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.”
I was thinking about ways to run wires over stuff and here is a little exploration on a way to make that work. Houdini and Redshift render.
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.
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.
Working up a sim of a pretty serious fire sim and here is the flipbook of it ATM.
