Voronoi houdini biography

My goal was to have an idea on Houdini's background and evolution.
PRESENTER BIO | Columbia University AAD graduate focused on computational design for architecture.
Link in Bio - Discover how to use bounding boxes in Houdini to simplify tasks like stacking and alignment.

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Created and written by Fady Kadry. Edited by Leif Pedersen

Precious Treasure

Dragon Treasure is a project by Fady Kadry and is inspired by fantasy aesthetics. This tutorial highlights some fundamental pipeline benefits of geometry instancing and procedural shading for treasure and environments with RenderMan for Katana and Houdini.

Shading Treasure

The gold treasure material is a very simple shader. Its textural detail is driven by a Voronoi procedural driving reflective roughness attributes. The pattern setup is a Voronoi noise with a large Voronoi scale connected to the roughness gain component, this allows for a rich textural quality which adds a dirty and ancient feel to the treasure.

Simple shading goes a long way with procedural patterns

Interactivity Optimizations

It’s incredibly important to get these 200+ million coins to render in a quick and optimized fashion and more importantly, parsing the scene efficiently is crucial for interactivity. Using instancing to achieve this really helped keep deadlines on track, as the first pixel went from 2

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Animations & Videos

The following is an incomplete list of animations and videos that my colleagues, students and I have produced alongside various publications. Feel free to use, but please remember to give appropriate credit and reference to the journal articles.

Flight through Schoen’s Gyroid Minimal Surface

Ref: S.T. Hyde and G.E. Schröder-Turk, “Geometry of Interfaces: topological complexity in biology and materials”, Interface Focus 2(5), 529-538 (2012)

Making sense of a pear-shaped world (by Philipp Schönhöfer)

Ref: Philipp W. A. Schönhöfer, Laurence J. Ellison, Matthieu Marechal, Douglas J. Cleaver, and Gerd E. Schröder-Turk, “Purely Entropic Self-Assembly of the Bicontinuous Ia3d Gyroid-Phase“, Interface Focus 7(3), 20160161 (2017)

Credit: Philipp W.A. Schönhöfer

Construction of 8-srs structure (by Thomas Pigeon)

Credit: Thomas Pigeon, Paris

Gyroid assembled from flying puzzle pieces (by Stuart Ramsden)

Credit: Stuart Ramsden (ANU)

Universal, effectively hyperuniform tessellations from Lloyd’s algorithm

Ref: M.A. Klatt, J. Lovr

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Intro

What made Houdini what it is today? I thought that might be a good question to answer, especially if we are digging into all the uses of the software over a period of articles. You can find all of them: HERE. Houdini has played a huge part in my life, and I was so excited for my first Houdini job, I got the SideFx logo tattooed on my arm. So, let's give Houdini a spotlight article and go over her history, the development, and why it is so popular as a VFX software.

A *Brief* History of Houdini

Houdini or PRISMS as it was called back in the day, was created in 1987. PRISMS was a software combination of C programs that a company called Omnibus was using at the time. The creators of SideFx; Kim Davidson and Greg Hermanovic then decided to take this software that they had created using these programs, and throw it into the world of computer graphics. PRISMS had a few versions of development before it was called Houdini. This is a full list of them:

1.0 Published 1987: A new motion editor and modeler ad