Author Archives: pinkall

Roughly speaking, Combinatorial complexes play a similar role in the discrete world as differentiable manifolds in the smooth world. They are able to capture the “intrinsic” properties of a geometric object, i.e. those properties that are independent of any embedding … Continue reading →

In a scientific context a very common task is to prepare figures for manuscripts. In most cases the objects in the foreground are the sole focus of attention, and in such cases it is desirable that the figure should blend naturally with … Continue reading →

Visual perception is always slightly irritated when it is confronted with understanding objects that are just floating in empty space, with no clues concerning the surrounding environment. For this reason the slight gradient in Houdinis Scene View is already helpful: The … Continue reading →

Let us now work on the visualization of edges and points. In case you worry that your screen looks slightly different from the pictures we show: For the pictures we already applied the White Porcelain material as explained in the … Continue reading →

Before rendering it is always convenient to create a dedicated camera for this purpose. You do this by choosing New Camera from the yellow menu in the upper right corner of the Scene View. After this, you will see a … Continue reading →

This post is also meant as a first introduction to using Houdini. In most applications discrete curves and surfaces are used as approximate descriptions of smooth objects. This situation is close in spirit to Numerical Analysis where the discrete objects would … Continue reading →

On Notebooks that are not totally ancient and run Windows or Linux, Houdini works fine. On those Macs that feature a non-Intel graphics chip, Houdini runs excellently. The only problem are Macs with Intel graphics. Here (probably due to the lack … Continue reading →