Tutorial: Needlework in Houdini

Check out a nice video guide by Entagma to learn the tricks and start to stitch.

Do you love watching a sewing machine do its work? It turns out that you can recreate something similar in Houdini. The thing here is to make the stitches run into a certain direction. How can you do it? Check out a nice video guide by Entagma to learn the tricks and start to stitch.  

We decided that for the sake of art directability (does that word exist?) we’d settle on a manual appropach of drawing guide splines in order to define the direction in which the individual stitches would run. Next we’d create tangents based on those splines which we then feed into a velocity volume. Another way to look at it is that this works pretty similar to what you’d do when combing hair or fur.

In this video we go over the basic setup and creating a single spline for each stitch. For rendering (get the final render setup on our Patreon) we added a background with a weave shader as well as created secondars spines that coil around our stitch splies, in order to give the impression of twistes yarn.

Entagma

Make sure to check out the project’s website for more tutorials on Houdini. 

Published 27 February 2018
Arti Sergeev
Business Head