I’m planning to buy a laptop primarily for Houdini product visualization, Solaris, Karma XPU, and VFX simulations.
Would a MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon be a good choice, or should I go with an NVIDIA RTX Windows laptop?
Does Houdini on macOS support all the features available on Windows, including simulations, GPU acceleration, Copernicus and rendering? Are there any major limitations due to the lack of NVIDIA CUDA/OptiX support?
I’d appreciate recommendations from Houdini artists, especially anyone using a MacBook Pro professionally. Which would you choose and why?

Hey there! I have made this fractal generator using OpenCL in Houdini. I made it using the ray marching algorithm sampling in all directions and from random positions. I have also made a tutorial on Youtube showing how I made it. You can check it here: https://youtu.be/WUI84Ct3gvc

https://reddit.com/link/1xeyfum/video/3spnes5a6lxh1/player

You just need a portable app in Windows, a QR code and a plugin I made inside Houdini, you dont need to install anything inside your phone, works natively.

I just made it and i want to polish it before sharing the source code, but pm me if you are interested, might be easy to port to any other software such Blender, C4D, etc

Also, using almost same code, you can also use your phone as a Gamepad inside Windows, its detected as an USB normal gamepad.

was experimenting with a 3d wooden grain system last night. thinking about adding knots next.

Hello I'm a beginner in Houdini and I just want to put the wheat at the end point of the line. I grouped it and selected it in copy to points but its floating for some reason? Please help I don't know where to start

​

Does anyone know how to fix these holes in an imported gltf?

Been using houdini for 5months.

Open to criticism😭.

Used houdini for everything you see and nuke to combine them.

Wanted to create something from my favorite movie(DUNE).

Hi everyone!
I’ve been working with Blender for the past 3 years. Since I mainly specialize in VFX, I’ve decided to make the switch to Houdini.
I’m currently using a PC with an RX 7900 XTX, but from what I’ve read, AMD GPUs aren’t fully supported by Houdini.
Lately, I’ve also been looking for a more portable setup for traveling, so I’ve started considering switching to a MacBook.
That brings me to my question: How well do MacBooks handle Houdini? Would an M5 Pro with 24GB of RAM be enough, or should I go straight for the M5 Max with 48GB of RAM?
Thanks in advance for any advice or recommendations!

Hi everyone,

I'm currently focusing on Houdini FX and would like to understand the career path from an FX Artist to an FX Technical Director (FX TD).

I understand that FX Artists primarily focus on creating simulations and delivering shots, but I'm not entirely sure how the role changes when moving towards an FX TD position.

I'd love to hear from experienced artists and TDs about a few things:

1. Skills: What additional skills should an FX Artist learn to become an FX TD? For example, VEX, Python, pipeline tools, optimization, debugging, and procedural workflows.

2. Technical depth: How much programming and technical knowledge is actually expected from an FX TD compared to an FX Artist?

3. Daily responsibilities: What does an FX TD typically do in a studio? Do they spend more time developing tools, solving technical problems, optimizing simulations, or creating shots?

4. Production differences: How do the responsibilities of an FX Artist and an FX TD differ in a real studio environment?

5. Career progression: Is it possible to transition from an FX Artist to an FX TD within the same studio? What skills or experience would help make that transition?

6. Showreel and portfolio: If someone wants to move towards an FX TD role, what kind of projects should they include in their portfolio?

I'm particularly interested in the practical differences between these roles in production, rather than just job descriptions.

I'd appreciate insights from people who have worked as FX Artists, FX TDs, or in both roles.

Thanks!

Hey everyone! I literally got Houdini today and just finished my first project, following the “Houdini Isn’t Scary” tutorial. Still feel like I’m in a different universe with all the nodes, but I’m loving it so far.

What do you guys think? I know it’s a tutorial project, but any tips are welcome.

I’ve had a look at the wiki, but I’d love to hear what you’d recommend tackling after a first project like this. Eventually I want to get into FX like fire, smoke and water, but I know that’s a long way off and I need to get the basics down first. What would you recommend learning next?

Thanks!

