All images from The Magic of Houdini by Will Cunningham. Reprinted with permission.

This is the next in a series of excerpts from the Thomson Course Technology book The Magic of Houdini by Will Cunningham. In the next few months VFXWorld readers will learn the basics of the dominant tool that has been used in the creation of some of the most awe-inspiring animation and cinematic effects ever made.

By default, Houdini is arranged in three panes — the Viewer pane, the Network Editor pane and the Parameters pane. Figure 1 shows each of these areas. The Viewer pane is where you control the viewport and can change how things are displayed. The Network Editor pane shows you a node-based view of what your networks look like. Each of the boxes in this pane is considered a node (or tile). The Parameters pane shows you the specific information about a particular node.

A pane is a generic window that you can configure to display a number of different types of information. The Network Editor pane could just as easily be set it to show parameters (in which case it becomes the Parameters pane) or the view into 3D space (in which case it becomes the Viewer pane).

[Figure 1] The three most common panes. 

To change the pane type, just click the Pane menu in the upper-left corner of any pane and choose a different type. LMB on the Pane menu in the Viewer pane and choose Network Editor. You now see the same information as in the other Network Editor pane that was already displayed. Now change it to a Channel Editor pane. This pane is used for manipulating animation channels. As you can see, you can configure a pane to display whatever type of information you want. Change it back to a Viewer pane to continue this chapter.

The Viewer Pane
The Viewer pane is where you control the viewport and can change how things are displayed using differing projection methods, different shading modes, as well as determine what kind of geometric information to display, such as point numbers and normals, and much more.