One of our bread and butter techniques when it comes to adding detail into our renderings is using layered materials where we blend between multiple shaders. In this brief video Mo introduces the basic technique.
2020-05-21 14:31:25 +0000 UTC View Post
This time Manuel talks about how to setup sub-polygon displacement in Redshift3D. After going through the steps necessary to make RS render Displacements we'll explore the different option the engine offers and discuss in-depth how the "Auto Bump ...
2020-05-17 09:45:16 +0000 UTC View Post
This is Mo’s take on the three different techniques currently available in Redshift to create translucent materials.
2020-05-07 16:44:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Another one of those very (very!) frequent questions concerns shading volumes in general and in Redshift specifically.
Here's Mo's take on the underlying principles of volumetric look dev, how to pull it off in Redshift and the one fea...
2020-04-30 07:38:24 +0000 UTC View Post
As you might be able to guess from this video, Mo isn't the biggest fan of Photon Mapping, but in order to get caustics in Redshift, he has to work through it.
2020-04-16 12:34:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Note: I added a second .hip file where I slightly increased the liquid's roughness. This brightens up the liquid a bit due to the fact that we're now getting more rays from the backlight refracted into the camera.
As our latest poll on rende...
2020-04-09 08:40:12 +0000 UTC View PostHeyhey,
as the basics phase of rendering 101 is coming to a close, I'd like to continue with covering more intricate topics. However doing so for six(!) engines in parallel is slowing down this course too much.
I'd rather focus on a fe...
2020-03-26 10:16:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on our initial Mantra setup we adapt our scene to be rendered in V-Ray.
2020-03-26 09:45:56 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on our initial Mantra setup we adapt our scene to be rendered in Arnold.
2020-03-19 07:51:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on our initial Mantra setup we adapt our scene to be rendered in RenderMan.
2020-03-12 08:56:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on our initial Mantra setup we adapt our scene to be rendered in Octane.
2020-03-05 10:58:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on our initial Mantra setup we adapt our scene to be rendered in Redshift.
2020-03-02 07:40:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Let's get finally started and render something in Houdini. To make this an easy start we're gonna be using a very simple scene and set up a three point light setup in Mantra.
In this video we're gonna set up a basic scene for rendering a sin...
2020-02-27 17:12:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Although at this points it's somewhat of a clichée, three point lighting has long been a go-to setup for quickly setting up a reliable light configuration, so let's talk about it once and then quickly forget about it.
In this vid...
2020-02-27 17:05:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Rigging in Houdini is a misterious topic. Even simple rigging like this. Whenever you want to move one object along a curve you're probably using CHOPs based constraints on the scene level. But what if you want to do this on geo level? In this tut...
2020-02-14 16:14:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Admittedly this took longer than anticipated. One failed day in the studio ended with a photo subject being shattered in pieces and me reshooting four hours of studio work... Well at least I managed to get this intro to what we're about to do out ...
2020-01-30 11:58:40 +0000 UTC View Post
This time we'll create an often used effect, a wet road with rain pouring down. While particles are the meat of the effect it really starts to shine by using a wetmap for shading. After coming up with a particle setup we'll explore a cool way to c...
2020-01-16 13:22:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Taking pictures in real life involves dealing with light sources. Creating synthetic images involves creating light sources in our render engines.
In this video Mo rambles on about how real life lighting works vs. which light sources are ava...
2020-01-02 10:40:57 +0000 UTC View Post
When taking pictures, we're usually using some sort of camera, no matter if it's in your cell phone, if it's a nice DSLR or that old school Polaroid camera you hipsters keep showing off with.
When we're creating computer generated images, we...
2019-12-19 07:53:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Bright petrol green plastic, warm shiny copper, clear glass, waxy jade - materials define how objects in a scene appear. But how do we model this plethora of appearances? Let's talk BxDFs, Fresnel and microfacets!
Everything Has Fresnel on F...
2019-12-05 08:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Before we dive head first into our first renderings, I think it's cool to get an idea of how a computer actually calculates how light propagates through a scene and how it computes an image.
This video goes over the theoretical background of...
2019-11-21 09:02:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Hooray! Mo finally convinced himself to start a new course. Rendering 101 it is!
In this video Mo rambles on about where he likes to take this course: Communicating a general understanding of render engines and photographic techniques to be ...
2019-11-21 09:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Volumes are versatile and can be used for some nice effects. So I got excited when I found the sliced data of a very high resolution MRI scan online. That can be turned into a VDB I thought and sat down to come up with a simple setup that imports ...
2019-11-15 07:30:49 +0000 UTC View Post
This one took us ages. Literally I had a houseplant grow big and die in the process of figuring out how to redesign our website. It's done finally and we encourage you to try it out and (hopefully don't) find bugs. It is finally online:
www....
2019-11-05 07:15:56 +0000 UTC View Post
What's going on guys? Why the recent interest in the Volumes Course? (Comments, plz!)
Anyway, happy you're digging it. But apparently there is some confusion about updates/changes since Houdini 17. The most prominent and maybe the only chang...
2019-10-24 07:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
EDIT: Added file(s) for Houdini 18.5
How do you trigger a specific behaviour in Vellum using another attribute?
In this tutorial we'll have a look at two ways of triggering the inflation of specific areas in a softbody simulation usin...
2019-10-17 07:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
I often get the question how to move simulated particles with an animated mesh. This video shows one technique to achieve this. We'll simulate particles travelling on the surface of a torus and then post move these using the parametric coordinates...
2019-09-26 06:29:27 +0000 UTC View Post
After last week's grain softbodies, let's use that technique to have some fun and build a quick and easy setup that chops up an object into soft and squishy pieces.
As you can see by my preview rendering and hear by the sound, I'm still on ...
When discussing simulation techniques with colleagues recently, Martin Salfity wondered how I'd go about setting up what he'd done here using purely old-school grains: 2019-09-12 09:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Still on the road, still working from a laptop. Turns out that this setup isn't really the most efficient thing to do without a beefy workstation but hey - let's just take the challenge!
In this tutorial we're implementing a hacke...
2019-09-05 08:15:46 +0000 UTC View Post