Friday, June 12, 2020

Stocktake

wow - time has flown.
is this blog even active ? it doesnt matter - it is now....
 enter Rambing mode - this will serve as a dumping ground for some houdini experience gained last year and reflections....as well as a bunch of notes on what lies ahead in these uncertain times.



So much to learn - so much to catch up on..

FEM
Packed Prims
Karma
RenderMan Updates...
USD                                    
Vellum

the list goes on...



Vellum seems like a good place to start since i already started exploring it on the last film job. On this show, we create some jiggly compound eyes, complete with procedural animation, and with complete control. It was quite involved for my experience - and wouldnt you know it - in the final shot it was too dark to see the effect :)

Other FX using vellum included a curtain tearing and an exploding monster !
I will have a go at re-creating these effects.


 

Thursday, October 10, 2019

LAG CHOP

playing with the lag chop...
this is an attempt to mix between lagged animated Normals and non-lagged normals by distance from the animated normal - in this case the center of the grid - in red.




Saturday, August 24, 2019

rfH - Ribspreader Title

sub-surface test on the Ribspreader (not ripspreader)Title text.
Would be nice to have animated dripping...




...& an initial skin tear test :)

RFH (renderman for houdini) step 2 mixing uv coodinates

I got stuck on this for a little while...

it seems now despite posts in prman 22.0
rmfH is automatically dealing with conversion from uv attributes to s,t,st attributes

iwas playing aound with converting/promoting uvs to primvars and using pxrPrimvar in the shading context - but it seems this isn't necessary.

In rmfH 22.6 i am blending ehre between 2 uv sets (maya terminolgy ?)
and using a simple ramp to mask between them.

To avoid confusion - i tested each map and the ramp in SOPS first and updated the render in mantra's ipr until i was sure it was working correctly.

To get the new uvs into the rsl shader, i put 'uv2' into the PRIM_S/ST parms to override the default uv parms. I did not have to convert from 'uv2' to 'st' in SOP context. Thank you developers.




Sunday, August 18, 2019

RenderMan for Houdini



here's some initial test with Renderman - i havn't really used it much before so lots to learn. The first step was getting Houdini's Cd parm through to shaders using PxrAt or PxrPrimAt.