Hey everybody, this is Emeek and I’m here with the Houdini Tutorial. And it’s not really tutorial, I’m here to show you why Houdini kicks Maya all over the place not for the modeling, not for the dynamics, not for the particles which it does kill Maya in. Not taking it away it from Maya, Maya is wonderful and you can get the exact same results in Maya that you get in Houdini, it’s just how you get those results—I mean look at the movie industry, they all show you that Maya is completely capable but it’s just not as feature filled as Houdini. With Houdini, I don’t need to separate compositor have shake no confusion. It’s all combined right here in Houdini. Let’s see Maya key a green screen or let’s see Maya do a few things that we can do in Houdini with their compositor.

So what I’m going to do first to demonstrate this—I’m going to go up here and do my little tabs and select composite view. Now, this puts me into my composite. As you can see right here, we have all of our channels, which is object view where we was and image is where our compositing view. Now, we have this comp right here, I’m going into it on the tab the file node in and that brings in the default picture that comes with Houdini. So you can fill around with the compositing aspect. Now, if you tab this open, look at all the nodes, you can see there’s a chroma key, there’s rotoscoping, there’s masks, all the common nodes in operating that you would find to in any other compositor like Shake. So we’re going to give this butterfly a glow just to show you quick how these works.

So the first I’m going to do, right click on the output, it start typing invert because I’m going to add invert node. Now, we have this invert node. Now, what I’m going to do is I’m going to click again, I’m going to add a light, there’s a light there. So let’s kind of mess with our light a little bit, let’s make our tone angle maybe 14 like that where in with that one, that looks pretty good, just go back to your lighting, let’s see if we can bring some of this out a little bit. Now, bring our defuse down, okay that—pretty good little picture there. Now, I’m going to add an Edge detect, right click and type edge, there is my Edge detect—boom. Now, we have this funky looking pick. So now, what I want to do is I want to Blur this. So I’m going to Tab and type Blur, we’re going to add a Halo Effect, the Halo is glow to this just as an example. I’m going to pop this edge into by blur, let’s bring the controls up for my blur and make it Guardian Filter and we’ll make the size about 31 so really blur out there.

So now, after we do that, let’s add a contrast node. There’s our contrast node. Now, we’re going to set some of our contrast a little bit here. We’re going to make this one, -1.01 and we’ll make this one 2. And now, we have a really bright on his wings and stuff like here you can see what we’re going with this. Now, I’m going to add a brightness filter, there’s our bright filter, let’s do that. Now, we want to turn the brightness up can we say or down to about 0.73, that looks good—that will be good.

Now, let’s add one more node, we’re going to tab in a composite node, hit tab and start typing composite. Now, let’s go up here and we’ll type brightness into the second input and we’ll partner this default pick into the first input—let’s see what we’ve got here. And now, as you can see, we have this cool glow and if I move this around, you can see what’s going on. This is being composite over there as you can see here. And we have this nice little Halo going around our butterfly, just look at the default pick. See there’s the original and here’s the composite.

Now, remember, you can do all kinds of cool effects with this and this is just for the compositing features alone. Let’s go back into our—I don’t know—let’s see here—a lot and let’s mess with it a little bit, that was our defuse, ambient light, specular. You can just fool with the looks all you want. You can change the color if you want—I mean it’s just—now as you can see it’s kind of a glowing in a little yellowish color there.

You can go in here and can go in there and fool with this, I just want to show you how to do a Halo Effect, it’s just a quick example because it’s really fast and it shows how you can use Houdini as a very, very powerful compositor like Shake. And I’m going to say it’s probably just as powerful as Shake maybe not quite because of rotoscoping stuff, it does have rotoscoping but Shake is—it’s a pretty tool but man, its quite timeless, it’s really one of my favorite compositors out there. But what this does is, if I really want ot do tedious rotoscoping or tedious scheme where I’m going to need a key lot or Primatte Mac. Yes, I used Shake but for something simple and quick and I don’t want to fire up another application and I want to composite my 3D Geometry that I just modeled into a scene, I can do it right here all the same interface. This is why Houdini blows Maya out of the water because of all the things like this.

Houdini is more than just a 3D application. It is so broad and so complex that you can just study it for years and years and years before you ever really become a master of it. So check out the composite nodes, check out the composite features, it’s really great and this is why I’ve chose Houdini over Maya, 3Ds Max, Cinema 4D or any of the lock. So thank you for watching and we’ll see you next time.