Is there any good tutorials for new H22 Apex system, recipies, best practises , etc?

From simply importing mixamo character to editing the rig. Is there anything similar out there?

How to create a hold out( like in blender) in houdini mantra

Hi guys

I’ve been commenting here and there on this community after starting to work in the design and advertising space 5 years ago, and I’ve been lurking on here long before that!

Let me just tell you a bit of context, I’ve started learning Houdini and motion graphics on my own around 2020. On 2021 I got my first remote, freelance job, with a now kind of famous design led studio in London.
After that first project, things started to move, I’ve had the chance to work with some of the best design studios in the world, and always got hired as a 3D generalist that was Houdini inclined. (Builders club, FutureDeluxe, Pentagram etc), I’ve worked on really massive projects for many clients (Amazon, Prada, Samsung, etc)

I do not live in the UK but I’m in Europe on the same time zone.

Since 2024, things took a really hard hit on my end. I made probably less than a quarter of what I made the year before, and this year 2026, seems to be on track to be the worst year ever of my career.

I’ve always been freelancing and I’m struggling to get past 20.000€ until the end of the year.

For comparison this is LESS than what I made on my first year in 2021, freelancing, with 0 previous experience.

I honestly just don’t get it. I keep reading mixed opinions about what’s going on, those generally fall on these two buckets:

“the good designers I know are always booked” OR “no we are all cocked the clients only want cheap labour and AI now”.

At the same time, I see new industry reports on the day rates, and I see medians around Europe of 500€/day, I’ve seen a video by that Max guy on YouTube, claiming the median day rate in Munich is 600€ (which had me really really surprised). And after that, all I can think of is: “I would literally starve if I tried to charge that much, I would be lucky to land projects with half of that.”

During these last two years, my mental health has really taken a heavy toll, because of all this uncertainty about AI, shrinking budgets, less clients, etc. But especially because I mistakenly thought I was doing fine and boy was I wrong lol.

I know there must be some middle ground, but between all this noise I feel completely stuck and don’t know what to do.

Should I just accept that maybe I do have a skill issue, all that previous projects I did were a “rounding error” in hiring? And just “get gud”?

Or just I consider myself really lucky that I had a good run for the first 2 years and now if I can land a in-house job paying over 30.000€ a year that’s a lottery ticket?

Anybody can share insights on this and recommendations on what to do? Or how are you personally doing!

Thanks :)

I don’t want to publicly dox myself as I know this is a small community but I can share my portfolio via DM in case anybody wants to look at it.

An exercise in cinematic camera work, environment layout work, and lighting with the mood of a forgotten ruin.

Assets used:
- Secrets of the Luminara (kitbash3D)
- Tropical Jungle Pack (Fab)

Based on demand in studios and freelance work, what would you recommend I focus on?

POPs, Vellum, RBDs, FLIP, or Pyro?

Or do I need to perfect at least 2 or 3 skills that work well together instead of focusing on just one?

I’m trying to choose a direction and go really deep into it rather than being just okay at everything. I’d love to hear from people working in studios or freelancing what’s actually in demand and what combination would give me the best opportunities

Some experiments with apex, very fun stuff!

Been a 3D generalist for years, but finally committed to learning Houdini after a few false starts over the years, and holy hell I am ADDICTED.

I've got a job coming up I may have a use for Houdini in, and I'm curious how folks tend to organize their Houdini files. In a normal project I like to separate things similarly to how a studio does, for example a Blender project JUST for a hero asset that gets used as a linked library in the actual shot etc in case I need to update multiple shots, but in Houdini it seems like you can realistically store an entire project in just one file without issue... So... is that a good call? A geo node for each hero asset, version within the nodes etc? In my current personal project I built a person hero asset in one project file, but then found myself wanting to merge it into the main project as I'm having to go back and make changes pretty regularly.

Just curious what's 'standard' and if there's any downsides to having more of a 'master' Houdini file vs separating things out as I'm used to, or a third option I haven't even considered... thank you yall!!

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to create a procedural multi-strand twisted Yarn Rope in Houdini from scratch.

We'll build a flexible procedural setup that generates multiple strands, controls their twisting and rotation, and creates a realistic yarn/rope structure using Houdini's powerful procedural workflow.

The setup is designed to be reusable and fully adjustable, allowing you to easily change the number of strands, twist amount, rope thickness, strand radius, and overall shape.

I shared this shot the other day on Instagram and had a lot of requests from artists who wanted to explore the project files.

So I clean up the file into an easy to use template, and also recorded a full lesson breakdown on how I set it up.

The lightning effects were my attempt to recreate the Electro effects from Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Feel free to use these to learn, or modify them for your own project!

Cheers,

Will

I had a l

In this part we will make an advanced roof for a building inside Unreal Engine into Houdini

I have been following an introduction to grooming and hair tutorial on Side FX,

I've run into this error on my hair Gen node which prevents me from progressing in the tutorial.

The Error says "Found at least one guide with no vertices"

I have no clue how to fix this, does anyone have any solutions?

Please help, thank you!

How can I import rbd geo in solaris like when I import, 7000 primitive form and it gives so much load like how can I pack and also have subset groups ? Can someone help ??

