We’re going to start off the course with a look at various methods of procedural modeling in Houdini. We’ll go through examples of some of the commmon modeling nodes, and then put everything together to create a procedural Haeckel-inspired organism.

We’ll break apart the various methods of instancing geometry to points. We’ll learn about how to control their attributes through vex and vop operators, and how to randomize or use animated instances in production. Out demo for this week will be a procedurally animated garden.

This lesson will focus on the core concepts of particles and particle behavior in Houdini. We’ll learn various methods of controlling particle behavior, leading to a demo project of a particle-human being formed from abstract clusters of environment particles.

We’re going to break down rigid-body simulations this week, learning how to art-direct and control bullet-solver simulations. We’ll focus on choreographing a simulation where parts of the simulation are controlled by an underlying animation, while other parts are allowed to break free and become simulation objects.

Houdini’s vellum solver is great for more than just cloth. While we will cover cloth, we’ll mainly focus on building a layered granular simulation for this week. We’ll learn how to set up and use vellum constraints, how to art-direct vellum simulations, and how to have vellum objects interact with other Houdini objects.

This week is all about volumetric fluid simulations. We are going to take a big tour of FLIP fluids and volumetric smoke simulations. We’ll go into various solver settings and cover meshing fluids, as well. For our demo project, we will combine both a volumetric smoke simulation and FLIP simulation to make something truly weird.

KineFX is Houdini’s new system for procedural rigging. While KineFX is still under development, we want to make sure to get you up to speed with as much info as we can, so you’ll be ready to run when it becomes fully production-ready. This week will focus on building a character rig in KineFX. In addition to building a rig, you’ll also learn how to apply motion-capture clips to it.

Fractals, recursive forms, and growth algorithms. The entire world of your imagination is open to you, once you get a proper grip on Houdini. In this lesson, we are going to explore some math-heavy, and some easier low-tech, ways of making intricate designs.