Creating a Camera Frustum in Houdini

Creating a Camera Frustum in Houdini from Patrick Woo on Vimeo.

In this newest video tutorial, I show how to quickly create a camera frustum in Houdini.

Having a polygon geometry that outlines the camera frustum is useful as a visual indicator of the camera's direction and shows immediately which objects are inside or outside of the camera.

It also allows for a geometric image plane and opens up visualisation options for clipping planes and projection mapping operations.

Addendum: I have discovered my mistake months after I published this post. I have posted this in my music blog. It should rightfully belong in my VFX blog. If this is first time reading my blog post, please access my VFX blog here.

Using Zampler to create a PitchFall Sound Design Patch

I have recently installed Zampler, the absolutely free plugin from PluginBoutique.com. Having watched the introduction video I was pleasantly surprised. Besides being a sfz player, there is a host of features that can spice and freshen up our old and dusty sfz collections.

These include fully automatable parameters like filters, ADSR and envelope controls, and effects like reverb, chorus, distortion, delay, and phasers. We can choose to make the instrument polyphonic or monophonic too. On top of that, we can also configure note gliding resulting in portamento.

The three main things that seal the deal and truly sets this virtual sampler apart, are:
LFO section(!) - 3 LFOs with 4 selectable waveforms can be used to modulate parameters. These are host tempo aware too!

Arpeggiator - An arpeggiator has been added with controls for pitch and velocity per note value. This would truly transform those

Mod Matrix - As if the earlier 2 features were not enough This third major feature alone makes it worth the while to incorporate Zampler into your workflow. This is a mapping section or virtual patch-bay to hook up almost any parameter's output (note pitch, note velocity, LFOs, mod wheel, pitch wheel, expression pedal, arpeggiator velocity(!), arpeggiator note pitch(!), or any randomly generated value) to any other parameter's output (volume, pan, pitch, ADSR, Filter Params, LFO rates, FX dry/wet levels, etc)

In my obsession with creating more pitch drop sound design patches, I decided to test Zampler out, and within minutes I have successfully used LFOs to modulate my pitch, and using my modwheel I could further affect the pitch in a playable manner. by using a second filter I could create a gating effect on top of the pitch drop. With automation I could automate the rate of the LFOs over time.

Watch the video and try this beast of a sampler out for yourselves!

Setting up Sonivox Vocalizer (Pro) in Cakewalk Sonar X3

I finally found the time to do up a video showing how I set up Vocalizer Pro in Cakewalk Sonar X3. I believe this would work with Vocalizer 1.0 as well as with Cakewalk Sonar X1 and above.



Vocalizer Pro takes a stream of audio data, and a stream of MIDI data, one of each. The audio data will get processed and played back only when there is MIDI data present at the same time.

I have tried to set up a working instance of Vocalizer Pro and Vocalizer in a couple of occasions, with no success. Vocalizer comes with video instructions for setting up in a few DAWs. Unfortunately for Sonar users, the video for Sonar shows a version of Sonar that was before Sonar X1, where the set up for signal routing and the interface was slightly different from the current versions.

In this tutorial I covered two scenarios:
- we use the output of a virtual instrument as the audio input to Vocalizer Pro, and then use MIDI input from a separate channel to feed into Vocalizer Pro.
- using an audio file (or live audio input) to feed into Vocalizer Pro and then using MIDI input from a separate channel to connect to Vocalizer Pro also.

The most important part of the set up is to understand signal flow, and what kinds of data we're passing into each section of Sonar / Vocalizer Pro. Whether it's MIDI data, or audio.

I hope this is of some help to those trying to get Vocalizer to work with Sonar. And also to understand the types of signals and data needed to get it working.

FL-Studio - Resetting "Init Song With This Position"

This is a problem that I was stuck with for a while. Today I finally took the time to search for the solution on the internet, and the solution was readily available on many forums including Image-Line's.

The Feature

Init Song With This Position is a feature of FL Studio to enable the user to set a particular knob/slider/control to a certain value at the beginning of a song.

Any control, knob, toggle, slider from FL Studio's main application interface can be assigned an initial value this way. These include mute/unmute, volume, pan, mixer sends, tempo (coarse/fine), master volume, master pitch, etc. 

Once you set an 'Init song with this position' on a control, that control will revert its value to the set value every time you hit play on your song (even when you are not at the beginning of your song). Even with initial values set for a control, it is still possible to record automation on it, since 'Init song with this position' is not automation data in itself.

To use it, right-click on the control (knob/slider/button), then select 'Init song with this position':

Right-click on the control you want to init

Click on 'Init song with this position'

I can think of many uses for this feature. The most helpful situation for me, would be when I am going to use a physical controller's slider (Korg NanoKontrol2 for me) to affect the values of a FL Studio knob for example. I may actually mess up the value if I accidentally bump on my physical sliders positions (or someone changed the slider positions while I am away from my computer for a while). 

If that control has recorded automation, there would be no problem with this since during playback automation will automatically get the control back to the correct values. However, if that control has no automation set, that value would be lost and I would not be able to know what it was originally set at. 

This is where the 'Init song with this position' comes in very handy. It behaves like an automation snapshot that remembers that value without writing automation data on that control.

The Problem
Having knobs initialised with a certain value, without knowing how to remove that initialisation, can be annoying. Say at the beginning of my mixing stage I have 16 tracks. I do a rough mix of the levels, and I set the 'init song with this position' for each fader on each track.

Later on I tweak the levels of track 6 while the song is playing, from -10db to -5db. I'm happy with it, and I stop the playback. I play back the song again wanting to hear another part of the song with the new level at track 6, and lo-and-behold, my track 6 level jumps back to -10db because the track is initialised to that value.

One of the solution could be to set track 6's levels to -5db, and re-initialise this value as initial position on track 6's volume, before playing again to hear this new level for another part of the song. This could work but imagine having to keep setting initial value like this.

This is just one example. Another crazy example would be if a track's mute state was set with 'Init song with this position'. Every time you play the song, that track jumps to be muted, or un-muted as dictated by your init value. I don't know about you, but in my workflow I need to keep changing the states of mute/un-mute/solo. So having them init-ed and keep jumping to a certain position at the start of the song is unthinkable. (You can also accidentally produce this phenomenon if you are in automation enabled record mode, and you solo/mute/un-mute tracks during your playback. its really painful to undo).

The Solution

From the discussion threads on a few forums, the solution involves 2 steps:

• In the browser panel (F8), go to 'current project' -> 'initialised controls'. There will be a list of controls that have initialised values. See the diagram below.
• select from the list of controls those that you want to remove the 'init song with this position' from.

Browser panel's Initialized controls folder shows a list of controls that have initialised values.
Delete these to remove the initialisation.

This should successfully remove the init state of the control, and now the value should not jump to any pre-init-ed values upon playback.

All this while I appreciate the usefulness of this but was afraid to use it because I did not know how to reset the initialising. Now I am confident to use it, knowing I can remove it any time I want to.

If you have a better workflow please feel free to drop a comment :)

Some helpful links on this topic:

• http://www.theflipsideforum.com/index.php?topic=16171.0
• http://forum.image-line.com/viewtopic.php?t=51073

Multiple Channels of MIDI Input Controlling a Single Instance of a Virtual Instrument in FL Studio

The title of this post is really long, because I don't know how better to describe this :)

I have been trying to find out how to harness the multi-channel feature of many of my virtual instruments. Some of these are YellowTools Independence Free, Native Instruments Kontakt 5, EastWest Complete Composers Collection Quantum Leap products, and lastly the newest addition to my virtual instruments library, the Miroslav Philharmonik Classik Edition.


Multiple Channels of MIDI Input Controlling a Single Instance of a Virtual Instrument in FL Studio from Patrick Woo on Vimeo.

Click here to view this same video on YouTube.com


Not being able to access individual channels of a multi-channel midi instrument (physical/virtual) is one of the greatest reasons why I went back to making my music in Cakewalk Sonar for a while. Knowing how to separately control signal flow is crucial to me (MIDI/audio). I feel helpless if I do not know how to use this multi-channel feature. To me this is the most basic feature in a sequencing software. The other big thing against the workflow in FL Studio for me, was the fact that I still do not know how to drop into an audio record mode inside FL Studio. I found that I always have to start recording the audio tracks at the beginning of the song. Sorry for digressing, this topic is better kept for another day.

Finding out how to do this has boosted my confidence to continue to work with FL Studio. Having mentioned all the drawbacks of FL Studio (mostly due to my incompetency), I am obliged to mention a very strong area of this application. FL Studio really feels more solid and stable in terms of interaction and resource optimisation. The latency I get from FL Studio is generally quite fantastic. I can never get the same almost-lag-free experience with my virtual instruments in Sonar. Also, I feel FL Studio gives a more solid timing sync to the music (again this is probably because of the superior latency optimisation in FL Studio).

FL Studio Introduction & Workflow Video

Just posted an introduction video on my FL Studio workflow on Vimeo.


Introduction to My FL Studio Workflow from Patrick Woo on Vimeo.

I am now starting to do my projects on Cakewalk Sonar too. Being worried that I'll lose and forget the painfully accumulated workflow, tips and tricks when I need to come back to them, I've recorded a video as a reference for myself in the future.

I don't even know if I am doing things the right way, but its been working for me so far.

If you see anything in there that's not right, please correct me. Please also share any experiences, tips, tricks that you may have, so we can all learn together.

Thanks for watching!

The only thing I want to add, is that middle-mouse-clicking on your instrument names in the step sequencer/pattern editor would also allow you to rename your instruments. :)

Yes it saves you 1 additional mouse click! (usually its right-click to bring up the menu, then choosing 'rename' from the menu)

Cakewalk Sonar - Fixing Latency for Virtual Instruments

So I am back to take another look at the software I've been using for years.

Somehow this time I find that I am much less familiar with it. I still roughly know where things are I do not feel as close to it as I did FL Studio.

This time round, I ran into a very annoying problem. It's the latency problem in Sonar. Remember a while ago I wrote a similar post on solving my latency problem with my EastWest virtual instruments in FL Studio. Now I'm facing the same problem again in Sonar.

This time it happened to all virtual instruments in Sonar 8.5. The lag is unacceptably long (about 1.5 seconds). Tweaking the appropriate audio buffer values did not allow me to find an optimal setting that completely removed the lag. It was either laggy when I set the Sonar audio buffer values too high, or the sounds became choppy and stuttered when the buffer values got too low.

I went to youtube to do a search and found these.

So here are 2 youtube.com clips that talks about how to solve latency problems in Sonar.


This is the first time I've heard of this fantastic tool. Its called Asio4All. The website affectionately calls it A4A. It is developed by Michael Tippach to solve his own audio latency problem, and it's become one of the most sought after tool for fixing latency. He  (it works for me!).
Download it here: http://www.asio4all.com/

Here's a clip showing how to use the Asio4all tool. (this video shows it on an FL Studio host).