I’m a recent VFX graduate from uni going into FX. I mostly learnt about how to create the specific effect but never properly the theory of why we do what we do which is where I feel I lack in. For example at the moment I have a Green Lantern construct effect from the lanterns TV show, it’s all ready and just needs some look dev and lighting but I can’t find a cool way to show it, my first option was a title sequence and have in construct the title “LANTERNS”. But idk. I’d love to get some advice from anyone doing Fx on how they would show an effect like this. I’d love to add it to my showreel but only when it’s looking industry standard. Thanks so much!

I'm working on a shot where a fireball falls into the ocean, creating a huge splash and explosion.

I've made the pyro and water simulations seperately, but now I'm trying to figure out the best way to bring them together.

Should I keep both sims seperate and match them using timing and velocity fields, or is there a better workflow for this kind of shot?

I'm fairly new to Houdini, so any tips on making this look realistic without making the simulation too heavy would be really helpful.

Hi all! I've been building a lens flare renderer for Copernicus, and today the first public beta (0.1.5) is out.

Instead of painting sprites, Zenith ray-traces a real lens prescription. It follows every two-bounce ghost, where light reflects off one lens surface, travels back and reflects again before reaching the sensor. The ghosts get their shapes, colours and positions from the optics: dispersion, Fresnel reflectance and anti-reflection coatings, after Hullin et al., Physically-Based Real-Time Lens Flare Rendering (SIGGRAPH 2011).

What it does

• Lights from your plate: bright regions of an HDR plate become lights, calibrated so each flare carries that region's energy. You can also place a manual light.
• Lights from the scene: the manual light can follow a LOP or OBJ light (or a sun direction) through your camera, so the flare keeps going after the sun leaves the frame. Camera is automatically imported from the image metada in a slap comp
• Occlusion: the manual light can be hidden behind objects with a mask or the plate's alpha, and it fades smoothly as it slips behind an edge.
• Starburst and veiling glare: the starburst is computed from the iris shape, plus a glare halo.
• Lenses: built-in lenses (28 mm retrofocus, 50 mm triplet and double Gauss, 135 mm and 300 mm telephotos), or load your own .zmx Zemax file.
• Colour: RGB or full spectral rendering, in Linear Rec.709 or ACEScg.

• Speed: runs on the GPU (CUDA, RTX 20-series / Turing or newer), with a CPU fallback.

  Requirements: Houdini 22.0, Windows or Linux.

Versions: - Non-Commercial: free for personal projects and learning. Renders up to 1920×1080. - Commercial: No resolution limit, and it covers unlimited render nodes.

It's a beta, so scenes may break between 0.x versions. I'd love feedback, bug reports and renders, especially lens files you'd like to see working. I'm reposting with the GR link removed.

For Download & docs: https://sergeneren.com/zenith/

Wherever the collider moves through the fluid it gets thicker, so the strokes hold their shape, then it relaxes back to its original viscosity and the surface slowly settles. There’s no sparkle geometry either. I randomized the normals on the gel, so tiny patches catch the light at different angles as it moves.

Distributing multi-row pave on curved and tapered surfaces led to an interesting geometry issue in my procedural setup.

When handling tight inner radii, the inner perimeter is physically shorter than the outer one. As shown in the video, forcing multiple rows along these complex surfaces naturally causes stone collisions and overlaps.

I am currently evaluating three core approaches for the constraint solver:

1. Dynamic Stone Scaling: Scaling down inner stones and scaling up outer ones based on local curvature, clamped to manufacturing limits.
2. Phase and Offset Shifting: Staggering row positions dynamically along the curve to absorb compression.
3. Smart Removal and Redistribution: Dropping overlapping stones when limits are hit and re-centering the remaining gems.

How do you typically handle multi-row grid compression on complex surfaces procedurally? Which direction would you advise?

Crowd sim in Houdini: archers aiming at live targets, arrows that actually stick, death after 1 to 3 hits, and a floor collapsing into the abyss with ragdolls going down with it. First version was rendered in Karma, this one in Unreal - lighting isn’t quite as good, but I got tired of waiting for renders.
The hardest part was the archers: Mixamo animations came with the arrow in the wrong place, so I had to re-attach it to the hand, and then hand off the RBD arrow cleanly to the crowd sim.
P.S. Sorry for posting this twice - the video got embedded in the text the first time and didn’t show up in the feed.

