Hi, thanks for this. Excellent to see modelling tutorial for houdini - makes me closer to finally cutting cord with C4D which I only use for modelling and rendering now.
Simon, thankyou for a brilliant modelling tutorial. It's a very complete education in so much of the underlying understanding of Modeling within Houdini. I've been using it to learn Alexey Vanzhula's Modeler as everything you show is transferable. I was wondering about the texture files you provide via Gumroad as their UV layout doesn't match the included hip file where you have UV's on the proxy but not the hi-res. Are you planning an additional tutorial to cover the texturing & a lighting/render setup in Houdini too to finish the Axe project?
Awesome work, I really enjoy modelling with Houdini. Never quite felt comfortable with destructive modelling since I rarely model with a plan in mind and geometry nodes or boolean modelling with DCCs like Blender always involve a point of no return for having to fall to destructive modelling at some point before real use in projects. Having said that, I do sometimes worry about mixing boolean operations with poly modelling even with hard surface objects like this, it very easy to run into situations with mixing boolean into workflow which outputs topology that is no longer clean to edit by hand or touch-up. For example with your axe there is definitely minor artifacts in the high-poly model along some of the edges (zig zagging is apparent in the lighting etc...), most of which I suspect is just a consequence of remesh not respecting hard edges properly. I'm usually at a loss what to do in such situations aside from manual retopologizing, would love to know what your thoughts are in how you handle keeping artifacts to a bare minimum if for example you wanted to spend a bit more time working on the model without resorting to fully manually work. I do realize its partly a philosophical debate of more work to keep clean topology vs remeshing and moving on with minor artifacts, especially when the goal is for import into game engines.
There is no point of no return. We work on computers - everything is digital. You can save a backup-file before getting "destructive". Manual work is not only cleaner sometimes, but it can also be faster. If you insist on using a specific workflow excusively, then you have to pay the price (everything has a downside). This is not a philosophical problem, just the consequence of your choice.
Thank you! For this boolean workflow it is often great at hardsurface and it also depends a bit with how creative you can be to make the shape in a non-destructive way. More complex shapes can require a bit more destructive way. Topology can always be something else, I was hoping with Houdini 20 the quad remesher would solve some of the issue. It is still in beta and maybe in the future it will work better. There are some nice quadmesher out there that creates topology along the shape of the model (they are not perfect but sometimes better then remesh/voxel). This remesh/voxel to make a high poly will never follow the shape. You can increase the resolution but then Houdini might take a while if it is crazy high amount of polygons. There are other ways you can try to make highpoly modeling, like in the video I did a super rough subD modeling. In general I found using polyreduce, auto UV and voxel-highpoly will always give some minor artifacts. Currently to get the most out of the model means usually some manual tweaking. I have not seen a magic solution that works on everything. The video shows the basic form of this workflow. For the more final output I would increase the resolution on the voxel and try out more setting on UV to see what works better. If you work in a team and the output quality is approved then I just leave the setup like it is. Some of the small artifacts are hard to see when you are not zoomed in on it, which I assume for most games might be fine. Hope this helped :)
Your points are very valid. I am still looking for really good resources covering ("procedural") modeling and topology. Even if I enjoy videos like this, I think it would be great to really double down on topology best practices (based on use cases ofc.)
hi, simon, thank you for sharing your knowlege, but i wanna make a question that is not about this video, and i dont have anyone else to... 1) how can i extrude manifold (like the blender one) and 2) how can i extrude a point in houdini? thanks a lot for you channel.
Got this from you Gumroad, and took into Blender (FBX File), The Topology could be better, there is lots of lowly areas and Topo errors, but that could have been the export as it looks pretty decent in the video... Please also offer a High Poly version of this since the main has issues... I don't use Houdini, but I still learned some things that I can translate to Blender... Great work!
Simon strikes again! Beautiful demonstration.
Excellent work! Thank you for sharing this.
Hi, thanks for this. Excellent to see modelling tutorial for houdini - makes me closer to finally cutting cord with C4D which I only use for modelling and rendering now.
