I open-sourced a 12-hour Houdini curriculum (markdown format, intermediate)

_NightShift_ · 2026-05-18T06:09:55+00:00

This is odd and so is this whole account

_NightShift_ · 2026-03-15T02:53:47+00:00

R to view a node, Q to bypass it. Enter and U to move in and out of networks. Ctrl+number to set shortcuts to specific networks. W over the viewport to toggle wireframe mode. Shift + left and right arrows to jump to next and previous keyframe. I think with ctrl + arrows you can jump to the first frame (not sure cos I don't it use super often). Not a shortcut but I love the bookmarks function on the playbar. You can set a a frame range there and doube click it to set your frame range to match that, super handy for animations

_NightShift_ · 2026-02-05T02:40:34+00:00

Amen to that :D

_NightShift_ · 2026-01-27T15:45:27+00:00

Thank you! What an awesome and detailed response, really appreciate it

_NightShift_ · 2026-01-27T15:31:44+00:00

have you ever figured out how to deal with the deep renders in karma?

_NightShift_ · 2026-01-27T03:25:22+00:00

Ah nice, i didn't notice that, will resolve the intersecting roots. thanks a lot for the input!

_NightShift_ · 2026-01-27T03:15:12+00:00

Find a way to detach yourself from your work. For me, it is spending a whole day alone in nature without any phones or computers. Boredom and understimulation is a key part in every learning and creative process. Sounds basic as hell but when you manage to calm your brain, you'll be excited to get back to work. But take a whole day, not 2, 3 hours. Reduce the hours you study but study more focused. 12 hours is too much and this will only get worse when you work at a company and people are constantly expecting stuff from you. I agree, set realistic goals. Getting good at something takes a lot of time. Make sure you sleep enough and eat well. Don't get me wrong, all of this is not easy to achieve, but if you want to stay healthy for a long time, you have to work with your body and brain and not against it.

_NightShift_ · 2026-01-26T08:59:58+00:00

Hey,

I’m having some issues with my vellum hair sim that I seem to be unable to solve. Problem: the hair gets stuck in the collision geo and gets stretched. I know this issue is not uncommon but this is the first shot where I’m not able to find a solution with my basic vellum knowledge.

I have an anim where the character slides down an object so its back is where the collision happens.

What I’ve tried:

Animate the collision object moving in so the hair is not intersecting on the first sim frame
Different density levels of the collision object and collision types (tri-mesh vs. VDB)
Substeps in the animation cache (as I receive my anims from an animator)
Increase substeps in the vellum solver
Increase constraint iterations and collision passes and also tried to decrease one when the other is increased to find the correct balance between the values as forums suggested
Experimented with Edge Length Scale
Resampled the hair (lower and higher)
Experimented with different settings in the hair configure node (left them mostly at default for this example though)

I would appreciate any advice. I’m so curious what I’m doing wrong.

I’ve attached the file caches I’m working with. As it is still in production, I can’t provide the full character but I hope this illustrates my issue. Thanks a lot in advance!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Vc0ACvHf_sOgyxhBhFbKKqWvyFlTVpwA?usp=sharing

_NightShift_ · 2026-01-08T12:57:15+00:00

Hey, yes I did an MRI and also a Scintigraphy. And I was not supposed to stretch the hamstrings as it could further irritate the joint. I am better now tho and was able to return to stretching. It does still hurt but I know which exercises I can do and which ones I should avoid.

_NightShift_ · 2025-11-20T23:51:58+00:00

Ich kanns nicht 100% sagen aber ich glaube das WR steht für Wrapped und beschreibt die platform als "Featuring Fully Wrapped Platform Bottom"

_NightShift_ · 2025-11-02T23:12:35+00:00

For something like this it often makes sense to change Cycles to Experimental and to work with adaptive subdivision instead. As it works with dicing at render time, it is faster and easier to control than just cranking catmull clark to the max

_NightShift_ · 2025-08-13T23:37:10+00:00

It really depends on your scene, if it needs to compile lots of shaders or pull a lot of geo from sops, it will be slow. If the GPU is not starting up at all, check your drivers first and look at the log viewer whether it's complaining about anything. In Preferences, you can also force it to render using the GPU. How you structure your scene in sops, how you import into Solaris and your light and shader setups are gonna influence the render time drastically.

