Exporting Animation Videos from Houdini

May 2, 2019

Exporting Videos from Houdini

Make Houdini Animations into Videos

Vimeo - My Flower Blooming Animation
Vimeo - Water flowers blossoming in Houdini. Tutorial + project (HIP,comp,ae)
By: Mike Stoliarov

I attempted to get into this large tutorial/project showin in the Water Flowers tutorial. The video is more of a time lapse than a tutorial really, so it's not the best resource to learn from. However, the video links to a downloadable version of the actual Houdini project itself, so I could use this to learn from.

After getting the project to finally run at all, I was able to follow along with the very first steps in the overall process. They imported some flower assets (petals, centers, stems, etc.), but I just made the petals and central object in Houdini itself. I was able to replicate the interesting point noise that is the foundation of the water effect, and translated it into a way to move color across my flower. After that, I just used similar techniques for using the Bend node to get that "blooming" feel.

Getting a Video File of the Animation

This gave me more issues than I thought it would. Rendering an animation to view in MPlay was straight forward enough, but getting anything out of this was a bit tricky. Initially, after letting all of the frames render out, I was trying to use "Export" and export any video type. There are options for 64 bit Windows, 32 bit, and Quicktime movie, but none of them were doing anything for me. Selected any would say "File saved", with the path, the name, everything, but nothing actually appeared.

After some searching around, I found that I needed to save out the image sequence first. This can also be done right there in MPlay. After that, you then open the image sequence in MPlay and only THEN can you actually export a video file out. It was the proper export commands I was using earlier, but I just needed to feed in the image sequence first.

This created .avi video files. I was looking to create an .mp4 file as well, but could not find a way to do that in Houdini. I then looked into ways to convert .avi files, but to no avail. I tried an online converter but it kept failing. Then I tried VLC, which has a convert option, but it just kept putting out 1 kb video files with nothing in them.

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