Learning the basics
This was my first week working with Houdini and learning the node based and procedural workflows. I actually found I was often more comfortable diving into an Attribute Wrangle node trying to achieve my desired effects through VEX than hunting for the correct node. However, I’ve learned that reverse engineering everything isn’t the way, and having some tutorials to follow and learn from helped tremendously as opposed to building on my own.
To get to know houdini a bit more and what it is capable of, I thought starting off with a simple project would be the way to go. I had recently taken a stroll through Duke Gardens and this chrysanthemum seemed like the perfect thing to model because of the repetitive nature of the petals.
Reference
Houdini Render
One of the things I could have done to improve this would be to increase the amount of noise for the direction that the petals are facing. That noise is present, but only has a minor effect. It’s further hidden by the twist node being applied at the end to cause the petals to curve, but as a first project I am happy with how it has turned out.
My first attempt at this solution involved trying to rotate each face on a sphere, then copy a petal to each point. I also tried out some VEX and attribute wrangles to get the primitives to behave as desired. But this resulted in a little too much clutter and some odd scaling issues.
Instead of rotating each primitive, I just rotated the normal of each point. This helped keep the location of the petals much more consistent and solved the scaling issue I was having before. This would have been a great place to offset the points or scatter some more for a less uniform distribution. But after this point I was satisfied enough to create the stem and leaves and move on.
One of the demos from the course was creating an iris to learn more about the procedural nature and node based workflow of Houdini. This is an iris I created while following along with the Rebelway tutorial.
It’s definitely a learning curve to use the node based workflow instead of reverse engineering everything through code, but it will take some time to learn what nodes are available.