I just tested it out, and wow, it's seriously impressive! The design is super smart and easy to use. Plus, it's free??? That's unbelievably cool of you, man. Thanks a ton!
The final assets were just approved on Orbolt. Feel free to download them there, but I also packaged them on Github for convenience and to remove compatibility problems between versions: github.com/handcraftedcc/SDFModeler/releases/tag/Orbolt_v1.0
There were some issues with the orbolt assets but the sidefx team ended up helping me out and you can download the hda version on github now too (under releases) @@matvampir0_
For now it's not amazing. The quad remesher is not great at recognizing sharp edges. But i think they're working on that! I did get some reasonable results with exoside quadremesher though.
wow ! So cool! keep up Sad, impossible to work with your own models, despite the fact that I have flagship hardware, everything loads very slowly and takes a long time.
The final assets were just approved on Orbolt. Feel free to download them there, but I also packaged them on Github for convenience and to remove compatibility problems between versions: github.com/handcraftedcc/SDFModeler/releases/tag/Orbolt_v1.0
Thanks so much Dominik this rules! I did have a possible feature request - it would be great to get those Prims out as surfaces also ( before a convertline.) Just thinking for moving from the volume to refined hard surface would be good to have them to use as surface prims for hard-edged booleans etc. For instance say I've made an LED display screen, I have used SDFM to make the surround for the acrylic screen (using a box prim (A) to make a negative where the screen would be in SDFM) - if there was access to the surface geo of (A) I could then just have a screen surface geo to use already exactly in place...Hope that made sense...
Brand new release now has that option! Just make sure to update your nodes to the latest version, if you open an old project! The node is called Prim Convert 2 Polygons!
I've been playing around with this and having so much fun! Thank you for making this, and keeping it free/opensource. 1 question: how are you assigning/blending the colors from the teaser, for example the torus sinking in to the ground? Is there a way to assign colors to the SDFM primitives so that they retain colors after being converted to a mesh?
Heyo! Sorry for the delayed response! I assume you were the one that emailed me about this, but just in case I'll respond here too: What looks like colors blending in the teaser is actually just a shader setup, there are no separate colors for the meshes. Now if your meshes are separated you can use the segment option in the volume2mesh node. But if you have shapes combining that won't work. Also not sure if that would be stable in an animation. What you could try is to extract your source shapes using the prim to mesh node (I can't remember the actual name but there's one that will convert your control prims back to a usable mesh), apply color to that and then use a attrib transfer with a blend radius to transfer the colors onto the meshes model. No idea how clean that would look though.
I was working on that, need to check if I ever released that node. Regardless using the mesh prim you can bring in any 3D shape you want, including a curve!
Amazing tool, great to have a little sdf toolkit in houdini. I wondered at the beginning of the video, if you could have a hook where we could add custom sdf function and have it as a sdf prim node. With the pig head example i guess that could be done using a volume wrangle or volume vop with an sdf prim node. Would that be efficient ? when you say that the one you propose are more efficient, is it because there are simple primitive like sphere or tube or because you did some specific optimization ?
I like the idea of custom functions, but I'm not sure that that would be easy or possible to implement without having to rewrite large parts of the toolset!
Looks great and something I would love to get into. Being a newbie in Houdini - what / how does this SDF toolset differ from already implemented Houdini nodes / features via vdb sdf ?
Houdini only ships with a very small set of sdf tools that are not tailored for sdf modeling, more for general sdf volume operations. Houdini does not have sdf math primitives nor does it have tools to create the smooth/chamfer transitions etc.
This is awesome! Dump question though. Is their any possibility of using the normals of an object and including those to shape the SDF when converting from polygons?
Hmm I don't think there really is, at least not that I'm aware of! Generally if you can subdivide the mesh beforehand that's your best bet. One thing you can in theory do is transfer the normals back from your source mesh after converting the sdf to polygons. That can be finicky though, as you have to mask it to make sure that it won't affect the transitions or other areas that are different from the source mesh.
Technically it's already possible (axiom for houdini is gpu powered for example). The issue is that for GPU you need to use opencl instead of vex, which is a very different challenge. Might try to tackle that at some point.
