SideFX Houdini For Absolute Beginners

hey guys and welcome to another very exciting tutorial Houdini is a very capable but also very complex procedural 3d software package and I have already talked about my top 5 reasons why I think you should be learning it today in a previous video if you have already attempted to get into it you may have found yourself at varying levels of irritability or like Walter just falling off the cliff all the way to pure hot rage in the interest of saving the life of your computer mouse or keyboard or one of ours you decide to take your frustrations out on in this tutorial I want to give you an absolute beginner guide on how to use Houdini we will cover how you can get your hands on the free version of Houdini how to work with the interface and create some interesting procedural geometry and we will then finish off by going over how to set up lights and cameras in your scene and how to render out your final image now this is going to be an absolute beginner level tutorial and I will assume that you have never or maybe hardly ever used 2d me before I will however make some basic assumptions like you know what 3d is and maybe you've even played with some other 3d software packages before but even if you haven't don't stress you'll be fine following along but now before you take your anger out on me let's jump right into the tutorial welcome to the Internet now Before we jump into Houdini I figured I'd quickly show you how you can get you a free version and for that simply pop open your favorite browser and go visit side effects calm on the website navigate to the main menu and click on get and then download now in order to download Houdini you will have to register or login with an existing account signing up is absolutely free and you can decide to opt out at any newsletter so you really is creating a free account obviously I already have an account so I'm just simply going to log in and once you're signed in you can download the Installer Fotini either for Windows OSX or for Linux the install itself can be used to install different versions of Houdini like The Apprentice version which is absolutely free it just has a few limitations like you can only render up to 720p it does have a small watermark and you won't be able to use any third-party renderers personally I sign up for the Houdini indie license which has no watermark ran this up to 1080p and it supports third-party vendors but for this tutorial you can just as easily follow along with the Houdini apprentice version which is absolutely free so just download it and install it I am going to assume that you know how to install software on your computer so once you've installed whoo let's fire it up and welcome to Houdini now the interface for Houdini is pretty busy and before you get too used to this particular view the very first thing that I highly recommend that you do if you're just starting out is to change your workspace come up into the tool bar and over on the right-hand side here you can select your workspace or your desktop and change this from built over to the technical desktop now this may feel like it just made it worse and edit even more elements onto the interface but I can guarantee you that all of the elements are highly valuable when you're starting out it makes it a whole lot clearer to see what is going on in your scene so personally I highly recommend you work with the Technica desktop but of course feel free to work with any desktop that you're comfortable with let's start out with a really quick rundown of the interface at the very top you obviously find the main menu bar this is where you'll open and save your files and can adjust settings and all sorts of other goodies underneath that this huge row of items are called the Shelf tools so these are presets that you can apply and they either create Network elements or they modify Network elements for example you can create cameras and lives rigid bodies fluid simulations pyro simulation so you can burn things or blow things up you can also create basic geometry notes like boxes fears and other things so all of these ones are essentially preset and you can do that manually in the node editor if you really wanted to but these either create Network elements or they modify network elements and just help you work so much easier and quicker in Houdini highly recommend you get familiar with them but there are a lot of them so for now I'm just gonna reset this to my basic tools they're called the shelf tools but again just know that they are we going to touch on them a little bit more later in the center of the interface you will find your 3d viewport to open around simply hold down the Alt key on your keyboard and then left-click and drag you can zoom in either with the mouse wheel or by keeping that Alt key pressed and then clicking and dragging with the right mouse button in order to panorama view still holding the Alt key you can click and drag with your middle mouse button if you're on a Mac and you don't have an alt key you simply want to be using the option key instead there's a whole bunch of additional tools for the view part on the left side you've got selection tools and some modification tools on the right and scientifica tools for changing how and what is being this like in your viewport don't need to worry too much about them for now the next thing I would move on to on the very left side is the tree view and the reason I like the technique viewport so much is because it contains the tree view by default this shows you all of the elements that you have in your project or in your scene so right now we on this object tab so this is where we actually create and place objects in our scene but there's other tabs for compositing for image layers materials obviously a current scene view for rendering shader materials on for vex operations the next most important element this is likely where you will spend the most amount of your time is over on