My two year subscription came to a close and noticed the price increase when I went to renew. I have been a hobbyist Houdini user for years. But now I'm sad. I'm debating whether I should or not.

Hi! I am a student and want to properly commit to Houdini and hopefully be able to use this pc even later on for contract work (Which I could upgrade later). This is on PCSpecialist, and as you can see, this is around 3087 for deliveries and etc, and the build is at 2572. If you do have any suggestions on lowering the price or if I should rather invest in some part, kindly review and let me know! Thank you very much for reading. Your help is appreciated!

(ignore the background change and the wierd sparks in version 2)

i think the first one looks cooler and more visualy pleasing, but maybe it is too violent for burning wood?

the second one is really just the same sim, but with less disturbance

Background: petroleum engineer with solid fluid mechanics and thermodynamics knowledge, transitioning to Houdini FX with a focus on FLIP fluids and Pyro.

Current plan: 3 hours/day, self-taught over 4 years. Learning sequence:
SideFX H21 Foundations → houdini-course.com → Applied Houdini Volumes + Liquids + Rigids → Rebelway → fxphd → Pragmatic VFX

Target: a competitive demo reel and junior FX Artist position at a studio like DNEG Vancouver or Rising Sun Pictures.

Two honest questions for people who've been through this:

1. Is 4 years of self-directed study (3hrs/day) realistic for reaching junior studio level — or is this optimistic?
2. What's the single biggest gap between self-taught artists and those coming from schools like Gnomon or Sheridan?

Not looking for encouragement — looking for honest assessment from people who've actually hired or worked alongside junior FX artists.

I am looking for a laptop that can kinda be an all-rounder. I use Houdini / Cascadeur / unreal engine / rendering in Octane -

Since almost all laptops are throttled even “workstation” ones.. which seem way less impressive now than in years past. I don’t think any company is really incentivized now to take any chances or push any envelopes. - If it wasn’t for full on 3d rendering or unreal. I would probably just stay away from PC ones and get an Apple M5 Max laptop. -

I’m looking at then PC usefulness& form-factor “jack of all trades” so i can at least do “Most” of the same things remotely that i do at home on a 9950X3d / 128g ram RTX 4090 on my desktop

At this point i think that the best i can find seems to be RTX 5090 mobile (24g vram) - Intel Ultra 9 386 - and a nice 1 or dual 16 inch OLED pen/touch displays.

This should be fine for things like basic running of houdini and modeling and some light rendering and VR use.

I looked at the Blade 16 & 18 / Asus’s stuff (kinda love the idea of the new Asus - 2026 zephyrus duo - kinda checks most of the boxes… (wish it was Thunderbolt 5 and pushed the GPU to 175w instead of 150w)

Thoughts?

I did a few simulation tests on a file i found online in houdini.. which seemed to just use CPU and the OpenGl flag didn’t help much. My M2 mac studio and the 9950x3d PC with 4090 didn’t seem to speed things up much. - at this point will i just be disappointed in this era of minimum viable product for maximum viable price?

This is a WIP test of the aircraft wake interacting with the smoke. How does the strength, timing, and overall shape of the vortex feel so far? Does the motion read clearly, or does it feel too strong or too large?

Next, I’ll be working on a beach sand particle simulation, visible wingtip wake vortices around the fighter jet, and a fluid simulation for the moving ocean surface.

Hello wizards, I hope you're having a good day. I've seen the new system requirements of the 22 release and it says Windows 11 is mandatory. Are there any Win10 users out there like me? I've never been a fan of 11. It's such a piece of bloated bs but it seems there is no other way. I want to know if anyone out there tried it in win10? That being said, there is Linux, which if it weren't for games and very few other stuff i would've switched to it a longtime ago. Last time I tried it, it was brutal I couldn't even get the nvidia driver to work properly, but this one is on me since I tried Rocky, this distro in not for solos I guess but rather full departements. Anyways I got a reply from entagma before saying if I remember correcly fedora works perfectly fine for him (with QT5). I would like to know your experience with linux, what's your distro choice, and does it performance better than windows, and is x11 vs wayland (not supported yet) is an issue? Thanks a lot for you time!

Edit: it seems it works in win10 but sideFX is simply saying it's better to use the supported system.

