Sharan Vaswani’s IPOPs Toolset streamlines VFX work in Houdini
Chakshu VFX – aka VFX artist Sharan Vaswani – has released the IPOPs Toolset, a set of over 70 HDAs intended to streamline VFX work in Houdini.
The IPOPs (Image Plane OPerators) are designed to speed up shader and AOV development, and were developed during Vaswani’s own production work.
Production-proven tools intended to speed up VFX pipelines
Vaswani describes the IPOPs as “operator workflows designed to streamline shaders and AOV development in Houdini”.
They were developed in production at VFX studio ReDefine, where Vaswani was previously FX Supervisor, on movies like Brahmāstra – Part One: Shiva and TV series like American Born Chinese.
Separate sets of tools for shader development and AOV generation
The IPOPs Toolset is divided into four separate collections of HDAs: the Standard Library and the Geometry AOVs, Particles AOVs and Volume AOVs.
The Standard Library is a set of utility nodes intended to speed up shader development, including nodes for creating Fresnel effects and mask falloffs.
The Geometry AOVs, Particle AOVs and Volume AOVs are intended to generate quick AOV passes and mattes from… well, geometry, particles and volumes.
All are actually online libraries: buying the products on Gumroad gives you access to private GitHub repositories, which Vaswani says he plans to update regularly.
Compatible with Houdini’s Karma and Mantra renderers
All of the IPOPs tools are supported in Houdini’s Mantra and Karma CPU renderers in VEX shaders, and in standard Karma materials in Karma CPU and Karma XPU.
All but the Volumes AOVs also supported in MaterialX materials in Karma CPU and XPU.
Price and system requirements
The IPOPs tools are compatible with Houdini 20.0+ (Houdini 20.0729+ for the Particles AOVs, and Houdini 20.0625+ for the remaining tools).
The currently only work with the Indie and Apprentice editions of the software.
For Houdini Apprentice, the Standard Library costs $30. The Geometry AOVs, Particles AOVs and Volume AOVs each cost $15.
For Houdini Indie, the Standard Library costs $40. The Geometry AOVs, Particles AOVs and Volume AOVs each cost $20.
A range of product bundles are also available.
Read more about how to use the IPOPs tools on Sharan Vasawani’s blog
See videos of individual IPOPs tools in action on Sharan Vaswani’s YouTube channel
Get the IPOPs tools for Houdini from Sharan Vaswani’s Gumroad store
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