Houdini Fundamentals, Collection 3

In this course, taught by Arihant Gupta and part of our Houdini Fundamentals series, you will learn the concepts of creating step by step production-ready flip workflows. We'll explore how breaking down flip to its bare minimum can simplify scenes to ultimately create complex looking fluid simulations.

In addition, we'll cover optimizing simulations using narrow banding and adaptivity and will take a look at the all-new whitewater system that was recently introduced. You will also create your very own wave tank to create ocean simulations and custom meshing workflows.

Gupta is a Vancouver-based Senior FX Artist. His love for Houdini started back in 2011 when he took masters in Visual Effects from Bournemouth University. He has worked on various projects over the past six years such as Aquaman, Detective Pikachu, Stranger Things and most recently Sonic: The Hedgehog. Flip Fluids is his speciality and he has been working on water simulations for six years.

course syllabus

A discussion about flip tanks and how we can set one up inside Houdini. Followed by the setting up a dopnet where we will take a deeper look into the flip solver and ultimately create test geometry to interact with our fluid.

The flip particles that were cached out in the previous lesson are converted into a polygonal mesh using the particle fluid surface node. A discussion of ocean displacements on our mesh.

Setting up a whitewater network from scratch, with a look at various whitewater parameters to control and optimize whitewater points.

A look at how to extract velocities from our ocean spectrum and isolate them as needed. A simpler way of sourcing our flip points and setting up a dopnet to call our ocean velocities into our flip simulation.

Using VDB nodes to make our very own custom meshing work flow. Also, a look on how to create custom vel fields to mask our mesh smoothing.

A jump back onto the whitewater side of things, with a side-by-side comparison of different results.