Simon, thankyou for a brilliant modelling tutorial. It's a very complete education in so much of the underlying understanding of Modeling within Houdini. I've been using it to learn Alexey Vanzhula's Modeler as everything you show is transferable. I was wondering about the texture files you provide via Gumroad as their UV layout doesn't match the included hip file where you have UV's on the proxy but not the hi-res. Are you planning an additional tutorial to cover the texturing & a lighting/render setup in Houdini too to finish the Axe project?
this is Soooo Satisfying man :D
Amazing thank you simon houdini,im waiting for to see new cours for you
more like this please 🎉🎉🎉
Awesome work, I really enjoy modelling with Houdini.
Never quite felt comfortable with destructive modelling since I rarely model with a plan in mind and geometry nodes or boolean modelling with DCCs like Blender always involve a point of no return for having to fall to destructive modelling at some point before real use in projects.
Having said that, I do sometimes worry about mixing boolean operations with poly modelling even with hard surface objects like this, it very easy to run into situations with mixing boolean into workflow which outputs topology that is no longer clean to edit by hand or touch-up.
For example with your axe there is definitely minor artifacts in the high-poly model along some of the edges (zig zagging is apparent in the lighting etc...), most of which I suspect is just a consequence of remesh not respecting hard edges properly. I'm usually at a loss what to do in such situations aside from manual retopologizing, would love to know what your thoughts are in how you handle keeping artifacts to a bare minimum if for example you wanted to spend a bit more time working on the model without resorting to fully manually work.
I do realize its partly a philosophical debate of more work to keep clean topology vs remeshing and moving on with minor artifacts, especially when the goal is for import into game engines.
There is no point of no return.
We work on computers - everything is digital. You can save a backup-file before getting "destructive".
Manual work is not only cleaner sometimes, but it can also be faster.
If you insist on using a specific workflow excusively, then you have to pay the price (everything has a downside).
This is not a philosophical problem, just the consequence of your choice.
Thank you!
For this boolean workflow it is often great at hardsurface and it also depends a bit with how creative you can be to make the shape in a non-destructive way. More complex shapes can require a bit more destructive way.
Topology can always be something else, I was hoping with Houdini 20 the quad remesher would solve some of the issue. It is still in beta and maybe in the future it will work better. There are some nice quadmesher out there that creates topology along the shape of the model (they are not perfect but sometimes better then remesh/voxel).
This remesh/voxel to make a high poly will never follow the shape. You can increase the resolution but then Houdini might take a while if it is crazy high amount of polygons. There are other ways you can try to make highpoly modeling, like in the video I did a super rough subD modeling.
In general I found using polyreduce, auto UV and voxel-highpoly will always give some minor artifacts.
Currently to get the most out of the model means usually some manual tweaking. I have not seen a magic solution that works on everything. The video shows the basic form of this workflow. For the more final output I would increase the resolution on the voxel and try out more setting on UV to see what works better.
If you work in a team and the output quality is approved then I just leave the setup like it is. Some of the small artifacts are hard to see when you are not zoomed in on it, which I assume for most games might be fine.
Hope this helped :)
Your points are very valid. I am still looking for really good resources covering ("procedural") modeling and topology. Even if I enjoy videos like this, I think it would be great to really double down on topology best practices (based on use cases ofc.)
hi, simon, thank you for sharing your knowlege, but i wanna make a question that is not about this video, and i dont have anyone else to...
1) how can i extrude manifold (like the blender one) and
2) how can i extrude a point in houdini?
thanks a lot for you channel.
Amazing thank you ! Always interesting to see modeling done in Houdini
I learned so much from this. Thanks for sharing! 😁
Thank you bro
Это топ!
It’s better, of course, to do this in Plasticity :)
Got this from you Gumroad, and took into Blender (FBX File), The Topology could be better, there is lots of lowly areas and Topo errors, but that could have been the export as it looks pretty decent in the video... Please also offer a High Poly version of this since the main has issues... I don't use Houdini, but I still learned some things that I can translate to Blender... Great work!
'Promo SM' 😀
This looks like a perfect environment for Ai to observe how to model
I liked.Thanks really good tuto