the right hand side it's the network view and this is where you create your notes and your network elements and this is where you actually build your scene so you will spend a whole lot of time in here and then further down you have your parameters and this will display the parameters of your currently selected note then underneath the viewport right now I've got my Python shell script which I don't really need that much and one thing you can do with the interface you can obviously drag all of these things around in any way you want there's also these little arrows here with which you can either collapse these panels or you can pop them up and there's actually a second hidden one underneath this one here so there's actually two panels so the bottom one is two shell script I'm going to collapse that and pop the second one open because this tab here contains another really important element and that is called the geometry spreadsheet and the geometry spreadsheet will show you attributes on the geometry in your scene this becomes really important when you've doing some fancy advanced stuff a 2d nee for now for this particular tutorial we probably won't need it so I'm going to collapse that against to make the viewport a little bit bigger and obviously you can drag these things around you can unlink them and float them around and then after you screwed everything up you can come back into the main menu click on technical desktop and select reload current desktop and this will just reset everything to the starting state because we're not going to be doing any scripting in this tutorial I'm going to once again collapse my Python shell and the last interface element of interest is at the very bottom of the screen and that is the timeline control here you will find playback controls and the little green arrows are for jumping between keyframes an actual time line that you can scrub through and playback for any animation you may have in your scene and over on the right hand side you've got a few additional controls time line the most important one is probably at the very very right so if you click this little icon here it will bring up your global animation options like the frames per second and your frame range and if your other options that are actually really useful it's going to leave all of that on default we're not going to touch on this for this tutorial obviously there are a ton of other interface elements and taps that you can see for example take list parameter spread cheese asset browsers and a whole bunch of other things don't worry about them too much for now we will touch on a few of them like the render view later on but don't be impatient it does take a long time to learn Houdini but we will take it one step at a time so now that you know expert at navigating the interface let's start creating some geometry and the easiest way to create geometry is to use the shelf tools in Houdini in your shelf tools under the create tab you will find a number of geometric primitives and there are different ways to use these tools option number one is to simply click on one so let's click on box and it hasn't actually created anything yet because it's waiting for us to essentially click on our plane somewhere to place this box try to click as much in the center as I can but it doesn't really matter so let's click and we now have a box in our scene in addition to this cube having appeared in our viewport you will also notice that in our network view we now have a first node we have this box object and again I can middle mouse click and hold and drag to navigate around and mouse wheel in and out to kind of zoom in and out of my little network so I have a box object here that's called box object one and you just double click and rename it something else so maybe we'll call it first space box and spaces will always be replaced with an underscore and Houdini it's kind of because it came from Linux so let's call this first box and down in our parameter panel you will notice that we now have first box selected and we can see all of its properties in here I can now change a lot of these properties and kind of move my sphere around or I can change render settings and other options there's usually a huge amount of options available don't stress about all these too much one thing I might want to do under transform our translates currently set to some really odd numbers am I going to zero that out is set it to zero zero zero and they'll descent our cube exactly at our origin and finally and this is really why I like the technical stop in the preview on the left-hand side you can see we have now objects under our object node and if I expand this I can see my first box in here so this tree view really shows me everything that's included in my adeney scene at one glance let's return to the network editor for a second and you may have noticed that as I'm hovering over these network nodes there's a little dial menu that appears and it has a number of options there are two options on every basic note in Houdini the one on the right-hand side is a little I so this is visibility so whether you seeing or hiding this object so you can click that visible icon and the one on the left is this little green cursor that you can click and this is making this item selectable so now I can no longer select my cube because it is no longer selectable in order to make it selectable again I can come onto my node and either click this little green arrow here or in the old days of Houdini actually just prior to version 16 which is actually really brand new and you had to click this little green icon here so that does the same thing that's a selectable one and on the right hand side so the blue corner here is actually the visible one they just added this really nice radial menu which makes it a whole lot easier to do that so this controls the visibility and the Select ability and on the left hand side you have this little eye for information so