Houdini Doodle: Texturing with USD Material X

I just wanted to work on some USD Material X texturing techniques, NOT Karma Material X, but USD specific. So this is working on getting better with Displacement with the planks and getting the right dicing on the geo. Working with Transmission and Metalness on the sphere and using a greyscale image to drive the bump instead of a normal map. Tried to dial in some caustics being driven by a pretty sharp spot light, but those did not really pan out all that well. Not very familiar with using Metalness instead of Specular so that was kinda interesting. The only hard wall is there are no ramps in USD material X yet, so I had to use the Karma ramps there.

I think the next thing I do will be to take the “Dyerin” art and try to remake that in Karma / Solaris and see how I do texturing all the plants.

On a side work note, we are hitting a busy patch and have a bunch of vacations coming up. So if you have any projects on the horizon let us know sooner than later as quick turn rush projects might not be feasible. Thanks!

Houdini Doodle: Lighting for Subject 4

Now that I am getting my head around Solaris and Karma, I wanted to revisit the cloud study I did and rework it from the ground up. The undocumented thing I had to figure out this time was how to get the HDRI that is lighting the scene to show up in the render. Its buried under Dome Light > Karma > Render light geometry. And the freaking manual just has a blank section for Karma….. like really?

Yeeesh

I can’t even….

Houdini Doodle: Lighting for Subject 3

So did some light texturing this time around and got my AOVs to work as well. Also, if you are wondering why when you hit render to disk in karma you do not see and progress bar or a MPlay window, that’s because it’s off by default. You have to turn on a monitor, which is not very artist friendly IMO. Screen shot below

Houdini Doodle:Lighting for Subject 2

Just more experimenting with Karma and Solaris. I also go into AOVs on the output ROP but they don’t seem to work as indicated. I wanted the volume output but it didn’t seem to stick.

Houdini Doodle: lighting for subject

Just messing around with Karma and Solaris in Houdini some more. Was messing around with the barn door function on the lights which is really interesting way to work. The light Mixer node is still very buggy though. Seems to lock to either the light node or the light mixer for exposure and glitches out between the two. And I also keep getting this camera glitch that when I enable the DoF in the F-Stop parameter, the whole camera breaks and the screen goes grey. Have to delete the camera and re add it. So, yeah, still so buggy bits. But, it’s better for sure. Not quiet up to Redshift for client work though. But it’s getting there.

Memedump Friday!

Here have some rando crap harvested fresh from the internets. It’s a series of tubes ya know.

Music Fridays!

Bill Evans Live '64 '75

Man, that is some nice brush work…..

New Work in the Wild: The STAPLE X-2

Was asked to create a cloud shape in the style of when jets break the sound barrier and composite a shoe into it for Staple.  I added some more tendril-ish shapes in there to add some more details instead of how straight and flat the actual cone would be, but I think it adds some nice texture. AD & Photographer: Unruh / Jones

New Work in the Wild: Specialized Tires.

We got to help out with the whole tire line at Specialized for the Season and those are starting to appear all around the site. We ended developing a new technique we call, “Texture Stealing” in house to help with the textures on the rubber when they punch in with a 9k camera. It’s kind of a variation on High Frequency Separation. /end nerd talk ;)

Albert Bierstadt- painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes

Just a little dive into Albert Bierstadt, this painter I was looking up. His landscapes are really something. I like the lighting quiet a bit.

New Work in the Wild: Sitka

Some apparel in ice retouching Jeremy did for Sitka went live on their site a little bit ago. Working with ice is always fun.

RTO is bullshit, here's a real life case study from Zillow

RTO is Bullshit. We all know. AI is Bullshit. We all know it. Come on people. Anyways, some interesting data points from Zillow.

“The company has drastically cut costs by shedding offices. Zillow’s total leasing costs reached $54 million in 2022 and dropped to $34 million last year. The company’s total revenue for 2024 was $2.2 billion.

Zillow’s financial results from last year suggest the workforce has been productive while logging in from home. The company reported Tuesday that it beat Wall Street expectations for the last three months of 2024 with a quarterly revenue of $554 million

Zillow shifted to allowing people to work fully remote during the pandemic. It’s been a recruiting and retention tool for Zillow as they “now see four times the number of job applicants for every job we have versus what we did before the pandemic,” Wacksman said.”

New Work in the Wild: Trailborn

Some architectural retouching work I did for Trailborn is showing up on their website. Looks super clean in their design / layout. Surf and Sand and Grand Canyon.

I offered the work in exchange for a couple weeks of free nights but could not get them to bite on that hook ;)

Revised name of band to Dyerin

So I had to make a new render this AM ;)