Modeling & Rendering a Quartz Crystal in Houdini 16 

yeah I get that too. especially when you try and follow along, but nothing works (I think using houdini 18 was a mistake lol)

yeah exactly

Maybe it's because using Houdini is most widely considered a self abusement to the majority of digital artists

李䶮 the abuse only makes you stronger mate!!

Let's been honest, Houdini is a lot of work and little fun if you just want to make stuff, those who excel at it already have a mind that integrates the technical with the creative. Most artists operate heavily on the creative side. In short; Houdini is a pain in the ass.

@@Bizarro69 As someone who comes from programming and has only used Blender for anything 3d... Houdini gets my pants wet man. It is soooo good. If u know how to program and have a decent understanding of how the geometry/shading pipeline and solvers work on an implementation level, it’s the opposite of a pain in the ass. Blender is the opposite of parametric in almost every aspect. Blender is the opposite of Houdini. And it... for a large part... is a pain in the ass 😅 Houdini can’t be a pain in the ass... ok, maybe the naming of the nodes...

much appreciated, you saved me a lot of headaches

@@lm96gatling No problem, it drove me nuts for a little bit. Glad it helped.

Hey man I think I'm on the part you are talking about but still don't understand completely

@@hayden7524 When you display the output of the first boolean and you see small inclusions, but then move down the tree and display the output of the second boolean and there is no output then you are experiencing the issue I ran into. You will only encounter this if you follow the EXACT dimensions and decimals used in the tutorial. If the second boolean output has large inclusions displayed in your viewport then whatever rendering problem you're seeing is coming from something else in your node tree.

Hi Jon, the render sequence in this video is a time lapse. 20 minutes doesn't sound too bad. Keep in mind Mantra is a) not really fast and b) a purely CPU based engine, so your 3070 doesn't contribute. Cheers, Mo

Try to convert to vdb volume in hoodini + smooth vdb and then back from vdb to polygon, might give a trick. Maybe exporting as USD be having less artifacts...

bro, just google it - there's several answers about that

same problem here

for some reason, the video seems to skip over promoting the parm. If you middle-mouse click on the second input of the multiply VOP, you should see "Promote Parameter" which will automatically add a parameter VOP. (if you right click on the little green tab after selecting "Promote Parameter", you should be able to click "Expose nodes" to see what's created.")

@@zephyrmann hey thanks, will check that out

@@zephyrmann It's stuff like this that make Houdini such a pain the ass. You can't assume anything when teaching it. So the second a line of code or a parameter is missed the entire thing falls apart. I can't tell you how many time I've hit a brick wall in a tutorial because the VEX codes doesn't work for no reason.

I definitely can use the mountain node in the latest 20.0.547 production build are you sure that's the case?

Do by yourself :) Use dispersion in render engines with wavelength (Spectral Ray Tracing). I highly recommend use "Photon Mapping" sampling or "unbiased path tracing", in Photon Mapping most accurate is SPPM - Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping (use 100 Million with 1000 passes, its progressive so you can stop rendering when its be looking good without any damage), CPPM is great but its available only in Mitsuba render and its pain. Octane has PT+PM, Direct Light+PM | Redshift has PT+PM | Maxwell has Unbiased PT | YafaRay has SPPM, PT+PM, Direct Light+PM, Pure PM with ability to save calculated Photon Map | Luxcore has Metropolis Light Transport (MLT on CPU only), Biderectional PT (fast but bad for complex caustics + CPU only) + PM, PT+PM with ability to save Photon Map, but it don't has passes so it calculated only once and limit is 100 Million photons with additional settings. Ordinary PM calculated only once while SPPM can calculate 100 Million photons with each pass (unlimited amount of passes), on my CPU - I5 9400f and I7 3770k it usually takes up to 4-5 hours in 1080p for still image in YafaRay and Luxcore (GPU slow too), best solution is Unbiased Path Tracing but its slow as hell and SPPM, everything else be having low quality caustics and dispersion... ordinary PM is good unless you have complex caustics - its be not enough photons (even max 100 Million) and caustics be very blurry, ordinary Path Tracing will take forever to render caustics and a lot of rays just miss + for fireflies everywhere (might take few hours or up to whole day for still image on GPU depending on render), Unbiased PT never miss rays and its most accurate rendering method so its best for any case but it veeeeery slow. My favourite is Maxwell, Luxcore, YafaRay, Octane. I prefer to use diamond like material - IOR 2.417 + Dispersion 0.044 not sure what value of dispersion and IOR in glass prism...