Houdini Vellum Workflow on The Battle for Bazoches

Taught by Liam Whitehouse
Duration:
2 hours 49 minutes
Software Version:
20 
Launch Date:
September 2024 
Course Number:
HOU235
3D
This course, from professor and VFX artist Liam Whitehouse, covers the Houdini Vellum workflow for creating ropes, cloth of different types, soft body objects, deforming fur objects, and rigid body dynamic simulations. Houdini Vellum is unique in that in combines various simulation systems together and allows them to seamlessly interact together in a realistic way to create amazing vfx including cloth attached to ropes and soft bodies covered in fur.

In this course, you will create several vellum scenes and take a look into the various controls of each constraint system so that you can recreate complex dynamic objects for your own action packed vfx sequences. Assets for this course feed into our medieval castle siege shot from the VFX308: Battle for Bazoches course.

Liam Whitehouse is an Australian based senior VFX artist who has been in the 3D industry since 2003. He has worked on various projects over the past 21 years including most recently environments in The Fall Guy, underwater environments in Aquaman 2, Lindon forests in The Rings Of Power, photorealistic canyon environments for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney Plus, and the hollow earth environments for Godzilla vs Kong, as well as photogrammetry rocks in Avatar 2.
 

Class Listing

Class 1: Overview

A look at the project files and learning about the various systems of Vellum and how we can use them to create simulated dynamic elements in our vfx sequence. Simulation systems including ropes, hair, cloth, soft bodes and rigid bodies can be simulated interacting together using vellum, so we will see an into to how this can be setup.

Class 2: Rope & Cloth

How to setup ropes attached to cloth using Vellum string constraints and cloth constraints. We will look at settings to control the flexibility of the rope and the folding of the cloth. We will also see how to create procedural rbd vellum objects which interact and simulate with the cloth and the rope dynamics together.

Class 3: Cloth simulations

An overview of vellum cloth simulations in Houdini. We will use a tent asset which is blowing in the wind outdoors and look at how we can control all the functions for vellum cloth to replicate different types of fabric, control how resistant the fabric is to folding or gravity and also setup a rippling wind effect on our scene.

Class 4: Simulation

We combine our Vellum knowledge to attach vellum ropes, cloth simulation and RBD objects to an operational physics-based object. By implementing RBD simulation using the bullet solver and attaching vellum ropes and cloth to our object, we can get high detail animation which gives us a great sense of scale and weight.

Class 5

How to setup soft body objects and control their flexibility and compression resistance, as well as how to set the inflation and internal air pressure of soft body simulations. How to attach dynamic hair systems to soft body deforming objects and how to add the Karma XPU hair shader to render your fur vfx from Vellum.