Houdini Boat Destruction

After going the Houdini Bootcamp series I wanted to try out some of Steven Knipping’s tutorials. I’ve heard lots of good things about Applied Houdini so I figured I’d start with his free videos and see how I liked them.

In this one he walk you through creating a row boat using procedural modeling techniques and then dynamically destroying it. You end up spending more time modeling the boat then actually doing the rigid sim. I found the modeling aspect actually pretty interesting. I have been doing traditional poly-modeling in Maya for a while now so this brought a new prospective on how to approach modeling. You end up using a lot of splines to define the edges of the model and then interpolating between the them. It was cool in the end to play around with the parameters and seeing the boat change shape and size.

What I like about Steven Knipping’s videos is that he explains a lot of the basics knowledge behind how the sims work, and he uses the standard nodes in constructing networks. The last tutorial series I went through the instructor spent most of the time showing the shelf tools which left you with little understand of how to control the sims. In the end the technique in this video is very similar to what he shows in the rigids 1 videos. You fracture the model using voronoi fracture to break up the model, then construct a glue network to hold the pieces together until a force is imparted on them greater than a given threshold.

Check out my final sim result below.