GET STARTED WITH VDBS

ENTAGMA DELIVERS A GUIDE TO BUILDING A VOLUME DENTING SETUP USING HOUDINI’S VDB TOOLS

1. Drop down a sphere, set its type to Polygon, and increase the frequency to 48. Attach a vdbfrompolygon, decrease the voxel size to 0.01. Also attach a scatter node to the sphere. Set its total count to 20.

2. Duplicate the sphere node, set its uniform scale to 0.1. Create a copytopoints-node and wire in that sphere into the left slot, and the scatter node’s output into the right slot. Duplicate the vdbfrompolygonsnode and attach to the scatter-node.

3. Create a vdbcombine, wire the first vdbfrompolygons into the left slot, the second vdbfrompolygons into the right. Set the vdbcombine’s operation to SDF Difference. Create a vdbreshapesdf-node, attach it to the second vdbfrompolygon-node. Set it to Dilate with an offset of 2.

4. Duplicate the vdbreshapesdf-node and wire in the first vdbfrompolygon’s output. Duplicate the vdbcombinenode, wire the second vdbreshape’s output into the left slot, the second vdbfrompolygon’s output into the right slot.

5. Add another vdbcombine node, wire your previous vdbcombines output into the left input and the unused vdbreshape’s output into the right input. Set the vdbcombine’s operation to SDF Intersection.

6. Create a final vdbcombine-node and wire the first vdbcombine’s output into the left and the last vdbcombine’s output into the right slot, set the operation to SDF Union.

7. Attach a vdbsmoothsdf-node to the last vdbcombine’s output, set its iterations to 3. If you want to convert your volume back to a polygonal mesh, attach a convertvdb-node set to Polygon and adjust its Adaptivity to your liking.

8. The final artwork has been created using the same technique, just switching out the original sphere with several smaller ones.