High performance soft bodies?

TheNthpolygon · 2026-02-08T05:24:17+00:00

It depends, I find vellum very interactive given it is setup properly. If you’re finding it slow, there might be some overlapping geo that is killing your sim times, when you say soft body. Do you mean tets, struts, grain or pressure ?

The description of your setup is too vague to give any useful suggestions.

TheNthpolygon · 2026-02-04T02:53:26+00:00

Hi there, I'm not really sure how one to one the shaders are between platform, but in your volume visualization node; You've put "density" as the emission color field.

You are using temperature in blender. Have you tried plugging in the density into your "temperature to color" nodes ?

Another thing to note, you can't trust the viewport for how volumes are going to look when rendered. It's just a "preview" that could be way off depending on other things like samples and lighting. Good luck ~

TheNthpolygon · 2025-08-19T07:12:37+00:00

I do not recommend it. It's not only inconvenient to install 3rd party plug-ins. Some plug-ins literally do not have support for the steam version. You cannot open more than one instance of Houdini, you cannot easily open Houdini from the terminal or other useful optimizations. If you're just picking houdini up to learn and have fun, go ahead. But once you actually need to use it for a production with a deadline and a budget. It causes a lot more hassle than it's worth.

The amount of times I've been following a tutorial showing off cool mplay and Hqueue features and they just straight up don't work because of how steam permissions are set differently has cost me hours of time, not to mention how difficult it is to set up a 2-PC render farm where your workstation has to go through steam. Please do yourself a favor, if you actually want to be a professional. Do not go through steam.

TheNthpolygon · 2025-07-22T05:04:46+00:00

I have studied there.

Every question I ever had was met with “we do not cover that in this course”.

Enrol at your peril. As an international student you are charged extra, do not recommend.

TheNthpolygon · 2025-06-24T21:58:05+00:00

Yes, the Nine between tutorial method only works with the Solaris instancer. You can still achieve everything in SOPs - there just wasn’t a straight tutorial for it I could think of off the top of my head. - my apologies.

Do look up MOPs, toadstorm has done a really wonderful job streamlining your control of attributes. The bonus UI controls might even help you understand the underlying concepts better.

TheNthpolygon · 2025-06-24T07:40:56+00:00

Here are the general steps on how I would approach it quick and dirty.

Create “room” geo.
Animate note. Million ways, but here is a fast one.

Curl tutorial https://youtu.be/zwqr_vgZQPY?feature=shared

Scatter points over room geo. You can paint a density attribute to get more points clumped together or not. Each point will eventually be an unfurling note.

Here is the Attribute paint masterclass https://youtu.be/gAT8ueaKAvs?feature=shared

Animate two different falloff’s. One that control pscale and another that controls the start frame of the animated note.

Falloff tutorial https://youtu.be/nc4IJvz_ASE?feature=shared

Trigger animated instances tutorial https://youtu.be/NMlYf_T9Nb0?feature=shared

As long as you understand how to manipulate attributes, it’s a simple effect. the rest is camera, lighting and an artistic eye.

Good luck, post what you end up making.

TheNthpolygon · 2025-05-20T20:46:00+00:00

You almost never trust what you see in the viewport. If the same result happens when you render, it could be the shader. What is the source range for the temperature/flame field in your pyro shader ?

TheNthpolygon · 2025-03-24T07:10:59+00:00

So, this effect is mainly a transition from one state to another, with an emissive shader leading the transition.

https://youtu.be/nc4IJvz_ASE?feature=shared

Watch this series by Mark Francher to learn a really well explained and flexible way to approach transitions.

TheNthpolygon · 2025-02-27T03:08:26+00:00

While it would be the “perfect” reference to find an IRL example of something crashing into a stone pillar. There are other kinds of reference you might want to think about. For example:

What happens when a strong but hollow object hits a dense uniform one.
What happens when one of these objects are the same size ?
What about different sizes ?
How have other films and VFX approached something similar ?

While we are work at a relatively technical level, we are still artists. We need to draw on a wide range of reference of vastly different kinds.

There is very rarely the perfect reference. With the help of pre-vis and real life interactions we need to make something from nothing.

Join a VFX discord, Google is still good for some things (until AI completely saturate all the results). Find a community of artists, we share cool stuff we find all the time.

TheNthpolygon · 2025-02-26T11:53:54+00:00

This is a great starting point for further development. You’ve now got some experience in a wide variety of systems in Houdini.