You could do cuda/opencl stuff on the GPU to make this faster, but that's a bit beyond what I'm capable of at this point. I might give the opencl thing another try at some point.
any way to run geometry operations on the primitive shapes the SDFs use? seems like a useful idea to get more complex boolean shapes. i know we can use custom geometry but it would be even cooler to quickly tweak one of these primitives as you are building SDF forms.
Heyo! I'm not sure I understand. What do you mean with geometry operations? Are you saying you would like to use stuff like the bend sop to edit the sdfm prims?
Oh gotcha. So the "SDFM Prims" aren't based on polygons, like I describe around 1:33. The shapes you see when you select the SDFM Prim node are just previews of what the underlying math function generates. There is no way to modify those directly. That being said you can always use the SDFM Mesh prim to make custom shapes. Just note that it won't be as performant. @@keithkirby7376
Hi. Congratulations on the video, I don't understand step 3 of the installation. Replace "PATH/TO/PACKAGE/" with the path to the folder. In my case it reads: "C:/Users/Dominik/Documents/Houdini Assets/Project Packs/DomLib" Make sure to use "/" as separator, not "" otherwise it won't work.😅 Where should I edit this string? Thanks
The file you need to edit is the SDFM.json file, and that should be placed in a folder called 'packages' which needs to be somewhere inside your Houdini preferences folder, which is in the top level of your Documents folder, (or Mac equivalent). I use a single packages folder but Houdini does seem to check -any- packages subfolders within the preferences folder structure. There's a Houdini preferences folder for each major version, named after that version, so it'll be houdini19.0 or houdini19.5 etc. You need to set the path in the SDFM.json file to the location of the SDFModeler folder, wherever you've put that. (FWIW, the environment variable for the preferences folder, which is $HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR, can be used in the path, and relative paths are supported so something like "$HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR/SDFModeler" would work if the plugin folder is dropped directly into the preferences folder, or "$HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR/../HoudiniPlugins/SDFModeler" if you had created a single location in your Documents folder -beside-, not in, the Houdini preferences folder, (and called it HoudiniPlugins)
Yeah, like other said you want to update that in the .json file to point to the downloaded and unzipped folder and put that into your packages folder. If this is your first package, just create one. In windows that is normally documents/houdini19.5/packages.
My goodness! This is just one killer tool you have created right there!! You have my utmost respect sir, and my appreciation. Thank you for this, can’t wait to give it a whirl!! 🙏🙏🙏🙏👍👍👍👍🫶🫶🫶🫶
@@Handcraftedcc Hey Dom. I installed SDFM on my workstation at work on which we have a H19.5 fx installed. As soon as I dropped a node, Houdini converted my session to "Indie". Might this be because SDFM's HDA's have been saved out on that edition? Is there a way to remedy this? Cheers...
@@noc2_art yeah, its because I have the indie license. I will be uploading the toolset to orbolt in the next few days though, at which point it will be usable for all license types! I’ll let you know when it’s up!
The mesh you get out of sdfs is similar to what you might get when sculpting. So when it comes to UV unwrapping, there is no straight forward answer. You can retopo your mesh, and then uv unwrap nicely. Or you can use autouv or something similar and then paint your mesh manually in substance. Really depends on what you need and what your final goal is!
is there a way to say, merge 3 things, A B C, where they all overlap, like 3 balls in a triangle, but only A and B blend, and B and C blend, but A and C don't blend? like if you made fingers, but don't want them to blend to other fingers, but just to the palm
Hmm you cam get to some degree by A: getting the order right. For example if you want the fingers to bot blend with each other but blend all the fingers with the hand, you can first add the fingers together and then add the palm after with your desired blend. B: use sub assemblies. So make an assembly with all your fingers and then merge the second output of that onto the palm. You can see an example of that workflow under the sub assemblies part of the video! That being said beyond those two methods you can't specifically say which part you want to blend with. Hope that answers your question!
Hi Dom, Great tool. I just downloaded it but can't use it as it tries to change my Houdini License to limited commercial. Is there a fix or is it supposed to do that?
