Applied Houdini: Rigids

Moving on from my introduction to Houdini, I am next working through a tutorial series by Steven Knipping. I wrote a previous post about another tutorial by him on creating a boat destruction sim. He’s got a couple of different dynamics topics you can learn about, but I decided to stick with learn rigid body dynamics since that was holding my interest.

There are five different tutorials in the rigids series. Rigids 2 really has the most information in it. After that you are mostly applying the same techniques to different contexts. This was actually great for learning since each of the tutorials reinforces ideas from the previous video. Unfortunately, I am writing this post a little while after I completed the series so I can’t remember a lot of the details from the process. Basically though, the idea is that you break the model up using voronoi fracture and then use various glue networks to constrain the pieces together. By using different constraints and animating parameters you can art direct and create different types of effects.

I really enjoyed playing around with the settings and see how much the final result was effected. One thing I struggled with was that some of the attributes were generated randomly, which meant that when I would want to make a some tweak to the sim it could lead to widely different results, since I didn’t have complete control over some of the settings. In the end, I set up a few different sims with different settings and then choose the one I liked the most. However, in the future I would like to investigate how I can get finer control over the sim. Also, I really want to go back and do the updated Rigids 2 tutorial since it looks like he includes lots of new Houdini features.

Check out my final results below. I’ll create more post in the future as I work through Knipping’s different series.