Get Started With Clouds, Volumes, VOPs in Houdini
Create, animate, export, feel great: the four chapter free course on Volumes
Ever wanted to learn the workflow to create your own clouds and other volumetric effects in Houdini? I got you covered. I made a free Houdini course, consisting of 4 step by step tutorial on just that: understanding how to work with volumes, VOPs, make it your own, and export it elsewhere.
The series is completely free, but you can support me (only if you wish to do so, everything will still work if you don't!) by buying the asset pack of all 4 Intro to Houdini series combined
Part 1: Intro to Houdini Volumes and Operations
Volumes, VDBs, converting to polygons and back again, voxel size and resolution, volume boolean, smoothing, as well as tons of other techniques, tips and tricks to elevate your knowledge. This intro tutorial is packed with info, so don't feel bad about watching it twice. If you feel overwhelmed, i suggest you first go through Getting Started With Houdini series, which is also free btw.
Part 2: Custom Clouds with Volume VOPs, XPU Rendering
In previous videos we learned how to use VOPs, and some basics of volumes in Houdini. And we are about to connect those two in a spectacular fashion – by creating our own custom clouds! I will show you how to use a special volume sample node, we will utilize different noises to create desired effect, and we will render it all with XPU Karma in Solaris LOPs. Let's have fun.
Part 3: Clouds Seamless Loop, VDB export, Eevee and Cycles rendering
Learn how to create seamless loop animation of our clouds, and export the resulting VDBs into blender to render with EEVEE or Cycles. We will use all the knowledge we already have from previous videos to create a looped animation of our cloud, export the cache, and use it inside of b3d to render our fluffy pretty volumes there. We will use simple expressions to create procedural animated offset of our Volume VOP noise to achieve that. As per usual, I will be covering lots of gotchas and nifty time savers, including setting up both blender render engines and shaders.
Part 4: Custom Animated Clouds for UE5
Create great looking atmospheric mist effects for Unreal Engine 5. As a final piece of our workshop, we will create spritesheets with SideFX labs tool. We will then tweak the master material to dial in the look we need to create volumetric looking mist over mountain, using just a plane with a texture.
What now?
If you finished this course, congratulations! You now know more about how to work with volumes in Houdini, and in any other DCC in general – especially if we talk about VDB volumes, which are standardized across all 3D applications (almost seamless interop today really). The next learning part will be to create the volume sims inside of Unreal Engine Niagara system (coming soon). Still, the videos above should give you a feel for what's up, and will help you feel less lost if you have to deal with it in other apps (because H is so 2023 amarite?).
Catch me on marketplace of ideas, X the everything app (not my words lol) if you wanna stay connected.
– song
