Node Nuggets 003 – Shot Sculpt (Houdini) (Patreon)

A little-noticed but very useful new tool in Houdini 21 is Shot Sculpt. Let’s look at what it does!

Way back in the day I animated a beating heart in Cinema 4D by creating keyframes with sculpted deformations. This type of thing is now easy in Houdini too. Using Shot Sculpt you create tracks that hold clips that store poses that can be interpolated between.

Let’s create a toy test geo and attach a Shot Sculpt.

Click the Open Shot Sculpt Pane button to display the Shot Sculpt timeline view.

Use sculpting tools to modify the mesh and create clips containing a new pose or two:

Clips can be slid around on the timeline, made longer or shorter, and set to various interpolation methods.

You can also paint masks to create point attributes used to control parameters on downstream nodes. Here I painted an attribute called mask to animate a Mountain node’s blend strength.