you can click on that and a little info box will come up with some details around the item within your scene which again you don't need to worry about too much for now it really becomes more important once you get some more advanced stuff so for now I'm just going to close this again before we move on obviously already covered the parameters panel and how we can change all of the properties of your object in here you can however also just come directly into the viewport and modify the position scale and rotation of your cube for that right now I'm on a multi mode but you can also come and press T on your keyboard for translating you move your object around you can press R for rotate and then just drag the handles to rotate your object in any way you want and you can press key for scale need to scale it up and down in any way that you want this position in your scene just the way you want it now this is all well and good but it's very simplistic in order to really understand the power of with Yuni we need to talk about procedural ISM and a procedural workflow for that I hope you haven't gotten too attached to you cube because I'm simply going to select it and delete it and we're going to start from scratch let me make the network at just a little bit bigger because again this is going to be your main working area when you work within Houdini and let's create a new queue but let's create it manually in Houdini in the network editor in order to create a new network note make sure you in the network editor so you just click into it press tab and a pop-up menu will appear that lists out all of the nodes that you can create within your network at this particular network level network levels again a bit more of an advanced concept for now just check out all of the things you can create as a huge amount of nodes in here and the one we want to create is a geometry node so you can either come into geometry and select the geometry node or what you can do is you can just press tap and start typing geometry and it'll just come up it'll fill that down after while you get really used to these no types and what you can use for what and it becomes a lot more natural so I'm just going to select the geometry node and I now need to place it in my network view so I'm going to click and place down my geometry node and I can see a cube right here but this isn't actually a cube it's just a placeholder for some geometry so first off I'm going to select my note and to change the name I can either double click the name here or with the node selected come into my parameters and at the top here geometry it's called geo one let's call this second box hit enter to confirm and now what we're going to do is we're going to jump into this network right now if you look at the tree view we are in our scene we are in the object level so the object network and we've got our second box selected so this will correspond to our network view at the top you can see I've got my object selected in this view so in here I could select all of these other levels and stages that I have in my tree view but we won't be in the object level and now I'm going to jump into my second box because again this is just another network so select the second box and just double click on it now one thing that happened at the top of our network editor you can see I'm now in object second box am in the second level network and this is kind of like breadcrumbs in a browser where you can have different URLs linking deeper and deeper so we're under object second box and in my tree view I can actually expand the second box as well to see what's in here and yep there's a file one note in here so there's a one here which right now has loaded default dot BG oh so the file default BG u is loaded through this fan-out and that's what we're seeing in our current viewport however I'm feeling a little bit cruel and I don't really want this default box so I'm just going to select it and delete it and we're going to create our own box because our own box is so much better so again let's press tab to create any note and you will notice that the nodes I can lay down in this second box Network because I mean the geometry node it's quite different to what I could create that object level and you'll find that in different networks you can write different types of nodes because they're constrained within Houdini in the type of elements that you can lay down so in my geometry node I have a whole bunch of other things and what I want I want to go into primitive and I'm going to select the box I'm just going to lay down a box so there is we've now created a box in Houdini within our own network without using the shelf tools click on the shelf to essentially just set this up for you automatically so the shelters are really the shortcuts to create network elements but you can just do it or manual if you really wanted to so we have now created our own box in order to return out of the sub Network into our object level you can either click on the object in the top of the browser so this will return into the object let's just double click to go back into this network you can also use this back or this up button here to bring me back into the top level let's go back into the second box one more time or you can just press you on your keyboard and we'll just jump you back up a level in the network again we end up at this object level we have our second box here which is exactly the same verse before it's just a simple geometry box but we've defined what's in it and what's in it is a simple box geometry node having a single box as much fun as it is doesn't really showcase the power foodini so what I'm going to do within my second box Network I'm just going to push this box aside and I'm going to create a second box so let's press tab and this time I'm going to be a bit lazy and just type box because I don't really want search through the pop-up menu and let's lay down a another box so here's my second