soft body test with particles

this was surprisingly easy wih the shelf tools !




I also used pops to emit a few particles where the softy collided.

Copy Stamp Play

some copy stamping.

the scale and rotation (mostly in Y) is randomized based on $PT.
I used the fit01 expression to fit my random values into a desirable range.

in the first pic, the cards are just planes, but in the second, the cards are 3D with a slight bevel, and some noise (offset for each card through stamping)

to get the Houdini logo - i made sure 'use Template Attributes was on.'
so the Cd att. (color) was copied from the grid (the template) to the cards.
In my shader - i told it to use a Cd parameter and wired this into the colour so the colour info was piped through to the shader as well.

In my current version - i decided to animate the swirl feature of the logo into appearance. In the top view i made a rough poly curve /line that matched the spiral using my grid (with the texture's colours transferred to its points)
as a template.

I then gave it white point colours and animated a sphere along it, then transferred the color to the cards. For the sphere to leave a permanent trail behind it I used a trail sop....thus the cards are animated to turn white.

One issue i had with this attribute transfer - was that because the sphere with the white points is animated - and the grid/ ground plane is of finite resolution - the distance from the spheres points and the grids points changes as the sphere moves around - giving a flickering effect on the white. - The attribute transfer's distance is constantly changing as the spheres points move closer to and further away from the points on the grid.

To get around this - Rob suggested using a group. This was n easy solution - the sphere with trails - intersects the points on the grid (or the points scattered on the grid) and adds them to the group. This group then controls which points have their point colours changed.

misc tests

some old tests

weekly.....monthly research...

a glance at nuke...

i had a bit of a play with Nuke this morning...so i though why not have another

look at it...

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from wikipedia:

Nuke (the name deriving from 'new compositor')^[1] was originally developed by Bill Spitzak of Digital Domain for in-house use beginning in 1993. Nuke used the FLTK toolkit, which was developed in-house at Digital Domain and was subsequently released under the GNU LGPL in 1998.

In 2007, The Foundry, a London-based plug-in development house, took over development and marketing of Nuke from D2.^[7] The Foundry released Nuke 4.7 in June 2007,^[8] and Nuke 5 was released in early 2008, which replaced the interface with Qt and added Python scripting, and support for a stereoscopic workflow. Nuke supports use of The Foundry plug-ins via its support for the OpenFX standard.

--------------------------

some notes:

just like fusion, you can hit 1 to get a viewer to pop up to display the node your focussed on.....which means you can select any node and then hit one to pop up a

preview of your tree at that position.

I noticed the menu has an open recent option....with the hot keys Alt - Shift -1, 2,3 etc...

Alt-G go directly to a frame...cool !

Alt-I script info..

Search / - just like houdini and linux !

CTRL-D disconnect or remove input

Zoom:

CTRL and a number to zoom in

ALT- and a number to zoom out.

F for fit and + and - to zoom in and out.

ALT-MMB for interactive zoom

ALT-LMB for Pan

` toggle the viewer

SHIFT ~ curve editor

S settings - you can specify a proxy here as well as general project settings

Shift - S preferences...

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ok from here i decided to investigate based on common tools:

a more structured approach...

splines / curves

add a bezier node under the draw submenu of 'modifiers' or tools

or just press P

CTRL-ALT-click to draw....

it seems by default the spline is closed.

some thoughts / questions and answers about splines from working in Fusion , After FX and Shake:

P (shift-p) allows me to draw a path

can i easily hide them ? -
O for Overlay toggles all the viewer type overlaid controls

can i animate the number of CV's ? and how is this interpolated ?

would I really want to do this ? i noticed shake was kinda klunkyu in this area -
you had to plan ahead with your keyframes.

can i easily control a feathered falloff or soft edge of the spline ?
using control gives me a soft edge for the bezier - indicated by a dotted line

the dotted line seems to actually indicate the beginning of the fall-off - not the end.

The solid line indicates the end of the fall off - where the spline is not having any effect - the outer most extreme region of the spline.

in fact moving the dotted - inner line can actually move the outer line as well - as if they were linked. CTRL gives independent control.

like shake.

x or right clicking and choosing 'BREAK' on the point will break the bezier handles.

cusp (corner) and blur / unblur and smooth (relink bezier handles) is also avail from this RC menu.

the help button has quite a few tips:

there is a transform jack when a few points are selected

you can also select points by clicking on the line between the points

Can i easily animate the spline as a whole ?

