Solaris in Houdini 21 | Create an Asset Library with Megascans

Hi guys and welcome back to NFlow. I am Mario and today we're talking about Solaris. I will show you how to import external assets from the Mega Scan library, assign the materials correctly and how to create your own custom library so you can make layouts in your scene as quick and fast as possible. So let's open and let's start. [Music] Okay, we are in Nudini and first thing I will go into lops. I will need to create some component builders. So I will create just the first one for now. But we will need to create one for each single asset that we are importing. For now I will leave this one as it is. And I will go on Google. I've looked for fab and I've looked for books. Okay. Then I've added some filters. The first filter I've added is just like price free. And then in publishers I only want books that have been made by Quicksill because they are high quality and because most of them are free. Now be careful because some of them they say free. But if I click on that you cannot really buy it. Did you need a license? If I do the free one, this is only for Unreal. So, I spent some time to find some books that were nice, like this one, and I went to download. I've downloaded a total of four books. And the important thing is the format. You see, you have to go to USDC and choose high quality. So, this one is the one I downloaded. Once you've done that, we can return to Dini and we have to understand that the USDC format is like a packed version of a USD. So, if you go inside, the first thing is just to import that book. So, USD import. And over here we have to unpack whatever we import because it's a USDC and converted that to polygon. Never forget about this step because it's very important. Then into the files I will go where I have my asset saved and I will find my first book over here. If you visualize it, we have imported that correctly. Now we have a few things that we have to check and improve before doing anything else. The first one is to scale it. So just a transform and let's change the uniform scale to 0.01. We are converting basically from Unreal units to hooding units. Now in this case the asset is already in the correct position. So it's already on top of the 00 0. But I always like to add a match size. And this is just like we don't know if every asset is like that. So it's just like to make sure we can add it. And then in the match size I will just check justify Y and say change that to minimum. I can connect this one to the default because this will be the render version that I will see. But I want to create a low poly version for the proxy and a low poly version from the simulation proxy. This one will be used for collisions when we start doing the layout and we start playing with those tools. So I'll create a poly reduce. Before connecting that, I will change the percentage to keep just to five. And I can just connect this one here and then to the proxy and to the sim proxy. As you can see, this maintains the shape fairly well for a viewport visualization or for collisions. And we can just go out and that is perfectly fine and working. Now, we need to import our materials. So, we'll just delete my material library and I'll create a reference node. Now, keep in mind that we are importing a USD file. So, that means that it has some layers inside. So, I can import the same asset that we have imported already. So the book itself but specify that I want to import on this side only the material. So that's what I will do. I will connect it and I will look for the same path. So I can definitely just copy the same one that I have my import going out into the reference and just paste it here where it says file pattern. And as you can see by default it's importing the whole book with the whole material but I want to keep them separated so we can create a component. So I want to choose that I want to tackle a specific primitive and on this side I will control and click and I will choose my materials and look high. So now technically the material has been imported but we have a small problem and that is where this material is being saved in this hierarchy. You see right now it's just saving that into source name. So it's just giving the name of the material itself. If we check the component geometry our geometry is saved inside of an asset folder. So let's save that inside of an asset folder and that is the way we can make it work. I will just write before asset and then slash and the lowerase mtl. In this way the component geometry will know how to look for the material. And now we have the correct book with the material assigned. Now there are some things that we can do to optimize this process. First of all, because this puff and the other one are basically the same, I can definitely just go here, copy this parameter and paste relative reference. So anytime I will need to add a new book, I just need to change one single path. The second is that as you can see this path for the material, it's specific for this book. Other books will have different names and this will not work. So we will need to change that every time. So let's go on something more general. If you go inside, you notice that all the materials in mega scans are usually contained into the material folder. And then it doesn't matter how it's called. So we can definitely say go into the materials folder. This is case sensitive so be careful. materials slash and I will say everything. So this is a wild card. Basically whatever it's inside the folder that will be imported. Nothing changes but again we don't need to change this the next time that we duplicate this whole system. This will work every single time. Now that we have all of this we can simply duplicate it. I will do that four times basically because I have four different books and in each one of them I will choose another book. So I will go here and I will choose the second. If you check now it's correctly imported. We only have a problem of rotation, but we'll fix that in a moment. Here, same thing. Let's import the third one. Checking that everything is fine and it's working. And here, let's import the fourth one. Okay, that is absolutely great. Now, ideally, we want the book to face in the positive C direction. As you can see, this is fine. But we have other ones that are not really in that direction. So, let's see. Instead of this one, I will create an extra transform. I want the pivot to be in the cent. I want the rotation on Y to be 180. And then a rotate on Z of 90°. And that is fine. I can also copy this transform because there are other books that I have the same rotation. So let's check for instance this one and let's actually paste the transform here. That is working. Let's actually check the last one. And that's already oriented in the right way. So yeah, congrats. We're done. We're basically importing assets from Mega Scans in the most efficient and probably the fastest way. At this point we can go into these component outputs. We need to give a name to these assets. So this will be my book 01. I will