then as usual I will separate the trunk from the branches and as we did earlier I will fragment the trunks with this Voronoi fracture scale them back up and here with the exploded view we can check the result so I usually like to add this exploded view just to have a clear idea of how the fragments are here of course for demoing purposes I don't have that much pieces but the more pieces you have the more flexible that she can be again I'm merging back in the branches and twigs so I'm separating them because the twigs don't really need to be fragmented that would be overkill and then again I'm generating the constraints just as the previous example I showed you again creating my inactive groups and feeding this into my top Network so here the only difference is I'm adding a Collider so I created this ramp just for testing and debugging purposes and I created a huge amount of logs that are falling and will collide with the trees the rest is the exact same setup that we already saw so here I have my constraint Network here I have my soft constraint and my sub solver to break the constraints so here is my point Wrangler with a very simple vex colt that will make the constraint break if the torque goes beyond this value so let's take a look at a cached simulation this is a result so we have this falling collision object and these are very heavy objects they have greater mass than the actual trees and as soon as they start hitting the trees some of them will break some will only bend if the force is not high enough and here you can ignore this very slippery motion I did this so that all the pieces reached the entire forest and here is where iteration becomes very important so at this point you will usually want to test the different values for example the stiffness of the constraints the amount of force or the mass that each object has the strength or the amount of strength of the individual forces like wind turbulence and again as I mentioned before the more iterations you can create the better the effect will be each iteration will usually yield a better result okay so now let's see what happens with the rest of the elements so here what I'm doing is again I'm isolating the twigs of course this is already cached remember I mentioned I usually try to generate a primary simulation and then generate secondary simulations of smaller elements so once we have the trunk and branches animated I will generate the leaves and what I did here is since I was going to have thousands of leaves probably even millions of leaves what I'm doing is I'm generating a cluster of trees and I'll speak a little bit more about this when talking about handling the data but the goal here is for me to very quickly iterate see some results and also be able to cache a huge amount of data by separating the the elements so I'm scaring some points here everything pretty standard changing the P scale value of the points adding some color so here is a gradient chittering the position of these points a bit and then copying the actual leaves to this points now here I'm generating a rest position and this part is important the reason I'm doing this is I will point the form the leaves with the animated twigs so here to the left I have the animation of this individual twigs and this geometry will point the form the leaves so basically it will inherit the motion into this scattered object and the reason I created a rest position is remember I added some animated noise to the bamboo leaves so I'm doing the same thing here I want this secondary animation the secondary motion even if it's Soto with this noise I'm able to animate the individual leaves and of course I could also create a volume simulation and this is where this balance between time budget and amount of detail that we want to put into the effect will come into play so right now I opted for a very simple solution just adding some noise and this will add to the point deformation to create a very convincing and very fast effect so let's see how this flip book looks so it's the same animation that we already saw we have the falling trunks colliding with the trees and to the right we can see the animation of the leaves and what I would do in more complex scene for example here we have 27 trees which it's quite a lot but a typical forest or jungle would have hundreds of trees so I could cache separate clusters of leaves and make it much more manageable and of course right now I'm generating this iteration very fast I can debug the leaves with just a single or just a few elements and then extrapolate this result to the rest of the trees so in the end what I'm doing is bringing in the entire forest of course we could blast whatever element we don't need and merging the rest of the elements in this case I'm merging the twigs and then I'm merging in the leaves to have the final result and remember I mentioned that the bullet solver can handle a huge amount of data and a huge amount of objects and this simulation if you notice I'll go back to the cached result this simulation is calculating the trees the branches and the twigs so here we have several thousand pieces and I think I could easily add five or even ten times the amount of trees that I currently have so let's take a look at the simulation from another angle so this is seen from the left view and again all these flip books that you can generate will help you evaluate the look and iterate when necessary and of course not always things go as expected so sometimes we have some very happy accidents in this case we have a very nice reaction to this constraints so here what happened is I forgot to create a rest length value for the constraints and I had this very weird and yet funny result and this is all part of this rnd process and it's also learning because probably it's not working for this particular case but maybe it will be used in some other situations or it will at least show you something that you didn't know or that you forgot or sometimes you need to research and find why these things are happening this way or why the results are not as expected and here we have a very funny example so this was a volume it was one of my first attempts of creating a volume simulation and at some point I kind of gave up and I thought okay let's go back to a very simple procedural animation and the wire constraints okay so as I mentioned earlier usually when you're creating these natural scenes you will be handling a huge amount of data so being at geometry for example leaves branches twigs or cast points probably cache simulations so whatever you're doing you'll end up with gigs of information and the way you handle this information can make it easier or faster to work so here are just a few pointers that I've been using in recent projects and things that have worked for me so first of all scaring packed instances or proxies in case of redshift or probably Arnold you can decrease the memory footprint of your scene and make it more optimized for you to preview on the viewports and even in render so you could render literally thousands of trees using proxies so remember my bamboo grove has almost 3,000 trees and the renderer is handling predefined another thing is clustering so say for example you have a huge amount of geometry try caching these individual clusters in different packages and different files and then probably merging together or even rendering separately for example say you have different portions of a jungle or a forest and probably the trees are separated between them or probably they're not interacting between each other you could render clusters separately or probably render depending on the distance from the camera or whatnot so in the end the goal would be that all these techniques will help you manage more easily your scenes and your data ok so as a brief recap let's take a look of what we've seen so far and hopefully you've learned a few new techniques so I spoke about my personal approach to problem solving and this is very useful for me because it lets me trace a roadmap of what I'm going to do for each project then we talked about some procedural modeling techniques and how we can create HTA's for these tools and this way we can reuse them in several projects or for several cases this makes it very convenient to reuse data we also learned a very powerful way of generating several instances using top networks hopefully along the way you were able to find some new hidden gems for example the elf system which in my opinion is an underrated tool I think that probably if you take the time to explore these tools you will find out that they can be very powerful and they can help in certain situations we also took a look at animating and simulating natural phenomena for example the volume solver to break apart the dandelion seeds some very simple procedural animation techniques with the bent modifier and a few simple expressions and we also added some very simple noise animation through the point Wranglers and point wops we also created some animation for the bamboo branches with the word solver and finally we created a very complex destruction scene with the bullet solver lastly we reviewed some tips to handle the large amounts of data that are generated with these types of scenes so before I say goodbye I want to leave you with some very useful links that I came across while doing my R&D so first of all Takeru calm that has a huge amount of resources and a very nice volume for this example of course the intact my webpage has also a huge amount of very nice tutorials and specifically a very nice tutorial talking about PDG and top networks I also came across where a very clever and very cool tutorial from Fabrizio Jomon to create this procedural skeleton for the wire solver also a very in-depth tutorial by hossam Alden called tree rigging for feature films and finally a link to the mastering destruction and effects in Houdini from rebel way where they go in depth with several destruction techniques and the soft constraints so that would be all on my part hopefully you'll learn something new and you will be able to put all this knowledge into practice I want to thank side effects for inviting me in this occasion to talk about Houdini that is a wonderful tool and to showcase all these techniques that I've been using in production and hopefully we can meet again in the future so thank you very much and goodbye

Channel: Houdini

Views: 5,617

Rating: 4.942029 out of 5

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Id: 52QA60pS80g

Length: 64min 32sec (3872 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2020