Heyo! I imagine you probably have core or fx license? The version available via github is sadly only for indie license. I will share the toolset via orbolt in a few days, which should work with all licenses!
The final assets were just approved on Orbolt. Feel free to download them there, but I also packaged them on Github for convenience and to remove compatibility problems between versions: github.com/handcraftedcc/SDFModeler/releases/tag/Orbolt_v1.0
In a way, nTop is obviously much more feature rich and the workflow of nTop is extremely unique. But yes SDF are similar in the general idea. nTop is a very professional software, and this is a 'simple' tool in comparison, so it's only like nTop in that it uses SDFs.
Did you happen to update the sdfm version and then open an old project? If so you have to update all the nodes to the latest version using the asset bar.
Yes! When doing A/B testing between VDB and Houdini Native Volumes the processing time of VDBs where significantly slower. There were also few to no benefits to be gained in terms of processing time as the vex code seems to also run over non-active voxels. In terms of storage VDBs are more efficient, but it's easy to just convert volumes back to vdbs for storage, however by default this is disabled, as the volumes to vdb conversion also is a hit on performance. The toolset running over big volumes is already heavy enough so I attempted to gain performance by any means necessary! I saw that H20 has made some improvements in terms of vex and vdbs, so it might be worth seeing if that changed anything.
I see, I thought vdbs would be much faster seeing how it worked under the hood. May just be a lack of implementation, anyways, thanks a lot for the tools, they are pretty good and useful
I haven't used the sdf tools in blender, so I can't really answer that question for certain. But I would say that a. This is not the most performant toolset as it runs on the cpu and uses volumes.
The final assets were just approved on Orbolt. Feel free to download them there, but I also packaged them on Github for convenience and to remove compatibility problems between versions: github.com/handcraftedcc/SDFModeler/releases/tag/Orbolt_v1.0
The only downside of this implementation of sdf that its supposed to use math volumes not voxels, so it could use less memory and be infinite in detail + would work with objects of any size. Really disappointed, if its be real SDF it would be great.
I just tested it out, and wow, it's seriously impressive! The design is super smart and easy to use. Plus, it's free??? That's unbelievably cool of you, man. Thanks a ton!
Nice work. Reminds me a bit of the meta mesh / meta blob modeler we wrote at mental images during the late 80s.
This is one thing I asked for h20, a suite of nodes to encourage the use of SDF modeling
Amazing tool. Please make more in-depth videos and especially about how to output as good mesh as possible. Thank you.
Yes! Been working on some different solutions! Will post something soon! Good to hear that people are interested!
Just released one! Sorry it took a while! ruclips.net/video/3YPO-Ucf49s/видео.htmlsi=CDqRIeN72FaVSZtO
Great, I'd love to move my rigid surfaces workflow directly into Houdini, and this is the answer! I'm looking forward to seeing you in Orbolt!
The final assets were just approved on Orbolt.
Feel free to download them there, but I also packaged them on Github for convenience and to remove compatibility problems between versions: github.com/handcraftedcc/SDFModeler/releases/tag/Orbolt_v1.0
@@Handcraftedcc Hero!
There were some issues with the orbolt assets but the sidefx team ended up helping me out and you can download the hda version on github now too (under releases) @@matvampir0_
@@HandcraftedccThnx Mate! I will check it
Awesome tool. Looking forward to seeing how it works with the new quad remeshing sop.
For now it's not amazing. The quad remesher is not great at recognizing sharp edges. But i think they're working on that! I did get some reasonable results with exoside quadremesher though.
Amazing stuff. Thanks for sharing. I am looking forward to testing SDF Modeling Toolset in Houdini!
wow ! So cool! keep up
Sad, impossible to work with your own models, despite the fact that I have flagship hardware, everything loads very slowly and takes a long time.
Awesome tool set, thanks for sharing it with the community 🙌
That is a fantastic set of tools! Thanks Much!
really helpful tool, also I like your video's keep going .
Very cool! Nice work. Looking forward to playing with these tools. If Orbolt would alleviate the limited/indy license, that would be very attractive.
Coming soon! :)
The final assets were just approved on Orbolt.