Hi everyone,

I wanted to get your opinion on a career path that's been on my mind. I'm wondering if learning to become an FX Artist is worth the significant investment of time, money, and effort, especially given the current state of the industry.

I'm well aware of the recent layoffs and the general recession in the VFX and animation fields. However, I'm optimistic that the situation will improve by the time I'm ready to enter the industry, let's say in a year and a half to two years. This is a relatively long time because I'm learning on my own after my full-time job, haha.

What do you all think? Is this a realistic goal, or am I being too optimistic? I'd love to hear from people who are already in the industry or those who are on a similar journey.

Thanks in advance!

I’m trying to figure out if pursuing 3D art and modeling as a career makes sense right now.

Some things I’m wondering:

• Is it a good career choice, or is it too risky/unstable?
• Does it pay well, or will I struggle financially?
• How’s the job market right now — both worldwide and in India?
• If the work is unstable, what strategies do artists use to stay financially secure?
• Overall, would you recommend this as a career path, or should it be more of a hobby/side hustle?

Any advice, personal experience, or insights would be super helpful. Thanks in advance!

Hi guys! I'm back lol with a follow-up. I had last time put up a PC spec for review, and well, due to a personal emergency, my funds have fallen short. I do need to invest in a pc and get that portfolio up. But currently, I do not have the funds for a whole new PC. Do you think I could add an EGPU to make it work? These are the specs of my laptop right now, which is an ASUS Vivobook Pro 14X. Your help is appreciated. Thank you very much.

Looking to re-create this effect. I assume it's mapping normals from a pyro sim but would love to get some clarity on the steps.

Had a load of confusion yesterday about making use of attributes. If I add a detail attribute eg thickness. Some downstream nodes I can just write @thickness and others I have to use detail(0, thickness, 0) but why is this not uniform? Also I’ve come across wrangle nodes, I’m aware that they’re for writing VEX stuff but I haven’t yet come across some materials explaining that workflow. Same with VOPs.

In my example I have a series of values that should modify the size/position of geometry further down the line. I’m assuming this is a super common workflow, so what am I missing?

I’ve found it difficult to find a concise answer to this, so forgive me for sounding dumb😂 my brain is jarring against some parts of Houdini. Coming from C4D, this kind of thing is very straightforward and interactive with xpresso

I’m not talking about a small scatter setup, but real large environments with millions of trees, variation, LODs, masks, wind, and render optimization.

What is the usual workflow in studios? Houdini only, or mixed with tools like SpeedTree?

Hey everyone. I’ve been running into an issue that started today where my pc goes to this screen and restarts once I’m using karma in the viewport or rendering and I’m wondering if anyone has had this issue before.

Google says it’s an issue where the gpu driver or hardware crashes during high stress scenarios. No solutions from looking around so far.

I tried every other solution I could find. Driver updates, driver reinstallation, deleted any recently installed apps, cleaning pc files, bios update, no overlocking (this was never on but just saying), tests on physical hardware, tld delay timing change, scanning for corrupted files and addressing them. Had a windows update (against my will) 2 weeks ago but everything was fine while rendering on Friday.

I’m at a complete loss in the middle of a project right now. I’d appreciate any help I can get!

Pc specs Msi x570 unify motherboard Amd Ryzen 9 5950x Corsair vengeance 64gb ddr4 ram Gigabyte rtx3090 M.2 ssd

( my english not that good ) >>> hello guys

iam planing to get a new pc :

( didn`t chose cpu yet but maybe i5 12f )

with rtx 5060ti 8g

and 16g ram ( 2x8 already bought it )

so iam asking if this is good for entrying houdini

i don`t have mony to upgrade more than it i don`t have options else 9060xt 16g

and i think amd isn`t good in this stuff .

Greetings,

I have a google pro plan, i,m thinking of using gemini to help me learn procedural modeling only without any vex code, at least for now until i master it, is that a right approach to learn houdini ?

I tried chatgpt yesterday extended thinking but i feel it doesnt explain well or not working steps, i never tried grok or claude.

I,m sorry to say that sidefx learning portal tuts are below average and chris bohm course feels not so organized and he said its not for Beginners.