box and in order to distinguish it from the first box let's just make it a little bigger and in order to do that let's just come into the parameters at the bottom and let's changed the sized to a 2x2 if you now check out your viewport you may notice something really weird we have this larger wireframe box on the outside but on the inside we can still see this smaller cube what is essentially happening is that in Houdini all networks need to have a single output however this network contains two elements box 1 and box 2 and Houdini does know which one to render and which one to visualize so it's kind of overlaying the new box box 2 in wireframe onto box 1 and the element that you're seeing is the one that has this visible flag set so if I now come over to box 2 and click on visible the visible flag this blue outline will move over to box 2 and now we see in box 2 the little purple one on the inside says which one gets rendered and we're going to deal with that later for now just remember that the only element you're going to see in your viewport is to note that has the visibility tag if you want to see both of them you need to merge them together into a single node and then view that because Houdini within a network can only view the output of a single node so let's do something cool so this makes a little bit more sense I'm going to leave the visible flag on my box one on the smaller one and I'm going to take box two and what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to move it downwards and I'm going to bring up the parameters a little bit and now you can type numbers in here but one really really cool feature of Houdini's actually has this sliding scale if I select the center Y so I can move this cube up and down press my middle mouse button I get this scaled slider I'm not sure what to call this and I can go over the top one so now I'm moving it my mouse left alright it moves this cube by 10 units at a time if I go down a little bit it'll only move by one at a time four go further down it's by point one so I can kind of change the granularity of how much of a change I'm making so I'm going to point one dragged this cube down a little bit so that we can kind of see the little cube poking out through the top one so let's check this out yep so that looks kind of cool because what I'm going to do is I'm going to essentially use the small cube to cut a hole into the bigger one so I'm going to combine these two elements into one and then we're going to visualize the result in order to do that let me lower my parameter panel a little bit and let's bring in a knee node that has been introduced in Houdini 16 and that is the boolean so with our network view selected press tap and let's type boolean and let's select boolean and drop that into our network view so this is now a boolean operator and these little round connectors at the top of the note are inputs and the one at the bottom is an output so if you hover over these pins at the bottom you can see what this means so this is the input for geometry a the one on the right hand side is the input for geometry B and you obviously have a big ass warning here if you click on that it's going to tell us not enough sources specified so that's the error so we obviously haven't actually fed anything into this boolean just yet what we can do is now we can connect these nodes together and this is where the power of Houdini comes in obviously this is a simplistic example but the power of Houdini is just configurability control over every single little detail in the scene so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take box 1 I'm going to click on to this little output pin at the bottom and this is going to bring up a little connection line and I'm going to connect that into the left input on my boolean and then go to come up to box 2 click on to this output pin and I'm going to connect that into boolean input number 2 so now I've connected up a boolean but I'm still just seeing a box and again it's because the visibility is still on box 1 and now you to come into my boolean and move the visible flag down to this note well something happened it's probably not quite what we wanted let me zoom in a little bit so with my boolean operator let's bring up the parameters again and let's decide what we actually want to happen at the bottom here I can control how this boolean operator works right now it has an intersection so it's essentially trimming off the top of box 1 wherever it's extruding past box 2 instead I want to use box one to cut a hole into box 2 in order to do that with my boolean selected in my parameters I'm going to change my operation from intersect over to subtract and well I'm getting a minus B which isn't what I want I'm actually going to change my operation from a minus B over to B minus a and now what I've done I've essentially combined these two elements and I'm outputting again only one node in my network is being output which is my boolean so I'm outputting the sound of box two - box one through my boolean in this network so this is now my new geometry note that I can render out or do whatever else I wanted to you're gonna go great yay I can use it in cinema 4d or 3ds max so now let's talk a little bit about the procedural ISM the great thing about having this non-destructive node flow is that I can change any aspects of any of these inputs or any node in my network at any point in time because Houdini will recalculate the output every single time now it does do caching wherever possible obviously for performance reasons but again topic for another tutorial instead let's select my box one bring up the parameters a little bit again and let's just make this a little bit bigger that's the same my box was one point two by one point two by one point two and can you see how Houdini automatically increases the size of this hole according to the properties of this box now let's take this a step further what if I wanted to cut a sphere