MOPs Plus Ident from Toadstorm Inc on Vimeo. I’ve finally released MOPs Plus, the commercial add-on to the MOPs toolkit for Houdini. It adds some fancy new toys for typography, modifying packed primitives, greebling, randomizing textures and other string attributes, Read more…
In case you haven’t seen it already, my presentation on MOPs at Houdini Hive Worldwide has been online for about a month now. Here’s the presentation: I’d forgotten to upload the example files I built during the presentation. They’ll be Read more…
This is a sort of sequel to the previous post I made about handling the Houdini.env file, and about configuring environments in general. Houdini 17.5 introduced the concept of “packages”, which are little JSON files (JSON meaning JavaScript Object Notation, Read more…
I’ve been putting off working in ACES for years now, because almost every explanation of the system I’ve tried to read online has been either extraordinarily technical and long-winded, or read like a sales pitch with no useful information about Read more…
I continually run into confusion from Houdini users about how the Houdini.env is supposed to work, what the syntax is supposed to be, or even what it does in the first place. It’s easy if you’ve been trapped in pipeline Read more…
Another year, another very very short side project. This was meant to be both an exploration of Vellum (and an attempt to see if I could force Vellum to work in 2D), and a neat little intro video for a Read more…
SideFX Software was generous enough to ship me out to the Netherlands last week to meet my partner-in-MOPs, the inimitable Moritz Schwind, and present together a little slide show about motion graphics, Houdini, and prison hooch at End User Event Read more…
Here’s a rare Maya post in 2019! I hate Maya, but sometimes it’s hard to avoid. One of the most irritating things about writing scripts for Maya is that the Python commands are totally un-Pythonic… meaning, there’s no sense of Read more…
I meant to write a post about this a long while ago, but couldn’t be arsed to do it, apparently. Sorry! Something that artists take for granted in render engines like VRay and Arnold is the ability to reflect and Read more…
Update: Imre Tuske from Weta pointed out that there’s a simpler method… it turns out that you can force expressions to evaluate inside a Wrangle by wrapping them up in backticks. So if you have a channel called “do_vexpressions” to Read more…