HDR Lighting

This is officially the first all-nighter for this year :)

Tonight I am going through the basics of HDR lighting. I have picked up a tutorial from DT and I am trying to finish it off. The acquisition that we have done for our project has some issues at the moment so it will be a while till I get the things the way I need them to light properly. It's good that we are having these issues now. It would be simply horrible to have these problems in March.
here is some output from my night.

Output without the lens shader

Output with the lens shader

Hopefully we will have a working version of the shot by Tuesday. Ciao...

Pipeline for proof of concept test

Hi, I have to take yet another break form my dynamics work because our tutors for the project were not very happy with the story that we came up with. SO we have to change that now. Also, they wanted to see a proof of concept, so we just pulled out a few cameras and went into the town to shoot a bit of stuff and we are trying to integrate the assets that we have into the backplates. This is the pipeline we have for this mini-project.

We just have 3 days to do this, so this is going to be a lot of fun :)

The BrickMaker tool

So, I have been working on this BrickMaker tool in Houdini for a couple of days now and I would say that it is done(at least I am leaving it here). I am not taking it any further as this is just a part of my learning process and I need to move on. We would be using it in our project titled "EGO" for destruction simulations.

Here are some results form the tool. These have been rendered out using Mantra, using a simple Mantra shader with a default environment light.

The tool can take any input geometry and convert it into bricks(or Lego blocks) The instancing bits can be changed to look like anything, Lego, plain blocks, matchsticks etc. In the images below you can see how the tool can be applied to any geometry.

Hmm... A Lego teapot!

OH MY GOD!! I am Lego too!!

Here is the little user-interface for the tool

Custom UI

You have several options. You can have the default teapot, or you can source your own geometry using the Custom Object Path. If you are using the default teapot, you can control it's size and position from within this parameter box. Offset allows you to increase/decrease the number of units the geometry is constructed with. We also have some access to the shader, so you can chose to have various types of colours. There is also an option to Animate the bricks which makes the geometry appear slowly. Appear order lets you decide, how you want the blocks to appear. And with build speed you can control the speed with which the blocks are placed to construct the geometry.

Right now I am doing some tests on it. I am currently rendering out some animations that I made using this tool. They should be up by today evening or tomorrow morning.

Cheers! Thanks for reading!

BrickMaker update: Use Lego for your geometry now!

I am extending the brickMaker tool today. Started off by making a Lego version of it. Added the capability to instance geometry at render time, thus giving higher detail, but still keeping the main scene file light and agile. In principle, the instance geometry, which is a Lego brick in this case, can be made as complex as required now.

Utah teapot, made out of Lego bricks

Houdini Brick Tool

So, now I am learning how to use Attributes, Groups and Expressions properly. Also trying to properly understand how the Digital Asset system works in Houdini. This is a little network that takes any geo and turns it into a brick map. You can control the resolution dictating how many bricks you want to have there. Once fully developed, I think it can be used to create some cool using procedural animation such as an effect where the cubes just come together and form this shape.

Some output from the tool:

An Utah teapot at 2x2x2 resolution

An Utah teapot at 4x4x4 resolution

An Utah teapot at 4x4x4 resolution

A Torus at 4x4x4 resolution

A Torus at 2x2x2 resolution

A Torus at 2x2x2 resolution

I would be working further on this tool tomorrow so watch out for the tree structure, UI and more output.

Rough Houdini RBD sim

I am continuing to explore Houdini in increasing depth. In the last couple of days I explored the RBD engine of Houdini.

This is a rough simulation I pulled out in 20 minutes. It is not very sophisticated at the moment, but it will get better soon.

Watch a video of the sim on Vimeo HERE!

(RE)starting with Houdini

Well... I have always loved the way Houdini works and have been using it for a couple of months now, but actually, we never really got finally introduced. So, there are couple of intermediate to advanced things I have a hang of, but then there are couple of very basic things that I have NO idea about. SO, I decided that before really diving into this huge sim, it would be nice to understand the basics better. Now, for the next couple of weeks I am going through the basic videos. It gets really dull at times, but I am getting a wealth of information, I had no idea about. So here goes what I did today.

createAttribute with colour override

I have started off with trying to understand attributes and groups a bit better. So I made a grid and then output some groups out of the polyExtrude and then based on the group gave them different colours.

Creating groups using polyExtrude

Here I just displaced the $TY with a random value using rand($PT) to create a mountainSop-ish displacement.

Randomising the y-coordinate on a per-point basis

Here I created a new set of attributes and then copied them over to yet another set. You can see the spreadsheet and the per-point attrib values displayed in the viewport.

WTF did I do!! I was trying to project a path on a grid, but instead of using the ray sop used the rails sop. Houdini had a minor heart attack :p

OOPS!

That's more like it

A path projected on a grid with a mountain sop on it