Where to start with Houdini
I have been a 3D artist for 5 years but have recently decided to start learning Houdini. I have been a huge Blender user for the last 3 years. I enjoy every moment in the program and have really been thrilled with the results I have managed to get out of Blender. It is such a great piece of software and the community is amazing! But recently I have become real fond of the procedural workflow. I headed over to SideFX and downloaded Houdini. But now what? Where do I start?
I saw that they have tutorials on their site but they are for version 12 and so I thought I’d head to Google. So I jumped into the deep end, head first, searching for “Houdini 15 tutorials” and watched any tutorial that came my way. The tutorials were concise and clear but for the most part I sat there scratching my head not knowing what anyone was talking about. Add $BBX to the X value?? Why? What is $BBX? Attribute names flew over my head at a million miles. I was way out of my depth and needed help! The only problem is there isn’t much help out there. That is until, I found some.
The most obvious place to start was back at the beginning. I headed back over to the SideFX website, where there are countless tutorials from the basics all the way through to master classes. I started at the very beginning, at the Getting Started module. So far the version issue hadn’t been an issue. So after completing those, I headed over to the First Steps Intro module. These lessons were exciting. Each lesson is packed with 3–5 examples and you get to build them all from the ground up. They are super clear and it gave me a super confident feeling in tackling this huge beast. I have decided to skip over the next module called First Steps Light Shade & Render as I can always head back there when I am ready to render something out of Houdini. Currently I am just interested in learning how to create procedural assets and fx.
The next step for me is to tackle the Next Steps Procedural Modeling module. It looks daunting but I’m sure I’ll make it out alive. For anyone interested in learning Houdini, I just thought I would recommend starting at the source. Once I have a solid understanding, there are a few great channels I intend checking out.
Links
Getting Started
First Steps Intro
First Steps Light Shade Render
Next Steps Prodedural Modeling
Next Steps Procedural Animation
Master Classes