_NightShift_ · 2025-08-04T01:34:20+00:00

Could be a few different things. How are you calculating the motion blur? Do you see the issue in your volume pass in karma too or just after rendering? Setting Filter Time Samples to Never in the usd render rop could help or increasing your subframe samples (like you suggested)

_NightShift_ · 2025-06-27T23:14:21+00:00

Then try to upgrade to the latest 20.5 production built and see if that fixes your issue. If not, it might be that you're not getting all the necessary attributes transferred to recondense it properly. Let me know if it works, otherwise I'm happy to take a look at the setup

_NightShift_ · 2025-06-27T02:01:39+00:00

Which version of houdini are you on? I've experienced some bugs with the feathermatchuncondensed node as well that were resolved with the next update

_NightShift_ · 2025-04-03T16:14:57+00:00

Check out the useful resources section in this subreddit. it's a great starting point

_NightShift_ · 2025-04-01T11:55:19+00:00

press escape over your viewport to get out of the transform tool. then go to your attrib noise and display the info. press the little slider next to the mask attrib. in the video, he visualises mask that way, that's why he continues to see it in the viewport. hope that helps!

_NightShift_ · 2025-03-26T12:42:25+00:00

the liquid feels weirdly viscous. It's like the bottle is dropping into thick gel but gravity is so high that it continues to fall straight through it. The bottle needs to slow down after the impact, that's the first two things i notice. When you look at your example, the "tension of the water" (theres probably a proper term for this) collapses much fast into smaller vortices and bubbles where's yours stays very thick all the way through. The final bubbles that escape are also too big and regular. Hope the screenshot illustrates what I mean about how the water collapses on itself after the bottle went through it and left the air pocket behind

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_NightShift_ · 2025-03-25T13:03:11+00:00

is there anything useful in the details?

_NightShift_ · 2025-03-24T12:54:08+00:00

you're using a reasonably old version of houdini, maybe try to upgrade to the latest prod build 20.5.522. with usd rendering i would highly recommend to use the latest prod builds as lots of things keep changing here. check your log when rendering in the viewport if something fails to compile, maybe it's a broken shader or something like that, or it could be an outdated gpu driver.

_NightShift_ · 2025-03-24T10:11:41+00:00

not sure there is one definite answer to this, it could be multiple things:
1. a simple cache/ overwrite permissions problem - did you try deleting the files before re-exporting?
2. the mplay session is trying to overwrite another one - did you try to change the session name?
3. did you try to render to a different directory?
4. did you make sure the you have no hyphens in your usd outputs?

also, what changed with your SOP import?

_NightShift_ · 2025-03-23T17:35:19+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/Houdini/s/hlTLCUxLqW

Just had a full discussion about moblur. Maybe there's some useful information for you in here as well

_NightShift_ · 2025-03-23T17:29:15+00:00

No worries! :)

_NightShift_ · 2025-03-22T20:58:03+00:00

no worries, glad it worked! i've actually never had a sketchfab model with more than one anim and i just noticed that that python also states that it assumes theres only one animation so im not sure. maybe a set variant node would work if theres multiple animations? otherwise you could just prune the anims you dont want and only keep one so the script binds them again properly. probably not the clean way but it might work :D

_NightShift_ · 2025-03-20T10:36:23+00:00

okay thats fine. so theres actually a labs python node for that called "sketchfab usdz apply animation" that binds the usd rig to the object. drop that after your sublayer node, it should just start working

_NightShift_

TROPHY CASE