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?

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.

Houdini Doodle - Dyer

Little doodle I whipped out today for something still cooking in the oven.

Have a lot going on and been busy with the life and work so trying to post when I can. Need to update the portfolio as well, but I kinda don’t enjoy that and it’s a lot of work that I don’t have time for at the moment, lol! But it is on the radar as something that needs to get done.

Houdini Doodle

And todays doodle sticks with motion blur as the primary component with some volumetric scattering added in.

Houdini Doodle: Motion Blur Study

After testing out some extreme caustics the other day, I kinda wanted to get into some crazy motion blurs. I made three different kinds of motions here to get these effects. The biggest hiccup I had was that my render window in Redshift was showing the blur but the final Render wih Mplay was not. Turns out if you have a motion vector AOV turned on, it won’t render out. Dunno if that’s a bug or not. But was odd to trouble shoot.

Houdini Doodles: Cassette

Just messing around with some clouds and voronoi fracture which was not really working for me. So I shifted it up and went into doing a caustics study which I like more. Works pretty good now in Redshift and renders fast.

Houdini Doodle

Some more water explorations going on and playing with displacement.

Houdini Doodle: Water and Wax

Was messing around with water and cutting it up into different groups for some abstract stuff here. Working with Poly to VDB and back, groupings, and the new SSS in Redshift, which I am really liking. So much easier to work with since the update to random walk.

Doodles!

Just some rando Houdini doodles messing with different systems. Nothing thought out or anything, just trying to mess around more with it.

Houdini Doodle- Cloth study

I am trying to do a deeper dive into vellum in Houdini when I catch a break between jobs and today I did a quick study on some cloth shapes that is kinda interesting. And purple. Very purple.