Original subtitles

To begin with lets understand a few of the basics of working with Houdini's User Interface

and how to go about customizing it Now

This interface layout that you see here is the default that loads up with Houdini

If you go under the windows menu Here under desktop

This interface is called the Build Desktop By selecting this you should get the same desktop

layout For any reason if its not similar

go ahead and choose reload current desktop and that should reset it to defaults

Now that you have reset it to the default desktop, your color scheme might be slightly

different for this under edit menu

you can choose color settings and choose the color scheme you are most comfortable

with I'm going to leave it at Houdini dark as my

preference. Now for customizing the user interface

one of the easiest ways is that most of the menu items and shelf items

Have this small notch with this arrow on them Clicking on which toggles these elements on

& off which gets you more screen real estate.

Apart from that most of Houdini's interface is divided into separate Panes

with additional tabs within them. We can go ahead and switch over to any tab

by just clicking on them. Or also go to the New Pane Tab

And select any Tab you actually want to create. So you can actually create any number of tabs

on the same panel and have the same tab displayed in multiple

sections also Now you can also go ahead and split a Pane

into multiple sections and add additional elements.

To do this go to the top right-hand corner of any Pane

Click on this and select the split option you want to use

Either split it vertically or horizontally After you've split this

You can again go back to The New Pane Tab element

and select which ever panel you want to actually create there.

So like this you can go ahead re-edit the entire Houdini User Interface.

Once you've gone ahead and created any number of panels and added tabs into them

there are additional controls that Houdini provides you

As you can see there is a notch here which lets you control the size of the different

interface elements But also by just clicking on this notch once

it toggles the position of the different elements It exchanges them

Also, this notch has arrows pointing in different directions in the same place

by clicking on which you can collapse the entire panel itself

Also, once a panel is collapsed By clicking on the middle notch you can still

exchange the panel So, even though you are in the same interface

you can toggle different elements at the same time.

Now lets understand how to go about navigating in the Houdini Interface.

For this I will go reset my build desktop first.

There are several parts of the Houdini interface where we can navigate around.

The two most important portions I will concentrate on are the

Scene view: which is a 3D Viewport, and the Node-graph/Network-view which is a 2D Viewport

So, in the scene view to navigate around we need to have the camera tool selected.

Once it is we can use the Left click to Orbit around in the view

Right click to Dolly the camera in and out and middle click to Pan around.

But these options are only available when the camera tool is active.

Lets say we have any other tool active. In such a case all of the mouse shortcuts

are now different. To get back to the camera tool

we can use the space-bar and this temporarily activates the camera tool

and we still have all of the same options

For those of you who are coming in from Maya or any other package which uses Alt-navigation.

We can go under Edit-menu > Preferences > 3D-Viewports. Here enable "Use Alt Key for View Controls",

enables Alt Key navigation. Just like Space bar

So you can seamlessly integrate Houdini after coming in from a different package (kind of).

Now lets us look at how to navigate around in the network view.

Because Network-view is a simple 2D viewport, we only have option to Pan around and Zoom

in and out For Panning we use the same shortcut as in

the 3D view, which is the middle click. And Right click lets us Zoom in & out, pretty

much anywhere in the entire Network-View.

So that brings us to the end of this particular video

In here we learnt the basics of User Interface & Navigation

In the Next video Tutorial, I'll show you have to create objects and manipulate them.

If you have any doubts, feedback or suggestions, put them below the video and I'll do whatever

I can to help you. If you've found my material useful please

dont forget to Subscribe, like and share! That's it for now, I'll see you in the next

video.