The MOPs tool for orienting curves using parallel transport is eight years old now, and mostly made obsolete by Houdini's native tool for it, but I wanted to revisit our old implementation and improve it a bit anyways. I documented how it works here:
www.toadstorm.com/blog/?p=1168
Matt Milstead from Mograph.com did a little interview with me yesterday where we talked about Houdini, MOPs, and motion graphics in general. Full video is online here: www.youtube.com/live/MsyvhOR...
A new stable release of MOPs is available! The Experimental build already supported Houdini 21, but this was confusing for new users, so that update (plus some others) are now merged into the main branch. Details here: github.com/toadstorm/MO...
My MOPs course on Houdini.School is now free! If you want a start to finish course on how (almost) everything works, plus the math background, you can watch it all here: www.houdini.school/courses/mops...
absolute insanity. a mad genius.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IgM...
here's mulder and scully sharing a hammock
we require more cat photos
MOPs Plus for Houdini node-locked licenses are now 20% off through Monday, December 2nd. Get access to MOPs tools for typography, dynamics, cameras, and more for cheap! Use the coupon code MOPSFRIDAY2025 at checkout to apply the one-time discount. motionoperators.com/info/mopsplus/
A new MOPs+ release is out! This introduces the MOPs+ Camera, a fully-featured camera rig with all kinds of fun and quick controls for animating cameras easily in the viewport. Check the demo videos and the full release notes here: motionoperators.com/blog/index.p...
was waiting to see if anyone mentioned duke's Far East Suite... it is *extremely* good and rarely noticed for some reason
Eem, Oma's Hideaway, Scotch Lodge, Apizza Scholls, Stammtisch, you could spend weeks eating your way around this city and doing nothing else. Forest Park has hundreds of miles of trails in addition to the Japanese Gardens. The Gorge is beautiful any time of year. It's a great little city.
Good catch, I just patched this and pushed the update to the henry_dev branch.
If you want a quicker fix, change line 18 of MOPs/scripts/python/mops_updater.py to:
from hutil.Qt import QtWidgets
why do GIFs not work here? 😫do I really have to embed video instead?
Happy Labor Day! I just added Houdini 21 / Qt6 hotfixes for both MOPs and MOPs Plus, and a few cool little upgrades to MOPs... now you can easily cycle falloffs! Check the blog for details: motionoperators.com/blog/index.p...
Clarification: Houdini 21 by default uses Qt6 and doesn't have PySide2 compatibility. This will break some tools that use a custom UI. You can get around this by installing a Qt5 build of H21. I'll add Qt6 support soon!
Happy Houdini 21 release day! H21 is compatible with both MOPs and MOPs Plus (for Python 3.11) so you shouldn't have to worry about any upgrades. Have fun!
I wrote a little article here for VFX artists about what environment variables are, how to manipulate them, what various .env files are actually doing, and how to roll your own pipelines to organize your projects at home. Look here: www.toadstorm.com/blog/?p=1010
The Conservatory of Flowers is one of the best indoor collections of tropical plants I've ever seen. It's a must-see if you're a plant person.
sorry i misspoke, i meant boints
yeah that's software-dependent. maya labels this behavior "segment scale compensate" on joints and is on by default... child bones will be translated by the scaled parent but will apply the inverse scale to themselves to stay the same size.
controllers are the front-end for interfacing with the skeleton. you'll often have very complicated constraint structures and multiple skeletons driven by the controls that blend their outputs together into the final skeleton that's exported to the game engine.
The MOPs website (and toadstorm.com) will be offline for less than 1 hour for some maintenance and improvements. Thanks for your patience!
A new Experimental release of MOPs is now available! This is mostly just minor bugfixes and QoL improvements. Details on the release page: github.com/toadstorm/MO...
I'm looking for software developers who can help me write a floating license server for MOPs+. Some experience in Houdini is a plus but not required. If you're interested or know someone who is, please reach out to me at henry@motionoperators.com.
Apex is still pretty scary and new for most existing Houdini artists, but there’s no need to be scared anymore! Matt (@cgwiki.bsky.social) will provide a jargon-free explainer of Apex at #EPC2025!
Get your tickets now: everythingprocedural.com
#everythingproc #ProcGen #Apex #GameDev
I wrote a little primer on rigid body dynamics in Houdini after seeing a lot of similar questions online. Bullet is a pretty deep rabbit hole to fall into and there's a lot of legacy stuff that's very confusing for new artists... hopefully this helps you get started!
www.toadstorm.com/blog/?p=1123
A new release of MOPs+ is now available! This adds the new MOPs+ Rig Aim node, as well as a new streamlined version of MOPs+ Collision Geo. More details on the MOPs Blog: motionoperators.com/blog/index.p...
Used to freelance as an artist for many years in LA. Get an accountant, especially if any of your income isn't W2. Please DO NOT go to H&R block or similar, they will have absolutely no idea how to prepare taxes for anything that complex (I tried doing exactly that when I first started)
It absolutely could, although there's existing constraints for that. This is more about gradually bending chains towards a target, for things like tentacles, tails, trees, etc.
An animation of the Paul test geometry bending to face a target object like some kind of mutated drinking bird toy
I'm trying to get another fun new toy done for the next release: MOPs+ Rig Aim. Enjoy watching it wave Paul around!
motionoperators.com/blog/index.p...
