 Howdy guys, IndiePixel here, and I am super excited because I'm starting this series now called Houdini Procedural Patterns. Every month what I'm going to do is produce a mini course that walks you through how to create different types of patterns, very much like how we go about using them in substance or how we go about creating them inside a substance designer. We can do the same thing inside of Houdini, and oftentimes it's even more powerful because we are actually producing 3D geometry while we're doing this, okay? So I wanted to walk you through how to do this. It's great workflows for beginners, plus it basically focuses you in on a single project, a very beginner project that allows you to start to really understand how you blend together different techniques and different expression functions and how to set up node structures so that you can produce and reuse a lot of your own networks to create procedural patterns, okay? So let's talk about who this course is for. What are the prerequisites for this course? Now, like I said, these are beginner courses. All of these courses that I make on a monthly basis will be targeted at the beginner Houdini user, all right? So if you have a little bit of experience making 3D content for games, that'll be great. Not totally necessary, but it will help give you an understanding of what we're doing, basically, why we're creating 3D geometry and why we're making these patterns tileable, stuff like that, okay? A beginner level knowledge of Houdini. I'm not going to walk through too much of the actual user interface or what a node is, stuff like that. We're just going to jump right in and again, these are targeted small projects for beginners of Houdini so that way they can practice a little bit more and start learning more techniques in a very focused way, okay? And then a beginner level knowledge of 3D modeling is always good because we're going to be working with your usual vertices and faces and materials and rendering and stuff like that. So it's good to at least know what those things are, okay? So with that, let's do a quick demo and take a look at what we are going to create. So here we have the results of the contents of the course. So we're going to walk through and we're going to create a series of nodes or a network of nodes that goes and creates a tileable wood plank mesh for us, all right? So we can go and create large amounts of wood planks really easily. Then we're going to go through and we're going to wrap it all up into an HDA and we're going to expose some parameters to it. So in this case, I can go and actually just turn off my tiling and see just the pieces that we have, just a single individual tile. And I can go and, you know, decrease the amount of rows that we have here. And we can go and increase the amount of rows that we have here, all right? So let's increase those rows. You have to wait for it to calculate a little bit. These are pretty dense meshes that we create, but you can see that it's all procedural. Everything is being taken care of for us. We don't have to go back in and manually edit anything. All right? So we can change the amount of row plank counts that we have, the gap, the min and max gap between each of the planks itself, and then we can finally go and tile it. Now, I just went through and, you know, created a basic set of parameters. There's so many more parameters in here that we could have actually exposed, but I just exposed a couple of them just to get the idea across. All right? So then we go through and set up some lights and some cameras. And I walk through how to do all that stuff. And then we go through and set up a render for this. And I just wanted to walk the beginners or the viewers of this course through the basics of rendering inside of Houdini. It's not overly obvious right away. And it definitely does not work like most of your DCC content packages out there, like Maya or Max. All right? So here's a render that I just did. Okay? So we're going to walk through all this. It's a great beginner project. It keeps you highly focused on, you know, just one small task instead of trying to tackle too much, which is often the case when people are first learning Houdini. Okay? So this will walk you through all the components necessary to create this whole scene and create an HDA that makes tiling planks. All right? Thanks so much. And let's jump into it.