into this well I could simply move the box over here or delete it let's create a new node and we already know how to do that simply press tap and let's bring in a sphere let's select the sphere place it down and let's for a short time enable the visibility so we can see what that looks like it's probably a little bit too big I'm going to change the radius to point six point six point six just to make it a little bit smaller and maybe I'll just move it up a little bit and now I want to cut this connection and connect my sphere to my input so now let's just take the output of the sphere and connect that into input one of my boolean now let's view the boolean and this is not quite what I was expecting and I suspect the reason is that our sphere right now is set to a primitive type so in my sphere I'm going to change my primitive type from primitive over to polygonal mesh which I believe I need for the cutting operation so now I've got a sphere cut into my cube and the great thing is I can make modifications in any way I want so for example let's say this sphere here that we can visualize again let's just make this like a little bit and even let's just kind of distort this a little bit and then use that as a cutting object in order to do that first off let me make sure I have a little bit more geometry in my sphere and in order to see the wireframe you can just over the viewport and press W and you can see the wireframe of that thing I need a little bit more detail if I want to distort this properly so in my sphere properties down at the bottom I'm going to change my rows maybe to 60 and maybe I'm going to change my columns to 60 as well just have a little bit more detail atmosphere before we distort it and now in order to insert any node between the sphere and my boolean to distort the incoming sphere I'm going to click on to this connection and press tap and let's search for a mountain note the mountain note can distort the yamen tree by applying noise to it so let's select the mountain note and you can see it's already going to be connected between my sphere and two boolean's let's just drop that into our network and again let's make sure we visualize the mountain note and I'm going to press W again just to get out of wireframe mode and so what I'm getting now is I'm getting this really weirdly twisted distorted sphere and again of course you could come into the parameters down at the bottom you can change you know how noisy this is you can change what type of noise gets used as a huge amount of options in everything for Houdini so you can just tweak this to your liking I'm just going to distort this a little bit maybe I'm going to go with just a standard Perlin noise oh well that kind of looks cool so maybe we'll just go with that so maybe I'm finding this isn't really nice enough it looks a little bit jagged and edgy so again I can drop another note between my mountain and my boolean click on the connection and let's lay down a smooth note so it's like smooth let's drop that down and all this is going to do is it's going to smooth my geometry just a little bit more let's visualize it so it just looks a little bit nicer than what came out of the mountain and now let's return to the boolean and visualize at the boolean and you can see that this now cuts a we twisted distorted sphere out of my cube one quick tip su networks get bigger they'll get a little bit harder to organise and two things you can do it you can for one come into your network and press L to layout all you know it's a little bit nice and it'll reorganize them you can Kalfas assumed out and zoom in but you could also press H on your keyboard to hone in on to all of the notes and I'll kind of show all of them at once so L and page are really really your friends to kind of layout unruly networks especially once this gets a bit bigger it can get pretty complicated but everything is really step by step really simplistic so starting with a sphere we're distorting it and then smoothing it and that then becomes the input into a boolean so it just gets subtracted from our box I can actually just delete box one for now because we don't really need it anymore we just going to output the boolean the last thing I want to do in my network is to mark the output point for the final result of my network and the way to do this is to place down a null object now a null object if you've used After Effects before it's exactly the same it's just a placeholder doesn't do anything at all so I'm going to select the bottom pin of my boolean to connect any note and with this connection already in hand let's press tab and let's search for a null object let's place down this now there you go and I'm just going to call this output cut finally I'm going to move the visibility and the render flag down here so this is now the output of my network and if I return to my object view again it's just one node at this level it's just my second box but it's the full geometry with a hole cut into it obviously this is a very simplistic example and there's so much more cool stuff that you can do in Houdini but for this absolute beginner tutorial I just want to get you thinking in the way you have to think in Houdini in this procedural workflow of building your networks and how everything hangs together the last two things I want to touch on for this tutorial is how to set the cameras and your lights and how to actually render out your final images let's start out by adding some lights into our scene as before you can either do that manually using the network editor or you can simply come up and use the shelf tools over on the top right-hand side you will find a lights and camera panel so make sure you have that selected and in here you can create cameras and a whole bunch of different lights I'm simply going to add a point light to my scene so let's click on point light and again nothing happens because if you look at the bottom of your viewport Houdini now asked you to select