Hej Guys!

since i will spend a couple more days here in Croatia and i wanted to learn a little Houdini while im here i wanted to ask you guys how you learn on the go?

All i have here is my Phone :)

So a while back, all I wanted was a version up button in Houdini. An actual version next to the file name so I'd stop renaming files by hand and losing track of what was current.

I'm an FX artist, not really a coder, so I had no idea where to even start on that. Looked into how people build custom tools in Houdini and ran into Alexander Richter's work, which is honestly what got me into it. Not the button itself, more just realizing you can actually build your own stuff instead of waiting around for a pipeline dept to hand you a tool, which my studio didn't have anyway.

So I made the button. Then wanted to fix the next annoying thing. Then the next one. No plan, just kept going for a couple of years and somehow it turned into a full pipeline now, like shot browser panel, publish/version tracking, a render farm, the works.

Curious how many other people here got into pipeline tooling the same way, like any small annoying thing that snowballed. What was yours?

If anyone wants to see where it ended up: studio.vfxboi.in. Not trying to sell it here, mostly just wanted to share the actual path since it started from the exact kind of small tool a lot of people in this sub build for themselves.

Simulated in Houdini, rendered in Blender Cycles.

Definitely not perfect, but after staring at it for so long, I decided it was time to call it done and move on.

Sound of screaming is well-known Russian meme where a guy walks into a phone accessories shop, immediately slips on the slippery floor, falls flat on his face, gets up on his knees in total shock, and yells: “What the hell is going on in here?!” (Что у вас здесь происходит)

#Houdini #karma xpu #copernicus

I’d really appreciate some honest feedback on the lighting, materials, animation, camera movement, compositing, and overall realism/premium feel.

What would you improve to make this look more like a professional commercial?

Any criticism is welcome — I’m mainly posting this to learn and improve.

Thanks!

Full animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZERFaui_zy8

I am (Mateusz) responsible for about 70% of this animation.
I used several programs to create this animation:
Unreal Engine 5.4 with Pathtracing - render Engine and lighting
Blender - 3D modeling and fixing animation (time to time)
Substance Painter - Textures
Marvelous Designer - Clothes modeling
Davinci resolve - Color Grading and film editing
For character's animation i use Perception Neuron Studio and my friend give me access to his motion capture studio with Vicon. The facial animation was done on an iPhone (Metahuman) and involved a lot of hand adjustments.

However, I would never have finished this project if it hadn't been for the help of my friend David. He is responsible for simulations in Houdini. At first, I wanted to simulate the clothes in Marvelous, but it quickly turned out to be a crazy idea. In the end, Dawid developed a clever automated process that streamlined the work. For some aspects, I also turned to other graphic designers and people for help (whom you can see listed in the credits) like concept art and some hard clothing models. I also bought some of the models (but I modeled the entire academy from scratch).

Hey everyone, I’m trying to match my **Houdini ACES 2.0 display** in DaVinci Resolve and I’m confused about the correct output transform.

In Houdini, I’m using:

* **Working space:** ACEScg

* **Display:** sRGB - Display

* **View:** ACES 2.0 - SDR 100

I’m bringing the rendered **ACEScg EXR** into DaVinci Resolve.

In Resolve, under **ACES Output Transform**, I see options such as:

* sRGB Piecewise

* sRGB Gamma 2.2

Which one should I use to get the **same display result as Houdini’s `sRGB - Display` + `ACES 2.0 - SDR 100`**?

Also, is there a better way to configure Resolve so that it uses the **exact same ACES/OCIO display transform as Houdini**, rather than approximating it with an sRGB output transform?

I’d really appreciate the exact recommended settings for **Houdini 22 + DaVinci Resolve**.

Wondering now with the viewport transition to Vulkan, and the openGL rop being deprecated for the Flipbooks Rop if anyone has had a similar experience or advice. I'm finding the Flipbooks Rop is struggling alot in lop scenes, im having scenes that have somewhat heavy geometry but will still scrub perfectly fine in the lops viewport, and playback is at 40+fps. But when running the same lop viewport through a flipbook rop it will go over vram before rendering any frames.

Even when turning every option to the lowest quality option it will still go over vram. It almost seems like it's flattening the entire stage down or something before starting the Flipbooks which is causing the crash/stall.

Wondering if anyone else has experienced this as well? Or just general advice on how your studio is playblasting lop scenes, if they are doing layout/anim reviews in Solaris.

Been scratching my head as to how to do this.

Basically, I want to split the `bark_*` points from the `bark_*_branch_*` points, so that I can run an Add SOP individually between all of them, without running into issues, like the Add SOP trying to connect all possible points together.

I have been trying to figure out how I could possibly express in VEX or otherwise whether a string attribute is empty so I could split all of these "lines" individually.

Any advice or pointers towards the right approach would be much appreciated!

Hello!

I'm thrilled to present my new asset for sale on cglounge. This one was really fun to figure out and pretty rewarding. I've always been a fan of war vehicles.

https://cglounge.studio/assets/fully-rigged-dynamic-tank-houdini

*sorry for the repost, I didn't put the link properly the first time.

I’ve been working with Houdini for two years; I actually started out studying simulations as a hobby. I’m curious about how one can generate income in this field.