Here is another take on those VDB clouds. This time I went for a bit more abstract, odd angular shape on them. Kinda like if it was, “At the Mountains of Madness” vibe.
Just got back from the Oregon Coast and I am shockingly exhausted for some reason. Wanna work on some of my photos from there but just kinda staring blankly at Bridge.
Was playing around with the cloud and cloud noise nodes yesterday in a attempt to make a abstract cloudscape. Here are the results of that. Today I might get away from round shapes and see how they behave when I use angular shapes for the base. Possibly grids scattered like broken shards? Dunno. The Amplitude and Element Size settings in the cloud noise node can really change things up. Rendered in Redshift because Octane in Houdini hates me.
In my efforts to get off social media I am searching out blogs and other sites that allow me to escape the “walled garden” of insta, facebook etc… Go back to the day when the web was more based on people and not giant hoses draining all content, lol. Anyways, Wil Wheaton wrote a nice piece the other day and I thought I’d link it here. I can fall asleep on a dime, but I’ll wake up around 2-3 for a few hours with this crap spinning away in my nogging.
“It’s tough to fall asleep for me, because that’s when my anxiety does its most aggressive work expressing itself. Before I even hit the pillow, my brain is replaying everything I’m pretty sure I did wrong that day, taking occasional breaks to worry about, well, everything. My brain will work itself up so much it actually makes my heart speed up. When I’m supposed to be relaxing.
It’s not great, Dan.
But I started doing something that’s been incredibly helpful, and I thought I’d share it.
Every night as I’m getting ready for bed, I focus on a list of things for which I am grateful. I call it “doing my gratitudes”. I just start somewhere, like “I am grateful that I am going to sleep in a warm, safe bed. I am grateful that I get to share this bed with Anne. I am grateful I have enough food.” Stuff like that. I remind myself that there is so much that is good in my life, and by thinking about those things, recognizing those things, and making space to feel grateful for them, I do not give my anxiety an opportunity to grab hold of anything and go to work on me.”
Daily Doodle on some current news here. CoronaVirus is no joke it seems.
1,000 confirmed cases of infection.
8,420 people are reported to be under observation.
Lockdown acrossthe province of Hubei, 35 million people.
Buses in cities of Chibi, Xiantao, Zhijiang, Qianjiang, Xianning, Huangshi and Enshi have suspended services.
Ezhou city has shut its train stations.
70,000 of the country's cinemas will remain closed this weekend.
Shanghai's Disneyland also announced that it would not open its gates.
Pretty seriously scary stuff.
Technically speaking, this piece was pretty interesting to me because I incorporated Volumes for the cloths and Vellum for the cloth. Using the FBX loader from Calvin Atorr to load the mask as well.
Taking a class on VEX and I’m applying some of the ideas from it in this animation I started yesterday. I want to add in some camera movements yet before I render it out. Hoping to get to that today…..
Had a chance to start that RedShift Lesson from LFO Design last night and I am super happy with that purchase already. Lots of good general tidbits in there. In the meantime, the MoGraph Slack has been posting a bunch of great ways to bring in OBJs into Houdini I can’t wait to test out. Here is a free method for simpler models:
And here is a method that will do more complex models and match all the materials but it’s a shelf tool you have to buy. But at $50 it’s kinda a no brainer. OD Shelf Tools.
Can’t wait to dig into both of these at some point. But for now it’s all about RedShift, Redshift and a touch of Redshift…. maybe?
Was just working my way through a tutorial by Arvid Schneider and I got it kinda working in RedShift so I just wanted to through the results up here. Want to redo it all with a different object and styling but I was happy with this result. I need to figure out how to solve the Highlight flickering in Redshift I keep getting. Was a problem in the raven skull smoke animation as well. Really distracting…..
Yesterday I wanted to get some smoke to roll down a sweep, interact with a object and then have some wind come in to clear the set. This is where I ended up and I’d chalk it up as a success. I did not get into lighting or textures too much because I wanted to focus on the sim mostly. There is also some annoying flicker in the textures I need to look into fixing. Then I brought it into Resolve 16 and dove into some of the nodes for the first time. The Fusion part of Resolve I think I can sink my teeth into. Interesting stuff in there.
K, got the animation to work. Man, I really dislike doing any kind of video editing. What a pain in the ass……
Been super busy with the work-a-day world but I was able to get a smoke sim built in Houdini over the past few days. Think that smoke sim is where I will be spending my time when I have the energy. Pretty happy with the shape and texture of this one. Learning how to art direct it is pretty tricky. Hoping to get into animations at some point but for now I’ll stick with still I think.
Was tinkering around with vellum and the detangle node in Houdini yesterday and came up with this little logo study for the band, “We are Parasols”. Liking Redshift in Houdini quite a bit as well. Volumetrics are pretty easy to do. Though I say that after failing terribly at a fire sim this weekend……
Just getting my get up and go on here so I thought I’d post away here. why not right? Anyways, this is pretty amazing feat.
Pretty cool image.
You can download the full high rez file as well. Some interesting wallpapers could be made from that for sure.
When I first sat down, I thought my saved tabs told an interesting story as well. Gee, can you tell where my focus is now-a-days?
Took some time to work on a animation of the Raven skull. This is the first time I have animated anything besides a simulation in Houdini and key framing is much easier than in C4d for me. Need to practice camera moves and learn more about time ramping. Would like this to be way more slow motion but not sure how to go about that yet.
Trying to work more in Houdini but it is such a rabbit hole. It’s difficult for me to just make something quick in there without wanting to add more and more stuff into the scene. I have like three things I am trying to finish up between work, music and the difficulty of it I am not getting to them. I almost wanna go back to “dailies” and just set a timer for 30 minutes. Wherever I am at 30 minutes, hit render and just be done so I did something at least. Anyways, here are somethings I managed to get out today after playing with pop networks a bit more. Really fun once you get it working.
Wanted to play with animating the last project I posted. It’s my first go at actually getting into a keyframed animation in Houdini. Everything else I have done has just been a sim. Actually getting into the POP network and keyframing it to behave how I was wanted was nice. Overall, Keyframing in Houdini seems pretty easy. No need for the Dope Sheet like in C4d to move keyframes.
Little daily render based off of a Nine Between tutorial, “Houdini Tutorial - Nodes Part 1: Attribute Nodes”. Rendered in RedShift. Might try to run a animation of it later. I can not recommend delving in Attributes and VEX sooner than later. This set up is shockingly simple.
Just wanted to work on a quick daily messing around with layered materials in RedShift Houdini.
Did a bit of scatter of smaller spheres as well which I need to look into how to UV. Not too sure on how to use Particles in Redshift yet.
Wanted to dive a bit into simulating with vellum so here is a pretty simple set up with a heart “balloon” type thing tumbling down some stairs.
Ran into issues with the normals flipping a lot in redshift but not the viewport. Still not really sure how I solved that issue, it just kinda went away as I was futzing around with nodes. Here is a screen shot of the Heart Geo node showing how the dynamics were wired.
Nothing fancy going on with Redshift at all but I am finding it a bit more interesting to use than Octane in Houdini at least. Not using it as much in C4d. But that is where I do “work work” and not just play with Ideas and Concepts. Now that I look at this screen shot, I should really have a Null in there…..
Been wanting to shift more into Houdini and Redshift lately and this weekend I had a little time to test out some particle tracers. Houdini just gives so much more control then Modo or Cinema 4d when it comes to FX, the little details really make the difference. It is rather difficult to parse though. Not a easy switch at all.
