New Stuff

Haven’t had an update in a while…now that I’m in Los Angeles and working at Rhythm&Hues I really haven’t opened houdini at all outside of work. Until yesterday… I rewatched Tron Legacy recently which had some inspiring VFX in it.

I found online this: http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178 an article by a guy who did some integrated graphics work for Tron which had some cool examples of the programs he put together, so I made my own version of one of the rigs he had, enjoy.

UPDATE: View the animated version in HD on vimeo!

:At Sea: Finished!

2 weeks R&D, 10 weeks of production.  Lots and lots of Houdini!

Enjoy!

Volumetric Rendering of Particles

Inspired by Krakatoa’s “voxelized particle” rendering system.  I have an empty volume with a shader which looks up a point cloud for density.  The power of this over transfering particles to a volume in the scene is the detail level is limited only by the volume step size of the render.  This scene has 10 million particles and only uses about 3gb of RAM, the only choke in the process is to write the pointcloud all of the partitions had to be joined, but there are ways around that.  Additionally, all extra attributes like color, velocity, even Normals, can be included in the shading network through attribute transfers to named volumes.  Theoretically, an alternative system of surface scattered could be wired so that the surface color is created from a surface lighting model with the Normals field, then that could be multilpied by density accumulation.

It’s obviously slower than Krakatoa, as the depth map for 1 light took nearly 30 minutes to generate at 0.01 volume stepsize, maybe other raytracing engines could be faster.

Also, pretty particles

Dry Ice, part 1

Here’s a small project I’m doing for a colleague, he wants a dry-ice like effect for his scene.  Here I have a basic sim, where a torus object emits a low amount of density, and a high temperature.  A strong, animated noise is added make the sourcing more irregular and interesting.  Peter Quint’s latest video gave some ideas on making this easier.  The buoyancy is set to a negative temperature, which pushes the “hot” smoke towards the ground.  As the temperature cools the density evaporates, and the buoyancy direction/gravity direction are pushed slightly towards the staircase .

To be added: up-res version, renders, etc

At Sea: Week 2

More updates on the voracious particle systems in this project!

Here is a flipbook from a few days ago, it shows the wave crest particles as well as the boat sprays.  I rendered out a test sequence of the particles which has let me see a lot of changes I need to make, so there will be much change in the next week!

At Sea: Week 1

At Sea is my final studio project at SCAD, it is a short narrative of a model boat and it’s former glory on the storm seas. The ocean environment is the focus of this project and a majority of effort will be dedicated to look development of the ocean and technical direction for particle effects interacting with the boat.

Here is a flipbook of whats been done so far, ocean controls are set and the camera move is getting locked down, started working on the particle system for ocean spray hitting the boat

alot of trial error to get the particle system where it is now, and lots more to go

January Updates

I’m finally back in Savannah for my final semester, and I my studio project is well underway, which I will start posting updates for soon, in the meanwhile watch this video showing volume interpolations in sops

More Ocean

Been doing more work with oceans, the shader has been redone a billion times and im getting closer to a more desirable result

Ocean RnD

I finally acquired a working build of the Houdini Ocean Toolkit for 11.0.504 so I started doing some work with the HOT plugins.

The Ocean node is neat, but for anything advanced you are better off using the vex node, since that can output eigenvalues and be blended with various vex operators.  The obvious use of this is outputing geometry for water-spray particle sourcing.  The sample files demonstrate how you can use the minimum eigenvalue to isolate the crests of the surface without additional measure sops or other methods.

HOT oceans look cool but you need a good shader to make them terrific.  I studied several examples of ocean shaders and put together my own which incorporates white-water cresting similar to the Liquid shader, and reflective/refractive qualities with several controls.

I also combined HOT with some basic fluid-based liquids for simulating wakes and waves, which is also fairly straight forward, since you can just toss a vopsop onto the surface mesh out of the simulation.

http://odforce.net/wiki/index.php/HoudiniOceanToolkit
-site for HOT

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/11943-hot-1-0rc9-for-h11-504-compiled/
-for lastest windows builds

IMPACT: Finito!

Compiled the two shots and their breakdowns together for the quarterlies, add some fun sounds too! enjoy