DescriptionNo Particles. No programming. No plugins!This tutorial will explain you how to build a basic crowd system, without any particle, programming or plugin. You will only need to plug nodes into each others. This allows you to have a system that is easy to manage, understand and edit. For yourself or for your coworkers. Houdini Escape, not MasterSince we won't be using particles, this allows you to use Houdini escape, which is Houdini Master's little brother. It does not have POPs (particle operators), but it does have CHOPs (Channel operators), which we will cover extensively here. And it has the advantage of a much more attractive price than Houdini Master. Cheap in the making, Grand in the resultOn top of this, we will be using free motion capture clips. So, all in all, this system will not only be easy to deal with, it will also be cheap to make, still keeping in mind a very high standard for our final result. Prerequisites and personal noteAlthough you do not need to be an expert in houdini at all to appreciate and learn from this tutorial, it assumes you have basic houdini knowledge. You should at least be able to navigate in the interface. If you don't there are already tons of other tutorials on houdini's basics. But even if you do not have those basics, this tutorial could be even more interesting, since it can show you that building a system that seems complex is actually easy and intuitive within houdini's mindset. Some of the reasons behind this are its powerful procedural nature and the fact that you don't need to be a developer. Simply pluging nodes to each others allows you to get so much further than with any other software. So you get the change to build a system that has all the advantages, it is easy to create, easy to evolve and you have full control over the end result and the path you take. Some topics covered on the wayCHOPS: we will spend quite some time in CHOP in order to deal with our motion capture clips. We will also build CHOP otls. Python expressions: I said no programming, but we will still write a few expressions. If you do not have a programmer's soul, don't step away from this, as I spend the time to make this easy to understand. And they will mostly be basic mathematic operations. Division, mutiplication, addition and substraction, no complex math. I let houdini handle the heavy stuff. OTL creation: We will build a few along this tutorial. If you are not familiar with the power that otl can bring to your houdini skills, this should enlighten you. Other nodes: We will spend quite some time with my dear friends attribute transfer SOP, copy SOP and foreach SOP. Those guys solve a lot of my problems. Performance monitor: This is a very nice tool that allows you to find out what is going when your scene becomes surprisingly slow. I have unfortunately witnesses too few people use it, so I make sure its usage is demystified. WATCH 5 MINUTES OF FREE EXTRACTS!Check below in the gallery for 4 extracts of this video tutorial and one render, which is what the tutorial aims to. What this tutorial does NOT coverAlthough quite a lot is covered during those 3 hours and 40 minutes of videos, here is what not to expect from it, in order to avoid disappointment: character to character collisions: Characters will be able to avoid some static obstacles, but they won't avoid each others. You would definitely need particles or programming to achieve this. This could be covered in an advanced version of this tutorial. Feel free to let me know in the forum at the bottom of the page if you are interested in this subject. rendering: This is out of the scope of this tutorial. I will explain how to build a system up to the point where you have a crowd of skeletons that you can use to skin some characters. But the skinning and rendering are not covered. That said, I provide below the hip file that generated the render displayed in the gallery. You can understand a lot on the rendering process by looking at it. I made sure it is very clear, by leaving only the bare minimum and writing a lot of comments inside. But as you can see, you can still get pretty decent results without dealing with those topics, so... dive in! Gallery
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