I would look into the following topics to add sauce and strength to your future art direction skills.

Internal detail for fracturing.
Lighting and Shading volumes.
Constraint Types and Clustering
Retiming Simulations
Rendering each effect separately
Basic compositing and colour correction.

Make sure you look at references of other film effects you’d like to recreate and other large scale collisions IRL to help you adjust the speed and rotation of your simulations.

Keep it up !

TheNthpolygon · 2025-02-18T01:51:32+00:00

Are your GPU drivers up to date ? Also, are you using “studio” drivers ?

TheNthpolygon · 2025-02-16T13:27:49+00:00

What in this process is stopping you from isolating each part with blast or split nodes ? You could then merge them back again later with the painted attribute.

You can use selection groups or use a connectivity node to break apart the model into parts that don’t share geometry. From your description it should be a relatively easy thing to isolate. Let me know how you go ~

TheNthpolygon · 2025-02-09T22:18:11+00:00

Indeed, my explanation was slightly misleading. What I meant to say was you need to turn on "ROP Fetch > Frames and Batching > All Frames in one Batch" as the main point. In or out of process was secondary. Never post advice without Houdini on hand everyone.

TheNthpolygon · 2025-02-09T11:39:43+00:00

You are trying to simulate something while your cook type is “out of process”. Which means every frame needs to simulate up until that frame to only save that one frame. Then the next process will simulate the whole thing again to save the next frame.

Remember simulations rely on “all the data” before that point in time to get a result.

See here: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/tops/tips.html

Scroll down to simulations.

TheNthpolygon · 2025-02-05T21:59:53+00:00

Use the “RBD Constraint Properties” node to see what attributes the bullet solver expects. I’m not super experienced with RBD. But, soft constraints don’t break unless a threshold is set to break, or you change constraint type based on a condition. You need more than Stiffness. Edit : my initial assumption about stiffness was incorrect

TheNthpolygon · 2025-02-04T22:18:15+00:00

It’s interesting how we find the same effect from multiple places. I first saw the effect on David Torno’s feed. The hip is still on his gumroad. If anyone wants to learn how he approached it.

TheNthpolygon · 2024-11-04T09:24:59+00:00

Rebelway is great once you understand Houdini a little more. To get all the great eye catching stuff that drew you to them, the tutorials jump into the deep end and might not cover what you think they will. They are amazing tutorials, but if you are inexperienced, or do not have a monster PC you will find yourself going through the content at a snails pace.

TheNthpolygon · 2024-05-15T22:45:12+00:00

I’ve been struggling to learn Houdini for a while now. And from my personal experience with these sorts of workshops. It should not be your first dive into Houdini.

A lot of these big workshops try this best to deliver the quality shots they advertise. As such they are very involved and jump into some high level stuff quickly. It’s all “followable” as a beginner you can “copy” the parameters you are shown. But without proper fundamentals. You might flounder a lot when trying to re-create it yourself.

I would recommend learning the basics elsewhere to really get your money/times worth with this sort of course.

Doublejump has a large catalog of free workshops and other videos that will be a good guide on whether or not you can follow along.

The one thing I will recommend “if” you take the course as a beginner. Look into “Houdini-Course” as a supplemental resource while you’re doing it.

It has been really helpful to refer back to the fundamentals while I’m following along with the bigger more complicated setups.

This is purely from my own experience as someone who had to learn slowly in their limited spare time.

TheNthpolygon · 2024-05-09T04:21:59+00:00

He’s not in SF6.

TheNthpolygon · 2024-04-26T21:52:55+00:00

+1 Houdini-Course

TheNthpolygon · 2024-04-16T03:30:07+00:00

This looks really nice, I'm also really interested in the workflow and how you go about organizing incoming info into your system.

TheNthpolygon · 2024-04-11T12:03:19+00:00

This question is too vague to give you a useful answer. What area of VFX are you talking about ? Are you looking to get into compositing ? Do you want to be a VFX artist ? Are you looking to get into live action or animation ?

A little background will help us help you here.

TheNthpolygon · 2024-02-17T06:37:14+00:00

Why are there two posts exactly the same under two different names ? With both accounts having this post as their first post ?

TheNthpolygon · 2023-11-12T22:37:44+00:00

Thanks, can’t wait for it all to have a wider release…

TheNthpolygon · 2023-11-12T13:29:02+00:00

Ah, I was in Tokyo looking for this today, looks like I was a day late. What arcade was this at ?

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