Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 20, 2018. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Anyone who has been waiting for a PDF version of the SideFX documentation can look forward to the new Houdini Foundations ebook. Fresh from GDC 2018, the free PDF contains all the fundamentals for a good introduction to Houdini, designed for version 16.5 of the tool. Anyone who prefers to learn with video tutorials can find a good introduction here.
Contents of Houdini Foundations
The information is divided into four chapters over 100 pages in total.
- Chapter I Overview: The first chapter provides an overview of the most important concepts and contexts in Houdini. From the interface, nodes and operators through to texturing, rendering and export, you learn the basic knowledge that you can expand with the following chapters.
- Chapter 2 Model, Animate, Render: It continues with your first Houdini scene of your own, in order to explore modeling, shaders, animation & dynamics and rendering in more detail. The aim is to model, animate and render a football in the procedural workflow.
- Chapter 3 Procedural Game Assets for UE4: The third section is devoted to the Unreal Engine 4 asset workflow. The focus is once again on procedural workflows for integrating game assets together with simulation into UE4.
- Chapter 4 Terrain Generation: Chapter four is aimed specifically at terrain building in Houdini. Heightfields, masking, layers, Erode and further features are explained here. You can find more about landscapes & toolks in the current DP issue!
Download
For further information: To the SideFX entry
