🎨 texture-synthesis-houdini

Houdini / PDG plugin for EmbarkStudios' texture-synthesis.

Blog Post that goes into more depth can be found on my website.

Features

texture-synthesis features

• Single example generation
• Multi example generation
• Guided Synthesis
• Style Transfer
• Inpaint
• Inpaint Channel
• Tiling texture
• Repeat texture synthesis transform on a new image
• Combining texture synthesis 'verbs'

attribute-from-example.hda

texture-synthesis-houdini provides you with an otl to export point attributes as texture. This makes it really easy to use attributes as masks within texture-synthesis.

Requirements

Houdini 18.5+ (18.5.462+ recommended)

Installation

1. Get texture-synthesis-houdini including texture-synthesis with its executable

   • Recommended: Download the latest release

   • Or download and assemble

     Expand

     • The source code:
     • clone this repository including the texture-synthesis submodule
     git clone https://github.com/manuelkoester/texture-synthesis-houdini.git --recurse-submodules
     • OR download the Source Code of the latest releases from texture-synthesis-houdini and texture-synthesis. Unpack both contents to disk and place texture-synthesis inside texture-synthesis-houdini.
     • And the exectuable:
     • Go to the releases page of texture-synthesis and download the latest release for your system
     • Create a bin folder inside texture-synthesis
     • Extract the executable file to the bin folder of texture-synthesis.

2. Add texture-synthesis-houdini to your Houdini Environment

   • Create a folder called packages in your Houdini preferences folder (in your home dir)
   • Copy the texture-synthesis-houdini.json file into the packages folder
   • Edit the json file to point to the extracted texture_synthesis_houdini folder (edit the path in the "texture_synthesis_houdini" line)
   • Optional: If you have the texture-synthesis executable in a different place, you can point the texture_synthesis_executable to the path of that executable.

To read more on configuration, see the documentation on Packages on the official SideFX help.

Getting Started

I reccommend taking a look at the example hipfiles I've included at texture_synthesis_houdini/hip.

Make sure you either cloned the repository with its submodules (see Installation step 1) or additionally downloaded and extracted the texture-synthesis source into texture-synthesis-houdini.

Prior PDG knowledge is recommended.

TIP: If you are cooking the open_in_mplay nodes and they won't stop cooking; it is usually because you have not closed mplay yet and Houdini thinks it's still executing the Work Item.

texture-synthesis_examples.hip

This replicates all the exmples from the texture-synthesis repository.

To see test it yourself cook either the open_in_mplay_single or open_in_mplay_all node at /obj/geo/topnet. The _single version only cooks one feature, while the _all version cooks all features and previews them in mplay for you.

texture-synthesis_attribute_example.hip

This showcases how you can use attributes on your geometry to drive your texture-synthesis operations.

It uses the painted attribute mask from the Attribute Paint node in the texture_from_attribute node within the TOP network.

To see test it yourself cook the open_in_mplay node for your OS at /obj/geo/topnet. Afterwards click on the different dots of the texture_synthesis which will load the differently seeded outputs on top of the grid. (See preview below)

texture-synthesis_pighead.hip

Were you ever saddened as much as me that our beloved Pighead never got as much love as it should have gotten? The people at SideFX didn't even bother to give it a Texture for its "neck". Time to fix it the Houdini way!

We can generate a new UV set for its neck and start creating a fully procedural texture for it. It uses a painted mask to sample "Pig-like" texture parts to generate a fully new texture from it.

To see test it yourself cook the open_in_mplay node for your OS at /obj/geo/topnet. Afterwards click on the different dots of the texture_synthesis which will load the differently seeded outputs into the preview_new_texture node and give our piggies' neck some new 🎨; the procedural way :)

texture-synthesis_tile_pbr.hip

You can also easily tile PBR textures. It makes the diffuse map tileable and uses the transformations of the diffuse map to apply them to all other maps.