Houdini Interior Rendering Masterclass

Wow it has been a while since the last time I updated my interior project, it turned out to become a tutorial. And it has been a pleasure to work with guys from cmiVFX. This is my first tutorial and I do hope it can help any Houdini artist to grasp more understanding and tips to do interior rendering using Houdini.

cmiVFX Releases New HOUDINI INTERIOR RENDERING GUIDE from Chris Maynard on Vimeo.

Please have a look and enjoy.

Archviz Look Dev in Houdini : Almost there!!

I'm almost there with this project. I think I can push it more with better compositions and tweaks. Will play around more with night time lighting as well.

Wide Shot

Close Up Shot

Archviz Look Dev in Houdini : Post processing try outs

After some time, I thought it's better to have sharper shadows from the sun. It gives more contrast to shadow and bring more balance to the focal points. Before I continue shading the rest of the objects and do final tweaking, I was also thinking why don't I just build the post pro work using Houdini's compositor. Taking the procedural workflow gives and advantage of flexibility, below are the compositing trees and results of the post color corrections.

Compositing Tree

Wide Shot

Close Up Shot

I'm pretty satisfied with the post color stuff, so I can just finish up the rest of the shading work and finalize the renders.

Archviz Look Dev in Houdini : Room Shading and Colors

Finished with the layout and modelling stage. I'm now doing the shading and blocking the main colors and textures for the room. I've updated my Houdini Apprentice to 12.5 and I was impressed with some of the rendering improvements. And in the same time my Apprentice HD license were expired, thinking about buying it later since I'm planning to buy a new laptop with better specs.

Archviz Look Dev in Houdini : Layout & Modelling Part 2

Medium Shot

Wide Shot

Close Up Shot

I've made another progress by adding up more stuffs and also removed things that were not contributing much to overall image composition. Play around with camera framing as well. Houdini's switch camera node has been extremely useful to help visualizing different camera angles to capture the scene. Will be adding more stuffs like cloth, some pillows, books and other thing that can add up more to the richness of the scene.

Archviz Look Dev in Houdini : Layout & Modelling Part 1

I started a WIP forum in OdForce about demystifying archviz in Houdini. Well, it has been more than a year ago and finally after some time I finally got some time, bit by bit to build a scene from scratch and start layout and modelling it. I've done with the main furnitures. Still experimenting with different layout, cameras and objects for a good composition. Next step after I'm done with layout and modelling, that would be the most exciting part : Look Development!

Chicken Brood : Instancing In SideFX Houdini

Meet Chicken Brood

Meet the Chicken Brood! My doodle result in the weekend. Haven't been tried object instancing and I find it fascinating. The purpose is just to test how Mantra performs with my old Macbook Pro. 

The image was rendered in about 25 minute with my Core 2 duo 4GB laptop. I'd say it's great and probably will use more instancing in the future for massive scenes. The model was the chicken from Modo, shaded it in Houdini. And it's easy to setup instancing and do custom attributes to alter the way the instancing works. Check Mantra Rendering for more info on instancing showcase.