Working on some more Redshift today trying to dial in some shaders. I reworked my thin film to be a bit more subtle and took a stab at some subsurface scattering gummy bears. Pretty happy with the results.
Recent progress
I have continued with more RedShift in C4d and have really been enjoying it. Went back to Houdini to mess around and ran into a bug where I can’t get the lights to look at nulls. I can load the null as a target and it will track it for the first movement and then it clears the field and drops the link.
No Idea.
Then I tried to load a fbx file and what a freaking nightmare it is. Tried the first free solution below and it worked but a simple pair of shoes that in C4d is 4 pieces of geometry became over 150. So yeah, really frustrating. That said, being back in C4d has been really nice and easy. It’s nice not to have to break my brain to build out simple sets. So many possibilities with Houdini but it’s really frustrating to do simple ass shit.
Redshift is starting to really grow on me though. Everything works like I think it should. No abstractions or messed up ways of getting something done. Wire it up and it works. Octane is really, really easy but it does some things really quirky and non-standard. Plus, light linking is a joy in Redshift.
I will say gamma correcting scaler values is pretty abstract and should not be needed. That should be added on the programming level at the start of those channels. It is also not well documented as being needed for true representations of your textures.
Anyways, here are some of the things I have been doing along with the classes. Nothing special really but it’s nice to have a log of what I was building out. Some of these are just saved from the RenderView so I can find them later. A few are a bit more thought out ;)
One of the nice things to make is a default three point lighting set with Nulls as targets for the lights and camera. Set your GI and change the default render settings and bango, saves 5-10 minutes at the start of everything. Highly recommend building out one of those.
Also, Ramps are really, really, really important. Like use them on all the things.
Some Houdini OBJ stuff
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?
Busy busy busy
Trying to get caught up with work so the blog and Instagrams are a little thin ATM. My apologies. Going to shift from doing a lot of Houdini learning to a deeper dive into Redshift for a bit. Going to start off with this longer lesson from LFO Design that I came across from Lester Banks. Hopefully this weekend I’ll get to dig into it but in the meantime, I gots to go shovel more pixels in the pixel mine!
Tut example
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…..
Smoke interacting with objects
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.
Morning
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?
More Houdini and Vellum
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…..