Houdini, which later evolved into Derivative's Touch 101, provided a wide range of techniques that enabled the animators to control visuals in realtime. Here we will explore a few of these tricks to give you an idea of how things are done in Houdini.

See where this technology has gone since 1998 - click here or talk to crabman.

Here is one of the eight editors within Houdini called the CHOPs Editor.

CHOPs (Channel Operators) take numbers coming from inputs like MIDI, combines them, and then sends them to different animation or modelling parameters.

For instance, a MIDI slider value comes in, it is scaled to be in the range -10 to 10, and is connected to the horizontal position of a light.

Here are 10 basic tricks, plus 3 more that combine the tricks.

Trick 1 - Break Light Beams to move between Camera Positions Trick 2 - Hit a Drum Pad to Cycle through 4 Texture Maps Trick 3 - Stomp on a Floor Pad to Blow Fire from the Volcano Trick 4 - Bob your Head to the Beat Trick 5 - Touch the Orbs to Join the Blobby Balls Trick 6 - Activate Different Objects in each Section of Music Trick 7 - Stomp the Floor to Alter Zoop's Mood Trick 8 - Turn Noisy Sensors into Clean Data Trick 9 - Stomp the Floor to Shake Blubber Mouth Trick 10 - Make the Sperm Swim Aimlessly Trick 11 - Wiggle your Hips to Propel the Jellyfish Trick 12 - Use Tires to Blend Pre-Keyframed Moves Trick 13 - Go Ka-Pow when Objects get Close

These techniques and more are demonstrated in a file on the Houdini 3.0 CD-ROM named kabong.tar.gz .