a position for the point light and you now need to click into you see in two places I'm just going to plop it down here on the right hand side and there's my point light you can also see it edit in my network editor and over on the left hand side in the tree view down here you can now see the point light and with the point ID selected press T to enter move mode and let's move this light up a little a little bit closer to the hole we cut into the cube maybe a little over to the right hand side yep I think right there we'll probably do and let's add another point light so again let's click onto the port light shelf tool this time I'm going to place it a bit on the left side of my cube again just play around with this and set this up any way that you want press T to go into move mode and again it's going to drag this up a little bit so I have two lights kind of illuminating my little cube here that's not looking too bad so this is my little setup here actually with one of these lights selected I can also come into the parameters and obviously you can change all sorts of settings here maybe the only thing I'll do for now so I'll just click on color this is going to bring up a little color picker and maybe I'll change this over to be a bit red and I'm going to select my point light one coming to the parameters and maybe I'll change this to be a little bit bluish just so it looks a little bit more interesting come up has a bit of a tomb style feel to it with that particular lighting so close to color editor and this is where we're at now it's looking pretty good now one of the easiest ways to check out what you've seen would actually look like rendered is to use the render region tool let me make the viewport a little bit bigger again so we can see what's going on and maybe I'll zoom out just a little bit and over on the left hand side of the U port almost at the bottom you'll find a little render region tool so let's select that and this now allows me to draw a rectangle in my viewport and that area is going to be rendered so I'm going to draw a rectangle around my cube and let go and this is now going to cause who do you need to render out this particular region obviously this is just a preview render the great thing about the render v2 tool is that a I can resize it at any point in time so I can kind of render parts of the image only and it will automatically update so you've got some controls here for the render region tool to say automatically update or pause but what's cool about this is I can actually make changes to all of my objects and they will automatically flecked it so for example let's say I don't like this red to be quite so red from our point light so let's select it down here in my parameters I hope you can still see this getting that's squishy on the interface I'm going to bring up the color picker pull this over a little bit and let's change this to something a bit more yellow and you can see immediately my scene as well as my preview render in the render region to our updating life so that's kind of cool I will just turn it a little bit orangey cool let's close to color editor again and so this is pretty much all you need to know about the render region tool it's really useful if you just want to see parts of you scene and make changes very selectively but for now let's move on and close the render region tool just by clicking on this little X up here in the top right of corner so that will close the render region tool again and put us back to our standard viewport if however you want to render out your entire viewport you can come up here at the top of this viewport panel and find the render View tab so let's like that and in here you can render out your entire viewport and the easiest way just leave everything on the fault and simply hit render and this is going to render out your entire viewport you may have to scroll on the mouse wheel just to see the entire image and well it's not exactly what we see in the viewport so let's return to the scene view and the reason for that is that right now in our render view we are using a default renderer as well as a default camera so we're not actually seeing exactly what we want in order to specify exactly what we want to see let's return once again to our scene view and let's set up a camera right now at the top of the viewport we are in perspective mode but we have no camera and the easiest way to create a camera in Houdini again you can do this in the network editor but I find much easier to come up at the top right hand side of the viewport click on this little no cam icon and let's just simply create a new camera by clicking on new camera let me resize these panels again once a little bit and now in my network editor remember to press L to lay everything out and haitch to see everything so we now have a cam 1 object I'm going to select this come up into the parameters and I'm going to rename this camera to render cam and one of the most important settings in this camera you will find in the View tab because here you can actually specify the resolution of your final render right now this is set to 720p which you can also do in the free apprentice version so that is good enough for now and again let me make the viewport a little bit bigger you can now see that we're in the perspective view and we're looking through this the camera and you see this little lock icon here and that is because we have our current viewport view locked to the camera so if I move around now in my viewport I will actually make changes to this camera so I'm looking through this camera and as I'm moving around up altering this camera if i unlock my viewport I'm still in the render cam but now if I move around and let go you can see I've now unselected my camera so no longer making changes in order to reselect my render camera let's just change this no cam drop down back to render cam to look through this render cam and that's exactly where we left off let's relock