Feel free to download them there, but I also packaged them on Github for convenience and to remove compatibility problems between versions: github.com/handcraftedcc/SDFModeler/releases/tag/Orbolt_v1.0
@@Handcraftedcc Awesome! Will check it out!
This is amazing - can't wait to give it a try - thank you!
Thanks agin for this hope you keep up the dev! x
Amazing tool! Thank you for sharing!
great work man, I'm a cinema4d user and I want add houdini to m toolkit as well
great tool , testing it now , thanks for sharing
this is sooo useful ! youre a hero !" thanks a bunch !!
That's really great ! thank you Dominik !
Wow, thats cool! Thank You for making this!
Cmon Houdini ! WTFFF HAHAHAHAHAHA YOU GUYS ARE MANIACS ❤
amazing work 👍
Thanks so much Dominik this rules! I did have a possible feature request - it would be great to get those Prims out as surfaces also ( before a convertline.) Just thinking for moving from the volume to refined hard surface would be good to have them to use as surface prims for hard-edged booleans etc. For instance say I've made an LED display screen, I have used SDFM to make the surround for the acrylic screen (using a box prim (A) to make a negative where the screen would be in SDFM) - if there was access to the surface geo of (A) I could then just have a screen surface geo to use already exactly in place...Hope that made sense...
That's a great idea! I think the easiest way to do so would be to create a node that converts the prims to surfaces!
I'll look into it! :)
Started working on this! Should have a version to release here soon!
Brand new release now has that option! Just make sure to update your nodes to the latest version, if you open an old project!
The node is called Prim Convert 2 Polygons!
@@Handcraftedcc Beautiful!
Wow mind blowing!
I've been playing around with this and having so much fun! Thank you for making this, and keeping it free/opensource.
1 question: how are you assigning/blending the colors from the teaser, for example the torus sinking in to the ground? Is there a way to assign colors to the SDFM primitives so that they retain colors after being converted to a mesh?
Heyo!
Sorry for the delayed response!
I assume you were the one that emailed me about this, but just in case I'll respond here too:
What looks like colors blending in the teaser is actually just a shader setup, there are no separate colors for the meshes.
Now if your meshes are separated you can use the segment option in the volume2mesh node. But if you have shapes combining that won't work. Also not sure if that would be stable in an animation.
What you could try is to extract your source shapes using the prim to mesh node (I can't remember the actual name but there's one that will convert your control prims back to a usable mesh), apply color to that and then use a attrib transfer with a blend radius to transfer the colors onto the meshes model. No idea how clean that would look though.
Very nice! Will you also add SDF curves? That will make it more useful for organic modeling.
I was working on that, need to check if I ever released that node. Regardless using the mesh prim you can bring in any 3D shape you want, including a curve!
Amazing toolset!
Just brilliant, muchas gracias !!
Thank you so much! Amazing tool!
Amazing tool, great to have a little sdf toolkit in houdini. I wondered at the beginning of the video, if you could have a hook where we could add custom sdf function and have it as a sdf prim node. With the pig head example i guess that could be done using a volume wrangle or volume vop with an sdf prim node. Would that be efficient ? when you say that the one you propose are more efficient, is it because there are simple primitive like sphere or tube or because you did some specific optimization ?
I like the idea of custom functions, but I'm not sure that that would be easy or possible to implement without having to rewrite large parts of the toolset!
Looks great and something I would love to get into. Being a newbie in Houdini - what / how does this SDF toolset differ from already implemented Houdini nodes / features via vdb sdf ?
Houdini only ships with a very small set of sdf tools that are not tailored for sdf modeling, more for general sdf volume operations. Houdini does not have sdf math primitives nor does it have tools to create the smooth/chamfer transitions etc.
@@Handcraftedcc Ah I see, thanks for the information and your contributions!
This is awesome! Dump question though. Is their any possibility of using the normals of an object and including those to shape the SDF when converting from polygons?
Hmm I don't think there really is, at least not that I'm aware of! Generally if you can subdivide the mesh beforehand that's your best bet. One thing you can in theory do is transfer the normals back from your source mesh after converting the sdf to polygons. That can be finicky though, as you have to mask it to make sure that it won't affect the transitions or other areas that are different from the source mesh.
