Applied Houdini is back with a huge upgrade to one of my most popular tutorials, Rigids II – Structure Destruction! In this lesson we’re going to procedurally model a building that takes advantage of geometry instancing in order to create a super memory efficient and detailed rigid body simulation that is still art directable! This beautiful concrete and glass building will be held together with a custom constraint system, and then blown up over and over again when we run a bunch of simulations using Houdini’s new Procedural Dependency Graph (or PDG) workflow. These “wedges” will use TOPs nodes to run sims at the same time, render previews, burn in text, and even create final movies on disk that we can use to make decisions about our sim settings. Once we converge on a simulation that we like, we’ll shade, light, and render it in Mantra – but also as a bonus, I’ll show you how to optimally import our result into Solaris as well, using LOPs to bring our still instanced-enabled geometry over to USD so we can render our building collapse in Karma. There’s a lot to learn and love in this new update, and I hope you have fun exploring all the new ways making detailed destruction in Houdini is better than ever!
Applied Houdini is a production quality oriented series created by Steven Knipping, currently a Senior Rigid Body Destruction / FX Technical Director at Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic (Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Aquaman, Star Wars: Rogue One). Benefit from production proven workflows while also getting an in depth explanation of why things works they way they do. Best of all – each video is crammed with actual information and footnotes instead of gratuitous talking and dead space.