also copy this one and paste it here. Leave it as it is because that will be changed as to because you found a duplicate. So this is the same three and four. This is not just something that you might do. You need to do this because otherwise the asset will be called component output 4 and it's very hard to find it over here and understand what's going on. Let's see how to export that. So we need to go in thumbnail and view thumbnail camera. As you can see this will be the thumbnail that we'll be generating for this asset and this is important because now we are going to create a small library with this assets and we need to identify them in a certain way. So let's actually generate thumbnail and then save to disk. I will do the same process on this book too. Same logic for this one and save to disk and the last one. That is great. Now our books are in the correct orientation. They have a thumbnail. We only need to import them back in Houdini. So how can we do that? If we go here, we can actually create another paint tab. I'm looking for the Solaris layout asset gallery. We already have a database. You see DB. If you want to create a new one, we can go here and choose create new asset database file. As you can see, it's empty. So we need to fill it with this assets. One of the simplest way just go on each one of them and click on add to asset gallery. this button that you can find on this side. But I want to show you a more procedural way because maybe you have way more than this. Maybe you have one Ethereum and that would be very boring to go on each one of them and click on this button. So you can leverage the power of tops. So let me create a top network and inside we can use a note called USD assets to gallery. This one does exactly what it says. So right now I can just press shift and V and this will take care of doing everything for me. We just press that button on every single asset that it finds. or actually to be more specific, it will look on this folder to find those assets that we've exported and we'll just bring them back into the database that we have. So, as you can see, everything is down here and I hope you can see how powerful this workflow can be. But without doing some layout is very hard to imagine. So, let's actually do some layout. I will create a layout node very conveniently named. I will visualize it. And here I want to drag and drop my books. Now, actually before the layout, I would like something to collide with. So, maybe let's create a grid. That will be my floor basically. Now if you check the layout is already doing its own thing. You see I have an icon of my book over here. I can click just to release it or I can just hold and drag on this side to make them bigger. I can rotate. It's actually very very intuitive but it takes some time to do it properly. So I will now create two different books. Right now it's choosing only the first one. If I want to choose the second one I just need to select it. And as you can see I have the second book. So again same logic. Maybe one could be bigger, one could be smaller, different rotations. So let's do the third one and the fourth one just to add some beautiful and nice variation in size and in material. That is great. So of course this does look as a classic book pile. So let's see how to actually simulate that so they can interact between them. So after our layout that by the way has so many different options here. You can for instance choose the line and that will help you to create basically a line from point one to point 2 and you will create a line of books. In this case it's just one kind of book and that's because you need to select all of them. So if you do that again, as you can see, we have more variation. And I wish you experiment with all of these. It's very easy to understand what's going on with all of them. You can paint these books. You can scale them, stack them. Stuck is also very useful actually. You see, you can just do something like that. But again, it will do exactly what the name says. But we need to understand something else before proceeding. The layout node is creating instances. So you see if you go on options, it says point instancer. So I will change this one to instanceable reference. And this is a must otherwise we cannot proceed with the next step. Now I'll create an edit node. And I love this node. So let's visualize it and see how it can work. So I will press S in the viewport and select everything. Also the grid because I want the grid to be included in this physics simulation. And now I can press enter. Now you see every single book has been added. Also my grid has been added and that is great. I can now click on add physics and use physics. Now I can just do whatever I want. So first of all I would like to select only the books. Like the grid is just like a static one. I don't want to move it. And now, for instance, if I go here and press E to scale, you can see they are colliding. And the thing that is running like real time in Solaris for to me is kind of crazy. You see, now I can press T to transform and I can just put all of them down. Some of them are a little bit buggy as you can see. So I press Ctrl + C. We can definitely try to rotate them and to align them in the best possible way. What I tend to do that I really like, I prefer to rotate on a free axis. So something like that. So slowly I'm able to just orient all of them. I think it's just beautiful what we can do with this system. I can also either like select just one book like if I press S and click here I can then press T and move it singularly. It will always try to interact with the surroundings. So again it will take some time. I'm not saying it's 100% like easy. It's intuitive but with some time you'll be able to move them better exactly as you want. So great addition to the systems that we have in Solaris and I really wanted to show that to you because I think it's beautiful. Now because we already have materials we can just render. So I will just create a karma physical sky. Add a karma node. connect all of that together. And of course, I need a camera. Actually, I kind of like this angle. So, I don't want to create a new camera. I just want to click on this camera shift tool. In this way, I have the same camera, but it's already pointing where I want. But I still want some control. So, I will drag and drop the camera in the viewport. I will lock it. And now, I can just create a better uh layout in camera. That is something that I might like. Let's actually try to render and let's see what's going on. I think this is so cool. And I think this render is very interesting. Of course, we can do a lot more. Or we can add a material on the ground. But that will be a topic for the next class. So I hope you learned something new. I hope now you will be able to import assets from Mega Scans and create your own library over here. And so I can just press snapshot here and I will be able to see our render. So if you like the video, please consider subscribing. And I will see you next week with a new challenge and a new topic. Cheers. [Music]