Name: Houdini Isn't Scary - Part 2: Objects
Uploaded: 2025-04-02T09:23:39.000Z
Duration: 25 min 48 s
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Welcome back to another WhoDBisnscary tutorial.

This is part two, and this one we're going over objects.

Adverbs of degree

So we touched on this in the last tutorial, but we didn't really get in depth.

This tutorial we're going to go over how to create some objects, we're going to go over a couple more nodes, and we're just going to get comfortable with jumping between objects and bringing one object into another to reference it with object mergers, all the while creating something interesting.

We're creating a donut, so let's not waste any more time, let's get straight into it.

To begin on creating this donut, of course we're going to need an object.

So go up to your shelf tools and click on torus, press enter to place it at the origin, and we now have this torus.

Not the best donut so far, but we can make some changes to it.

So first things first, let's give this a name, so double click on the name of this object and rename it to donut.

Then we can double click on the actual node to go inside of it and adjust this torus geometry.

So we're going to give it some more rows, we can give this 50 rows and 50 columns, just so that it's smoother.

Next we're going to give it some color, so we've done this before, just press tab, type color, and drop down a color node.

Plug your torus geometry into this color node, and then don't forget to set your display flag on your color.

So now we have our color selected, we can go and give this a healthy golden brown bagel color.

So now that we have that, let's give it a bit more of an interesting shape.

It looks a bit too smooth right now, so we can press tab in our network view and drop down what is known as a mountain node.

What a mountain node does is it adds a mountain noise to a geometry.

So if we plug our color into our mountain node and then set our display flag on our mountain, you'll notice that we have this deformed donut, and all we have to do is really just drop the height.

So just middle mouse on this height setting, and bring it down to about 0.1.

As you can see, that just adds a little bit of shape to our donut so that it looks a bit better.

So now we have our donut, but we want to add some things.

Now a good way to do this would actually be to make a separate icing object.

That means we're going to go back up to the object level, create a new object called icing, and then we'll create our icing in there.

But we may want to bring our donut into our icing object so that we can actually put our icing on our donut.

So in your network view, press tab, type null, and place it after your mountain, connect your mountain to your null, and set your display flag on your null.

Now you'll notice absolutely no difference between your mountain and your null, and that's because this null doesn't actually change anything.

All it does is create a node that's very easy to reference.

We can just call this donut out, and now we know that this node over here is the output for our donut.

If we go up a level, we have our donut over here, and we can now create our icing.

I'm just going to show you a different way to create an object where you don't need to use your shelf tools.

You can just go over to your object network, press tab like we've done before, and over here you can type geo, and that will give you this geometry node.

We're going to place this, and you'll notice that it's the same node as this one over here, except there's nothing inside of it.

We're going to just rename it to icing, and then double click on the actual node to dive inside.

As you can see, our donut gets ghosted as expected, but that means we can't work with it because we don't have it in our current context, which is icing.

To bring it into our icing node, we have to drop down an object merge.

Press tab, type object, and you'll see object merge.

Now, to bring in our object, you can see over here that we want to bring in one object.

We go over to object one, go over to this open floating operator chooser, and this will bring up this choose operator window.

We can just minimize our icing, and now you can get a really good idea of how our networks are set up.

Expand the donut and select this donut out.

It's very easy to see which one is the output of this donut object when we've named it like this and put it as a null.

We can just double click on this, and now it's in our icing node.

How are we going to make icing over here?

The best way to do it is to drop down a group node and group some points that will be our  Press tab, type group, and press enter.

If you hover over this first input, it says required source data.

We can plug our donut into this, set your display flag on the group, and then we go over to our parameters.

Change the group name to icing underscore group.

We're also going to change it from a group type of primitives to a group type of points.

When you do that, you'll notice that these change to these little orange points as opposed to the faces.

We've changed it from being a primitive group, which would select faces, to a point group, which would select points on our geometry.

Over here under base group, you go over to the far right, and you have this select geometry from an available viewport.

Click on that, and it'll allow you to click and drag over some points.

What we're going to do is we're going to hold space so that we can change our view, and then press three so that we have front viewport.

Now we can select some points, and the group node actually goes through to the other side.

If we select some points and press enter, and then hold space and press one to go back to perspective, you'll notice that it has selected points all the way around.

We now know that these orange points are the points in our group, so we have an ising group.

The next thing to do is to go over to our network view and delete everything that's not in that ising group.

We can say delete, connect your ising group into the delete node, and then just set your display flag on your delete.

At the top of this delete node in your parameters, you'll notice that it has this group dropdown.

Click on it, you'll notice that there's this ising group.

We'll select that, and you'll notice that nothing's being deleted, and we also have this error message.

To view what that error message is, we can hover over our delete node and click on this error message on the left.

That's our node info, and it brings up this.

It says, warning, ising group is not a valid group.

The reason it's not recognizing this group is because we set our group to be a points group.

Under entity, you have to change it from primitives to points, and it will now delete all the points in our ising group.

We want to delete everything that's not in our ising group, so we change this operation to delete non-selected.

Now what we can do is we can give this a bit of thickness.

What we want is to just extrude this surface up a bit.

We can drop down a poly extrude node, so press tab, poly extrude, drop it down, plug your delete node into the first input, and set your display flag.

Under your parameters, you have all of these options.

The only one we really need to worry about is this distance.

If we push this up, you'll notice that it gives us some distance, and what we want is just a little bit, so 0.01.

As you can see, that's given us a bit of thickness.

Our ghosted donut is actually getting in the way, so we can go up to the top right of our Click on that and say hide other objects.

Now we only have our ising in this viewport.

If you take a look, you'll notice that there's this lip, and we don't have a back face, and that's because the poly extrude node doesn't actually output a back face.

We can go down over here on our parameters, and just click on output back.

If you take a look at this, it gives us a front, it gives us a side, and a back.

Another cool option that you have on this poly extrude node is that you can actually output this front, back, and sides with a group.

We're going to tick this front group, and we're going to call this ising underscore top.

What that'll do is it'll add this front face to a group called ising underscore top.

Just like we've done with our ising group, we now have a group called ising top.

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Houdini Isn't Scary - Part 2: Objects

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