it and that's actually position this camera exactly where we want to go and actually move it in a little bit because I think this hole at the top is actually the more interesting feature of this box but again tweak this to your liking this is just a simple tutorial so now we've got this render cam position I'm going to unlock it to not make any accidental changes and let's return to our render view and now what I'm going to do is before I hit render I'm actually going to come to this camera drop down and change this from ROP camera over to obj render cam and this is my actual render camera that I've just set up and positioned and now if I hit render this is going to render my entire viewport OOP I will have to zoom out a little bit from the perspective of this camera now if you zoom in a little bit this still looks a little bit preview quality and again while we now have set up a camera we're still using the default output renderer and that is the next and the last thing that we're going to fix up in this tutorial if you come over into the tree view on the left and you're trying to find this mantra underscore IPR node in your network because again as I said in Houdini everything is a node everything that you can change is a node in the network somewhere the render nodes actually live in the out tab so if you expand this little out tab here looks like a little movie reel if you expand this under here we have a mantra IPR node and this is this mantra' renderer that is being used here you can change this and tweak this obviously in the parameters to your liking but I actually prefer to just leave this in place and create a new renderer altogether in order to add new render into you Houdini seen the easiest ways to come up into the main menu select render create render note and in here you have a number of options I'm simply going to create a mantra PBR which is a physically based rendering so let's just create that and he will see that it just got added to our tree view on the left and also over on the right hand side in our network view and notice that we right now in this out tab so we are under this out part of the tree in here we've now also added this new mantra' node called mantra one I'm just going to call this mantra final and one of the things I want to do is down here there's an option for which camera to use for this renderer now if you rendering it through the render view you can select the renderer and the camera and kind of override this setting however we're going to render to employ and then render to disk because that's really what you want to do in the end so on your mantra fine load make sure that the camera which is right now set to obj cam 1 which doesn't actually exist if I was to try to render this now so for example if I set render to M play you get this error here and this error if you hover over the node and bring up this little warning icon will actually tell you unable to initialize rendering module with given camera that means the camera selected for your mantra final note doesn't exist it's incorrect and well we have no obj cam 1 in our scene because if I come up into my obj in the tree view well I've got a render cam but I have nothing called cam 1 so let's again select our mantra final and this again one of the great reasons of the technically viewport I would now have to dig through this to we bring up my man from node but my preview shows me everything that's in my scene so I can really just select mantra final to reselect my renderer come down into the camera and you could type this in here this kind of linux-based but much easier come over to the right-hand side click on to the second icon was just this little pick up this will bring up a pick up so you can pick these lights or we can look through the camera and we want to render this out with the render cam so let's just select render cam and hit accept so now we've selected our renderer with the render cam and one of the cool things you can do while you doing in progress work you can actually override the camera resolution so you can go resolution or quarter resolution it'll just render a whole lot faster so for now let's go half resolution on this and then you have a huge amount of options available for setting up your final render we're going to dig into this in a second just a little bit but for now let's come back up and we're not going to use the preview render anymore you could technically change this over now your render view to essentially use your final mantra' renderer and just hit render again to re-render this in the render view but once I'm setting up our final render I prefer to use em play I'll just render it out to disk so up here on the Left I'm just going to return to the scene view because we don't really need to see in the render view but it can be really nice and convenient if you just you know want to see it in progress shot instead it reflected my render cam so once again come back to your mantra final and with the Chemist elected at half resolution let's simply hit render to imply this is going to take a second and bring up and play I'm going to drag this over here and this is now our final render at hard resolution this already looks a whole lot better than what it did in the render preview because we now have diffused light bouncing so this actually looks a whole lot better already even though it's still a little bit grainy but this is already a big improvement to what we had before now one thing that kind of threw me off when I started working with Houdini is that when you do your rendering usually the images will come out pretty grainy to begin with and that simply has to do with a very low sample count on your render node so let me close down in play and come back into our mantra final node and let's bring up the parameters because we want to look at a few of these ones and one of the things you may want to change is where your files gets output to when you do a render it out to disk