(there appears to be a handle like in shake)

the actual function of splines and masking seems a bit different
you can have a bezier node function with no input - it can exist in it s own right
in order to get some results that were logical to me...
i had to :


to be continued....

ok so i had some difficulties getting used to the masking with Nuke.
finally i read some of the help files: :)

from the first tutorial script i see that adding a mask or bezier shape to an image
fills it with white by default - so by changing the colour to black and inverting the mask i was able to cut a section of the im age out and overlay it (over) on something else.
So if want to use a filtere to affect just a region of an image this is one way i could do it.
Im really after a more direct way - luch as in fusion where you apply the filter to an image (which applies it to the entire image) then you can plug a mask into an imput designed for accepting masks and the filster is constrained tot hat mask.
the same process is complete in three nodes rather than four..

mercedes glk website launched !

Mercedes Job makes it to SideFX's REEL !!!

www.mercedes-glk.com

looks amazing...but be warned - it takes a while to come down
hats off in a big way to the talent at Realise and Kanuka Studios !

ICP, Isixpack, BIC (rangi sutton)

ICP - convert images to rat format for better memory usage in Houdini.

after typing in a shell (in a houdini environment)
i get:

icp copies one image file to another, optionally performing simple
operations.

icp [options]

some options

-u output uncompressed if supported
-v turn on verbose
-f flip vertically
-F flip horizontally
-R flop image 90 degrees couter clock wise
-r scale to w x h res.
-s scale to a percent of the original
-c crop area in UV coords
-C crop area in pixels
-P include planes at the specified indices
-L load with cineon LUT
-O save with cineon lut
-N do not convert cineon from 10 bit log

isixpack takes 6 images and makes a reflection map in rat format.

type for help

% isixpack -

------------------------

from the help - there is 3 ways to convert images.
1. through COPS
2. converting in MPLAY
3. isixpack - mentioned above

AH HA !

what i was really after was the bic command (written by rangi Sutton)

the bic command converts images between formats.

Usage: bic -i  -o  [-e] image_file_names

Takes each of the image files specified with image_file_names and converts them
to image files of the format specified with the output_format. The files
specified with image_file_names should be image files of the type specified
with the -i input_format.

Valid file formats are:

pic jpg jpeg tga gif gif89 rgb sgi yuv pict pix cin tx rat exr

Input files should have these suffixes.  eg myrender.rgb
Requires a valid Sidefx Houdini License.

Written by Rangi Sutton on 20/3/97 for HM3d Graphics Systems

Ball o' Worms

Trials and tribulations...

well..im working on a new ball of worms and theres been some interesting developments...

the worms...
i took the old geometry from max in obj format and decided i could improve in it in Houdini - the ends of the worms in max had some 'bogeys' due to bezier handles being present and the fact that i told max to create the geometry in the spline object itself.

in Houdini, i used partition and connectivity to create a group for each worm, then i deleted all the worms except one, then rebuilt the group with a copy SOP - an awesome technique first shown to me by one of David Gary's old video tuts - the particles flowing along the l-system.

this way - all operations applied to the one remaing worm can also be applied to the entire list of groups / of worms :)

i grouped a bunch of co-linear - in worm space :) - points by using group by range, and then made a new spline from this, then swept new worms after re-sampling the spline giving me much cleaner worms...the obj was much too high in res.

then i decided to add a ring slightly fatter around the middle - see the pic ? and this was done by extruding - which was not good for the UVs - likewise i capped the open ends of the polys - bad for proceduralism and UVs. There was also a UV errorof some sort ruining my renders.

so today i went about solving these issues and opened up a can of well.....worms :|

my proc method of selecting the ends had to be scrapped - i made groups for the first and last point of the splines the swept the worms - proc ok - but then after copying spheres to these points i wasnt really cleanly selecting points or prims for extrusions or capping.

the sweeping itself also had to be redone unfortunately - as did the UV mapping - but uncovered some interesting techniques. The UVs were made with Rob K's (meshsmooth) unfold curve SOP
which looks at the angle of segments on the curve and then applies that same angle as a rotation to the specific segments and thus straightens out the curve. With the same method used for the backbone curve - a sweep with give you a flat plane which can easily be mapped - these UVs can then be transferred to the same sweep (with curly cuves) thus mapping the worm.

I also decided to go to town with the image and add some rain and all the water FX that would go with it - rain splashing against the ball of dirt and trhe worms and causing mud, and water dripping off the worms and bouncing around on the set / cyclorama. Joy...more cans of worms !

closest render I have to the original houdini render: