Make a useable tool for Houdini with no coding experience in either python or vex that is both functional and useful. use Claud ai to "vibe code" the tool and show it working.
Dec 8, 2025
Case study, 3D,
Houdini, Animation,
Karma, studentWork
Tags
Houdini, Claud AI
Lets see if this works.
The tool I built is a shelf tool that drops a camera into your scene with presets for popular cinema bodies and lenses. It gives me quick, easy access to different sensor sizes, focal lengths, and other key settings, letting me dial in a cinematic look without slowing down my workflow.
This is the prompt i but in when to begin with stating what tool I wanted what software i was using and what version so things would hopefully go more smoothly.
After my initial prompt I followed some simple steps and had to input the camera preset dropdown by hand. following the instructions from AI I eventually ended up with some good progress giving me the camera presets and some sliders.
Having gone through all the trouble of putting in the camera table by hand we ran into an issue and Claud gave me a ultimatum. This was pretty frustrating but I pushed forward with a more code based approach.
however this pivot turned out to be for the best as the code process let the AI take even more of the burden and just write out stuff for me to paste.
After the switch to a python code based approach everything went fairly smooth and I was able to get a functioning tool with drop downs for 10 camera sensors and 22 lenses.
Canaon_CN-E_85mm_T13
Leica_Summilux-c_40mm_T14
Adding some premade USD trees to frame the animation helped tie the whole scene together. I scattered points across the ground surface to place the trees, then used a Blast node to selectively remove points until I landed on a distribution I was happy with.
The main takeaway i got from this exercise was that vibe coding is a easy and accessible problem-solving tool. i had no idea how to code in python and I still don't but I was able to get a cool new tool out of it that I can add to my toolbelt. I still have some functionality I would like to add to this tool like emulating other parts of the camera like shutter speed or film grain but I will leave that for a later date.
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