Term 2 is here and it began with a talk with Medhi a Houdini artist who is going to teach us Houdini for at least a month. I never worked with houdini but I’ve seen some things made with it that are just amazing, it is a 3D procedural software used a lot in the industry as it is so versatile and good.
I am excited to learn a new software and to really understand it, but the scary part is that everything is created with nodes, it can also be created on viewport but eventually everyone who uses houdini needs to mess with the nodes.
We met Medhi, and the day after we got a video tutorial explaining the software interface and a few experiences with some noise nodes to create rocks for example and with our first task – model a wood cabin! I always loved modeling, it was my first contact with 3D and it’s always good to know it.
I admit at the beggining I didn’t really understand much of the rocks exercise, nothing was really going how it was supposed to, so I just watched and took notes to begin doing the cabin. So we created a test model (for reference) and a geometry node and inside: a box and gave it the right size, then 3 more boxes that were the door and windows, have them on the right position and create a boolean node (just like maya) to have it shape the door and windows. After this we created a delete node that separated the roof and floor from the cabin structure to be possible to edit them separately.
It was a simple exercise but I learnt a lot, when creating different nodes we have a perception of the possibilities within the nodes, and in each one there are A LOT of options, which is amazing. The interface is super cool and I think… user friendly, for me at least! Some things are similiar to maya, some options and the way the software works, but takes a bit of pratice to know the place and the way some things work.
In the end this was the cabin:
The node network:
The task for this week was to add some more detail and some wood planks on the side of the walls and whatever we thought good for the cabin, using what we learnt in the session.