Amazing.
this thing is awesome! I hope they make volumes for GPU so it can go faster! any plans for curve math shapes or something?
Technically it's already possible (axiom for houdini is gpu powered for example). The issue is that for GPU you need to use opencl instead of vex, which is a very different challenge. Might try to tackle that at some point.
@@Handcraftedccthat’s cool! I think I saw some opencl stuff for Houdini 20?
Yeah they made some updates there! Will take a look at that soon @@YuuJer
it looks cool! but don't yoou think that this voxle technology should be supported by nVidia on hardware level?
You could do cuda/opencl stuff on the GPU to make this faster, but that's a bit beyond what I'm capable of at this point. I might give the opencl thing another try at some point.
any way to run geometry operations on the primitive shapes the SDFs use? seems like a useful idea to get more complex boolean shapes. i know we can use custom geometry but it would be even cooler to quickly tweak one of these primitives as you are building SDF forms.
Heyo!
I'm not sure I understand. What do you mean with geometry operations? Are you saying you would like to use stuff like the bend sop to edit the sdfm prims?
@@Handcraftedcc yes or even to point based polymodeling operations on them.
Oh gotcha. So the "SDFM Prims" aren't based on polygons, like I describe around 1:33. The shapes you see when you select the SDFM Prim node are just previews of what the underlying math function generates. There is no way to modify those directly. That being said you can always use the SDFM Mesh prim to make custom shapes. Just note that it won't be as performant. @@keithkirby7376
god, thats amazing
Hi. Congratulations on the video, I don't understand step 3 of the installation. Replace "PATH/TO/PACKAGE/" with the path to the folder. In my case it reads: "C:/Users/Dominik/Documents/Houdini Assets/Project Packs/DomLib" Make sure to use "/" as separator, not "" otherwise it won't work.😅 Where should I edit this string? Thanks
I think it refers to the directory separator, Windows uses "\" but within the Json it should be changed to "/"
The file you need to edit is the SDFM.json file, and that should be placed in a folder called 'packages' which needs to be somewhere inside your Houdini preferences folder, which is in the top level of your Documents folder, (or Mac equivalent). I use a single packages folder but Houdini does seem to check -any- packages subfolders within the preferences folder structure.
There's a Houdini preferences folder for each major version, named after that version, so it'll be houdini19.0 or houdini19.5 etc.
You need to set the path in the SDFM.json file to the location of the SDFModeler folder, wherever you've put that.
(FWIW, the environment variable for the preferences folder, which is $HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR, can be used in the path, and relative paths are supported so something like
"$HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR/SDFModeler"
would work if the plugin folder is dropped directly into the preferences folder, or "$HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR/../HoudiniPlugins/SDFModeler"
if you had created a single location in your Documents folder -beside-, not in, the Houdini preferences folder, (and called it HoudiniPlugins)
Yeah, like other said you want to update that in the .json file to point to the downloaded and unzipped folder and put that into your packages folder. If this is your first package, just create one. In windows that is normally documents/houdini19.5/packages.
My goodness! This is just one killer tool you have created right there!! You have my utmost respect sir, and my appreciation. Thank you for this, can’t wait to give it a whirl!! 🙏🙏🙏🙏👍👍👍👍🫶🫶🫶🫶
Thank you! Let me know if you have any questions! :)
@@Handcraftedcc Hey Dom. I installed SDFM on my workstation at work on which we have a H19.5 fx installed. As soon as I dropped a node, Houdini converted my session to "Indie". Might this be because SDFM's HDA's have been saved out on that edition? Is there a way to remedy this? Cheers...
@@noc2_art yeah, its because I have the indie license. I will be uploading the toolset to orbolt in the next few days though, at which point it will be usable for all license types! I’ll let you know when it’s up!
