Volume Waves
Example of a volume field populated solely by VOPS. (.hipnc)
Vops
Cloudscapes via Volume Vops
It’s an understatement to say that Houdini volumes have a lot of depth, there are just so many possibilities and fun things to explore. After making a few requisite pyroclastic clouds I decided to see what can be done without DOPs. In other words, what kinds of effects can you get without simulation or just converting input geometry? Here’s the first part of an answer – you can use VOPs to create animated volumes and cloudscapes that are surprisingly fast. In these I first filled a volume with a sin wave and then introduced alligator and perlin noises at different frequencies following the sinusoidal surface.
Websling
A webbing rig, stretches nicely between two controls, lots of user control. Could go a lot further with this of course but I wanted a fast exploration utilizing and testing some of the generic asset’s I’ve made so I probably will leave it here until I feel like doing an animation with it.
Vex and VOPs – A Twist Deformer
Now let’s do something a bit more demanding. We will replicate the twist deformer I made in ICE in VOPs, and then use some vex wrangles to allow a control object to place the twist deformation anywhere on the object in world space. Here’s the actual twist deform VOP, with a little extra to make the twist into a whirlpool funnel shape:
Pretty straightforward, the VOP takes a radius of points around the origin and pull them down in Y as well as rotates them around the origin, with a falloff based on distance and ramps to allow for user control.