Laundry - Drying

 Simpler than a washing simulation with water - that comes later...

2024 - Chop Shop Post 1/2

 2024 was another busy year - this time with Chop Shop Post in Brisbane.

Some good aspects about this time at Chop Shop, some not so good.
On the positive - some outstanding work achieved. From my point of view I was mainly lighting and helping produce renders  - both shot renders and extra large marketing files. A lot of positive publicity generated.

This was an occasion where AI generated concept "art" for character design was made and then used to direct the Character Modelling and look Dev. This was quite challenging as the clients then expected a lot of realism - ie fur and realistic clothing.

The look dev process was complicated by a few factors - the clients was overseas in a different time zone and it seemed that meetings would sometimes occur with them without artists being present. What seemed like endless changes and tweaks was slowing us down for weeks.

Clothing was generated using Marvelous Designer .-With limited experience with MD, geometry had to be tediously analysed and optimised in prep for simulation in houdini. Once simmed into place for an appropriate pose for look-dev renders, we were then in a pretty good spot until they concept art was again changed.

Similarly - models were obtained from the internet - at various levels of quality and suitability and kitbashed a little too rapidly in order to hit desperate character look approvals. 
Long story short in the end - we had a TVC or something resembling a TVC. Extremely ambitious project - that never should have happened in the first place.

On the positive again - I learnt alot about Karma and setting up my Solaris networks - which I only briefly got to touch on in the previous contract

Time has flown !

Time really has flown by again - but in a good way as I have been busy. Since my last post - wow - there have been many shows and many trials and tribulations. 

Firstly credit where credit is due, thank you to my mate Robert Kelly for recommending me for a few jobs - this has kept me busy and able to feed my family !

Big Thank you to Chris Bending for doing a great job on supervising my crowd work on Elvis. I hadn't really done any houdini crowd work before - he was a very dedicated, talented and patient mentor. Thank you Chris !

Following Love and Monsters - now on Netflix, I worked on Elivs, Resident Evil (Series), Halo (the Series), Secret Head Quarters, Disney's Hocus Pocus 2, AntMan: Quantumania, Nautilus and soon to be released in Australia - "Sting" ! ....busy indeed.

I was really happy with an ant sim I worked on for a film called "FieldTrip" but I'm not yet sure if that is being released. I hope so - the ant sim looked great !

On Sting (w/ Cumulus VFX) I got to work on some classic snow FX using particles in houdini shots, some smoke and steam using houdini's volumes and pyro tools - great fun and a little challenging with not much render power available. I also did a little some blood spatter.

I started using Redshift for the first time. Had some problems with the creation of ZDepth channels but other than that it was more or less smooth sailing.

Also....along the way I've been lucky to meet a bunch of super talented artists, some of which have become great friends and colleagues ! Shout outs to Derek, Ohm, Kaniya, Harsh, Avani, Deepak, Jorge, Yuya and Tushar whom I met at MPC.

Good times :)

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.

 

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.

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.