@@Handcraftedcc Awesome news! Thank you again Dom 🤗
@@Handcraftedcc Hi Dom. I've seen 5 SDFM otl's on Orbolt. Was wondering if you're going to upload the other 3? (Can't wait 😋) Cheers :)
I have a problem, I have 2 Houdini license, fx, and apprentice but the nodes just working on the apprentice
Make sure to download the version for all licenses under the github releases!
how about texturing those things? how UV map looks for it
The mesh you get out of sdfs is similar to what you might get when sculpting. So when it comes to UV unwrapping, there is no straight forward answer. You can retopo your mesh, and then uv unwrap nicely. Or you can use autouv or something similar and then paint your mesh manually in substance. Really depends on what you need and what your final goal is!
is there a way to say, merge 3 things, A B C, where they all overlap, like 3 balls in a triangle, but only A and B blend, and B and C blend, but A and C don't blend? like if you made fingers, but don't want them to blend to other fingers, but just to the palm
Hmm you cam get to some degree by A: getting the order right. For example if you want the fingers to bot blend with each other but blend all the fingers with the hand, you can first add the fingers together and then add the palm after with your desired blend.
B: use sub assemblies. So make an assembly with all your fingers and then merge the second output of that onto the palm. You can see an example of that workflow under the sub assemblies part of the video!
That being said beyond those two methods you can't specifically say which part you want to blend with.
Hope that answers your question!
thanks! I'll give that a shot
Hi Dom, Great tool. I just downloaded it but can't use it as it tries to change my Houdini License to limited commercial. Is there a fix or is it supposed to do that?
Heyo!
I imagine you probably have core or fx license?
The version available via github is sadly only for indie license. I will share the toolset via orbolt in a few days, which should work with all licenses!
@@Handcraftedcc Does THE tool not work with the No commercial Edition license?
@@luigir.179 you mean the apprentice version? Should work fine with that!
The final assets were just approved on Orbolt.
Feel free to download them there, but I also packaged them on Github for convenience and to remove compatibility problems between versions: github.com/handcraftedcc/SDFModeler/releases/tag/Orbolt_v1.0
wow. I didn't know it had SDF. So is it like 'Ntop'?
Yeah SDF is awesome!
Not sure what Ntop is :)
In a way, nTop is obviously much more feature rich and the workflow of nTop is extremely unique. But yes SDF are similar in the general idea. nTop is a very professional software, and this is a 'simple' tool in comparison, so it's only like nTop in that it uses SDFs.
Hou 20.5.278 'Type' params (as in chamfer etc.) aren't working...Anyone confirm?
Did you happen to update the sdfm version and then open an old project? If so you have to update all the nodes to the latest version using the asset bar.
Is there a reason you used Houdini native volumes instead of Vdb?
Yes! When doing A/B testing between VDB and Houdini Native Volumes the processing time of VDBs where significantly slower. There were also few to no benefits to be gained in terms of processing time as the vex code seems to also run over non-active voxels. In terms of storage VDBs are more efficient, but it's easy to just convert volumes back to vdbs for storage, however by default this is disabled, as the volumes to vdb conversion also is a hit on performance. The toolset running over big volumes is already heavy enough so I attempted to gain performance by any means necessary! I saw that H20 has made some improvements in terms of vex and vdbs, so it might be worth seeing if that changed anything.
I see, I thought vdbs would be much faster seeing how it worked under the hood. May just be a lack of implementation, anyways, thanks a lot for the tools, they are pretty good and useful
INSANE
is the performance better than sdf in blender?
I haven't used the sdf tools in blender, so I can't really answer that question for certain. But I would say that a. This is not the most performant toolset as it runs on the cpu and uses volumes.
Does it work with Houdini FX, or only indie?
Fx is coming soon through orbolt!
Sorry i missed it in the description, very nice tool btw@@Handcraftedcc
The final assets were just approved on Orbolt.
Feel free to download them there, but I also packaged them on Github for convenience and to remove compatibility problems between versions: github.com/handcraftedcc/SDFModeler/releases/tag/Orbolt_v1.0
Does this work in H20?
Should! As far as I've tested it I have not run into any issues!
@@Handcraftedcc with quad remesh it would be good!
HellYEAHH!")
The only downside of this implementation of sdf that its supposed to use math volumes not voxels, so it could use less memory and be infinite in detail + would work with objects of any size. Really disappointed, if its be real SDF it would be great.