In the last post, I introduced why I want to explore Houdini and procedural tech as a Character Artist. From now on, I’ll dive deeper.

At the start of my journey, I focused mainly on two things: Curves and Points.

You can actually do a lot with just these two, especially using the Sweep Node and Copy to Points.

For example, a simple way to make a rope is by using a curve and two sweep nodes.

The first sweep transforms the spiral into columns of curves and twists them.

The second sweep then turns those curves into tubes with rounded caps.

There are other cool tricks I like to use to make this look even more interesting. A key point I'd like to emphasize is that being an "artist" learning a technical tool is a huge advantage; we can use our artistic knowledge to push the visuals further. The rope example I showed is fine, but knowing that real-world ropes have more imperfections and detail allows us to make it look much more convincing.

To achieve that result, I adjusted the Scale Along Curve setting on each of the Sweep nodes: on the first one to ensure the ends flare out, and on the second to make the tubes thinner at the ends. This already gives the rope a frayed look and makes it feel a bit more realistic.

Then, I duplicated the sweep nodes and created a thinner version with fewer columns to simulate some of the threads coming loose.

Of course, we can keep pushing this further—I’d add some noise to make the curve less smooth and add more variations here and there.

Another point I want to highlight is that this setup starts to function like a tool. By using the Recipe tool, you can essentially save this setup and reuse it whenever you want to make a rope. Each time you use it, you might add a bit more to the "tool," and over time, you’ll have a robust library.

And, as always, you can change the curve input, and everything updates automatically. You might need to adjust the twist amount—if the curve gets longer, you’ll need more twist.

In the next post, I'll talk a bit about the Copy to Points node.

See you in the next one!

Hello World!

For a few months, I’ve been learning Houdini, and you might wonder why. Houdini is typically used for simulations and tool creation, and most artists like myself never even considered opening it.

It's a fair question, and to be honest, during the first few days—or even weeks—I was questioning if this was really worth my time.

It turns out I soon realized that what kept me thinking about Houdini 24/7 was how incredibly fun it becomes once you get the hang of it. It’s a completely different way of thinking about modeling (which is my main skill and the one I wanted to test Houdini with). Plus, it opens a lot of doors that were only half-open before. By "half-open," I mean that, with time and effort, we can accomplish almost anything with traditional modeling, but in Houdini, some of those things are so easy that it makes you want to create characters just to try them.

And that brings me to the second reason I kept going: if this software can help me create things I’d usually avoid, then it's already worth the time and effort.

This blog will be personal, not a tutorial series. I'll write about my own experiences and hope to evolve along the way as I find new techniques and better methods. So, please don’t take everything I say here as absolute truth or the “right way.”

Hopefully, some of you find this helpful and maybe even start learning Houdini too.

On that note, you don’t need to buy a license to start; Houdini has an apprentice version that’s pretty good. There are some limitations, but for most things, you won’t even notice them. It’s the perfect way to start and see if this is for you.

Alright, let’s get to it.

I’ll try to include reference links at the end of each post whenever I have them.

Let’s talk a little about why procedural modeling is fun!

I was talking with a friend and showing him some things I was experimenting with, and his first thought (which is usually my thought too) was that the same thing could be done in Maya or ZBrush. But the perfect reply just popped into my mind: “but is it fun though?”

And that’s the main point—for me, working in Houdini is fun, maybe because it's a new approach after 14 years of traditional modeling.

If you've never tried it, you might wonder how different it is. Houdini uses a node-based approach for almost everything. Nodes are essentially visual scripting—a form of coding—so, in a way, you’re 3D modeling through code. Sounds crazy, I know, but it’s actually intuitive.

Let me give you an example:

Every node serves as an input. In this example:

1. Create a box
2. Taper it to make the top part smaller
3. Bevel the edges
4. Subdivide twice

One cool benefit of learning this approach is that it makes you reflect on how you’d typically do the same thing in other software and consider how to be more efficient in the future. For instance, here I used the bevel to add edge loops to preserve the cube's shape, whereas in Maya, I would probably add those edge loops manually.

Another example that highlights the power of procedural modeling is the ability to edit any parameter, which then updates everything down the node tree automatically.

I want to keep these blog posts relatively short so I can post more frequently.

That’s it for the first one. See you in the next one!

References:
Houdini Apprendice