and these dollar hip dollar hip named Ella OS dollar for I just variable names that get substituted in your file path so it'll render it out on your current file location in a render folder with your current file name F force the frame name that's all a bunch of cool stuff you can do in Houdini don't worry about that too much for now one of the things I really want to change is under the rendering tab so let's open up the rendering tab and in here you can control the quality of your final renderings we have sampling which controls the graininess and the pixel lated nurse off your image so right now we're the pixel samples of three which is actually pretty low let's Jack this up to maybe we'll make it twelve so let's Jack this up quite high a little bit further down there's a huge amount of properties and options and one of the cool things with Houdini if you ever fully lost you may have noticed that across the interface you have these little question mark icons in all sorts of locations they also have them in these nodes and you can actually click on these ones and it will automatically bring up the help for this particular node so this one here will now bring up the help for the man try render node and now the documentation personally I find a little bit hit-and-miss if you already know Houdini a little bit it can be quite helpful or it can give you a quick overview sometimes I find it hard to find exactly what I'm looking for but there's a huge amount of information on everything woody nyan obviously online there's a whole bunch more so if you're getting stuck just click on the little help I can it'll bring up a twist-off help and just a bit of additional information and the other thing you can do as well you can kind of hover over these parameters so for example noise level and it shows a little tooltip with some of the information and you can press f1 to bring up help specific to this property but the main ones I tend to tweak is defuse quality which controls the amount of bounce like how often these rays bounce around so it controls the amount of diffused light that you get so let's maybe pump this up to to just it'll look a little bit more realistic because the light will bounce around and off this cube a little bit so with those settings maybe I'll also uncheck override camera resolution so we're going to render it out at the full resolution defined by this camera which if you re selecting our render cam in our View tab is to find as 1280 by 720 so let's return again to our mantra note and let's again hit render to n play once again this is going to bring up n play and you can see that this is rendering out quite a bit slower now because obviously Houdini has to do quite a bit more work mainly due to our increase in sample size and the diffuse quality and here is your final render and this is looking a whole lot better now it's looking a little bit jagged still but this is actually just a shadow from the etch here and I would have to increase the resolution like the actual geometry resolution on my spheres that I'm using for cutting to smoothen out these edges but the render itself is really nice and smooth there's no more graininess and so this is actually now a pretty nice render straight out of the default renderer mantra which comes free with the apprentice version so this is actually again one of the reasons I'm really like Houdini because I don't need any third party plugins to create some really beautiful images and then if you wanted to save this file you can simply come up into file say frame s and then just define a file location and somewhere where you want to save it and hit save let's cancel out of that and let's close down and play if you don't want to see this little preview window you can also simply click on render to disk and this is going to render out to the image directly to your file system so right here in my render folder it's just being written out right now so again this is just going to take a minute and then produce me a final EXR file with the final image and finally very last thing you could also say render to disk in the background this will then leave you to keep working in Houdini while this is rendering out in the background obviously Houdini will warn me if I have any unsafe changes so let's save our project first and that's it rendered to disk in background and this is going to bring up a little scheduler it's going to show me the current progress on this rendering but I can just push that to the side and just keep working Houdini while the rendering is going on in the background I feel this was a pretty extensive video for an absolute beginner to tal with Houdini but Houdini is pretty complex and there are quite a lot of core concepts that you really need to understand to be able to work with it hopefully I managed to cover and explain everything that you need to get started with Houdini start setting up some things in your scene add some cameras and some lights and render out a final image and that's all there is to it I lied we've barely scratched the surface if you enjoyed this video please let me know by liking favoriting and sharing with the world and leave me some comments down below if you would like to see some more entry level who do you need to Charles just like this one also don't forget to subscribe if you do want to see some more cool filmmaking and visual effects tutorials and finally thank you very much for watching and until next time I will see you later [Music]

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 282,858

Rating: 4.9085422 out of 5

Keywords: SideFX Houdini, Tutorial, Beginner, Introduction, Absolute Beginner, Newbie, Start, Overview, How to Use Houdini, Houdini, Free 3D Software, 3D, Animation, Procedural, Cameras, Lights, Rendering, Mantra, Interface, Help, Start Learning Houdini, Surfaced Studio, Easy, Entry Level, Free

Id: pu_i6jeayLA

Length: 43min 1sec (2581 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2017