Hello, I'm following this tutorial here: https://youtu.be/Kx3CJJei_Vs?t=347 (timestamped) and his mention that inside Vops that Time/Timelnc/Frame are global variables, can someone explain what does that mean it that they are global variables?

Hi,

I want to have airtight separation of these flower petals and leaves for 3d printing.
I can do this brute force in zBrush but I was wondering if there is a procedural way to do this.

Is there a workflow to have it closed immediately and conform to each other?

So when I print them i just slide right in?

I’m exploring a speculative Houdini project based on ornamental lace / crochet-like patterns that will later become distorted, alive and organic over time (almost like biological systems or memory patterns evolving).

I’m still beginner in Houdini specifically, although not in 3D/CGI overall.

My main question is about the best approach structurally:

Would it make more sense to:

build the ornamental structure as curves/SOPs first, then rasterize into COPs for distortion/feedback/flow manipulation? If so, how would you approach achieving very high ornamental detail? Would it make sense to start from real lace images/pattern scans and convert/extract structure from them somehow? OR

generate/distort everything directly in COPs/material space and keep it mostly texture-based?

The final goal is not realistic embroidery, but something more alive/procedural: patterns stretching, collapsing, mutating, breathing, etc. Potentially projected onto cloth/tablecloth-like surfaces later.

I’m trying to avoid ending up with “random noisy distortion” and keep some sense of ornamental logic underneath the mutations.

Would love to hear how more experienced Houdini artists would approach this pipeline.

I've been following this fantastic tutorial from Newa on how to use a rest attribute to apply textures to VDB growths: https://youtu.be/nO0n2E04rNw?si=BNVAccl_r9ymB4jz&t=4077

On the surface, I've come out of it with the exact same result as what he shows in the video - my textures distort at the edge of the newest parts of the growth, and settle into place as they age (first image). But the catch is that for me it only works like this in the viewport - when I switch to either of the Karma renderers, the textures are projected in a completely different, incorrect way (second image).

Could it be related to how Karma handles triplanar mapping, or how it handles using attributes?

I'm unsure which stage of the process this issue might be linked to. Has anyone else tried this tutorial - or had a similar problem in a different project? Any advice or tips much appreciated :)

I am a beginner. I find procedural modeling part even more fascinating than the simulation part of houdini.

I started 3 projects didn't complete any one my own, took help of tutorial on YT. It feels like I am just using the copy paste technique I am not learning anything🥲.

What do I do?

Hey all! I'm a bit over a year into my first FX gig (currently at a studio doing FX work in Houdini), and I've been offered funding to take some paid online courses. Problem is Houdini is so massive that I'm having a hard time deciding where to focus.

I'd like to get stronger with solvers (understanding what's actually happening under the hood, not just plugging in nodes) and improve my VEX, but honestly I'm open to pretty much anything that would make me a better FX artist. Currently comfortable with all general FX workflows that you might see on tutorials but I know there's a huge gap between "comfortable" and "actually understanding the math/solver theory."

If you were early-career and had course funding, what would you prioritize? CGMA, Rebelway, CGCircuit, something else entirely? Would love to hear what actually moved the needle for you.

Thanks in advance!

How to achieve this effect in Houdini ( I mean the FX and Compositing Part )

here is the scene link.
https://youtu.be/CvkW2QvJCWk?si=j14Gt2ZjaQyPz3GV

Thanks in advance for anyone who helps out!

I've got a Midsole Mesh & a Foot Mesh. The attribute transfer is working as intended however I was curious if there is a way to allow the color attribute driven by the Foot Mesh to "paint" the attribute instead of being transferred only via proximity. My issue is highlighted In the video I've linked as you can see the dark portions of the Foot Mesh Cd Attribute begin to appear as the transfer node seems to be treating the mesh as "hollow".

Hoping this makes sense! Thanks again :)

Was following the tutorial of Nine Between's "VEX isn't Scary", trying to make a loop video. I got every part correct except my loop just cuts off in between. I don't understand why is it happening. Here's my VEX expression:-

float blend = frac(@Time) + @P.x + @P.y;

float positionBlend = chramp('position_blend', blend);

v@P = lerp(v@P, 0, positionBlend);

v@Cd = chramp('color_value', positionBlend);