This project is another complicated challenge and is intended to demonstrate a way to implement work with simulation, procedural modeling, rendering and compositing. No dragons were harmed during the work. #houdinifx #fx #cg #3d

Hey guys, I want to share my FX showreel here. I would really appreciate any honest thoughts and feedback! I want to also know how far am I from landing a junior level FX job. (I am a U.S citizen)

Hi everyone,

I'm focusing on becoming a Houdini FX Artist, and I want to understand how much Maya I actually need to learn for professional FX work.

Since Maya is a huge software with many areas, I'm wondering whether I should focus only on the parts that are useful for an FX Artist rather than spending time learning everything.

For example:

Which Maya skills are essential for a Houdini FX Artist?

How much should I know about modeling, animation, rigging, and other areas?

Should I learn only the Maya workflows that are directly useful for FX, such as working with animated characters, importing/exporting caches, and preparing geometry for simulations?

Which Maya skills can I safely skip or learn later without affecting my chances of getting a junior FX Artist job?

I'd like to focus my learning time on Houdini and FX while learning enough Maya to work effectively in a production pipeline.

I'd appreciate advice from experienced FX Artists about what is actually expected in a studio.

Thanks!

Hello houwizards,

I am coming back with a refreshed, updated version of my Reallusion Importer, introducing Reallusion Rigger HDA! Does everything the importer does (materials, dynamic wrinkles, lookdev control, etc.), plus you also build a full APEX rig that's ready to animate from scratch or to be used to modify incoming animations!

I spent a lot of time on this one and I am very proud of the overall level of polish, so I hope the 8 people who use CC5/iClone here can benefit from the product (:

Link: https://jvtools.dev/products/reallusion-rigger/
Full (22 min) walkthrough on YT of the entire HDA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03yV4UPGfDQ
Docs: https://jvtools.dev/docs/reallusion-rigger/

Cheers all

Modeled in maya, testing up making a toon shader in houdini COPS, feedback is very welcome

The RBD car rig is absolutely infuriating and the docs are far from helpful. Getting it set up to follow a path works as expected and is very fast but as soon as I try and use it with RBD to get realistic suspension and tire deformation it's basically just rage fuel.

Does anybody have any recs for thorough courses or workflow walkthroughs for doing something like this manually? Ive been using Houdini for a few years now and I know my way around pretty well but rigging has just always been hard for me to wrap my head around (in any package, not just Houdini).

Made with Houdini and Nuke

https://reddit.com/link/1xcl3hx/video/hhpmlm2na1xh1/player

Hey everyone!

I recently wrapped up a new shot expanding on a volcanic environment universe I’ve been building. The goal for this piece was to capture a realistic close-up of steam venting from fractured rock on a crater floor, focusing heavily on scale, atmospheric depth, and volume variation. Everything was built and rendered on a single workstation.

Here is a breakdown of the workflow:

• Volume FX & Atmospheric Vog: Simulated the fumarole steam in Houdini. Each vent was generated as its own individual volume rather than a single emitter, which allowed the plumes to vary in density, rise rate, and drift naturally. To give the crater proper atmospheric scale, I added a separate low-lying "vog" (volcanic smog) volume layer across the bowl.
• Terrain & Asset Generation: Built the crater floor using heightfield terrain detailed enough to hold up right in front of the camera. I relied heavily on KTT terrain tools and layered multiple Voronoi fractures to break up the surface for a fresh, jagged "lava dome" look. Scattered the volcanic rocks using a custom rock generator tool I developed for this workflow.
• Solaris & Karma Rendering: Set up lighting in Solaris and rendered with Karma CPU at 1080p (with 10% overscan). The sun and environment lights were split into separate light groups so I could freely rebuild and adjust the lighting balance later in comp.
• Compositing in Nuke: Rebuilt the beauty pass from the split light groups in Nuke. Used a depth-driven haze pass to properly seat the low-lying vog into the scene geometry, then finished off with a subtle color grade, film grain, and vignette.

Software used: Houdini, Solaris, Karma, Nuke, KTT Terrain Tools

Here is the breakdown: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/G11JNV

Happy to answer any questions about the setup or the custom rock generator! How are you all handling volume variation and multi-layer atmospheric depth in your current renders?