Still Life Study

Way back in September, I talked about doing a lighting study on some of Niall McDiarmid images. Well I finally got around to one of them! Took me long enough….

Built it out in Houdini with a quick Vellum sim for the napkin and towel thingy. The new vellum brush tool is quite handy to use. Lots of fun as well. I did learn how bad Redshifts Sub Surface Scatter is though trying to get the ketchup, mustard bottles and bread to look like anything other then plaster. It took a mix of roughness settings and coating to get it looking close to how I wanted. Using both the Sub-Surface and SS Multiple Scattering was not getting it there. Adding detail like the lipstick and coffee stains was super easy though.

Made a simple markup of the lights as well. Nothing too fancy. The super narrow spotlight for caustics is the only little trick in there. The light in back of the bottles was originally just there to help me work on the SSS, but I liked how it made that highlight on the table. Kinda looks like a window or something.

Revisiting some album artwork

A band I did some album artwork awhile back asked me to rework it recently so I took a project that was originally in C4d using the default render engine into Houdini and Redshift. Quite happy with the results. Did a proper glass shatter sim instead of just a Voronoi fracture as well. Here are the Houdini results with the C4d being last.

Well, hello there...

Been a hot minute with no updates here, sorry about that, but between all the election crap and a boat load of work landing I have not had much brain power at the end of the day. Anyhoo, here is a bulk dump of some more mirror balls and other studies I was working on. Just tinkering with some ideas here.

Jar Studies

Here are the three jar images all finished up and in one post to check out.

This Machine Kills Fascists

Inspired by the Great Woody Guthrie, I made a new piece of artwork  this weekend in response to the Alt-Riot / Proudboys coming into our town from out of state to cause havoc. Get out and Vote people. It’s pretty bleak out there, so do what you can.

Moon Hooch

I keep trying to come up with a better name for this one, but “Moon Hooch” seems to be the one that sticks for some reason, lol! More of the “jar” series I am messing with.

Cloud Study 2

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.

Background plate study

Kinda had an idea to start doing my abstracts in environments so today I wanted to play with getting BG plates to work with the renders. Not sure if smoke helps or hurts though….

Landscape Study

Felt like getting lost in a landscape for a bit instead of messing with the technicalities of Houdini. Spent most of yesterday and this morning working up this fantasy style landscape. D&D hidden grove type thing. Made in Cinema 4d with Redshift render. Started using Redshift proxies on this one but I kinda miss Octane scatter. That is a much better scatter system.

Lego Sim with Houdini

Made a sim using a Lego model I imported into Houdini. Started out just as a test to see if I could get the model imported, then I end up making the full sim out of it. Fun stuff.

Houdini Doodle 3

Todays doodle is brought to you from a failed animation. Way to much flickering to make it look good. But here are 3 frames from it that look pretty good.

Houdini Doodle

Today’s Houdini Doodle is brought to you by being completely zoned out and just moving sliders around in a For Each loop. Really simple node tree on this one.

Late night cloud study

Messing around in Houdini last night and felt like doing some cloud work. Here’s the result of that.

Landscape Concept Study

I have been playing with this landscape piece in Houdini for a while now and finally got it to an interesting place. It’s my first landscape in Houdini and using Quixel Bridge has been amazing. It is integrated with Houdini in such a fluid way. They made it one click to import everything ready to go in Houdini and Redshift. I still struggle with so many little things in Houdini and take classes CONSTANTLY, so to just be able to click on a plant and have it import with scatter nodes and materials all set up is a crazy time saver.

Another little mental leap for me was being able to art direct the smoke how I wanted without bashing my head against the monitor for a day.

Did some post work in Photoshop of course. ;)

Some recent stuff

Been kinda messing around with all sorts of things lately after doing a deep dive into Redshift. Worked up a vellum grains simulation in Houdini, a cityscape concept in C4d,a cat skull abstract piece and a more playful grapich coffee thing. Next deep undertaking is going to be doing more of a study on how to make abstracts in Houdini. Gonna dive into particles and messing with geo on a deeper level.

Skull Study

Messing around with volume meshes in Cinema 4d today and came up with this little study. It’s fairly tricky to work with Redshift materials in the C4d window though. Can’t see a damn thing in the viewport. Just basically keeping adding shapes into the volume till you get the shape you want.