3D Visual Effects

So I'm going to start with the process for my final project. Maybe I'll post some of the other stuff too if you want to see some unfinished effects. Basically I have been in this effects class for the last couple of months working on different effects. Effects are procedurally generated animation. For example: smoke, fire, explosions, buildings collapsing, etc etc etc. Pretty much anything can be done with effects. Here's the work flow for my project:

So now on to the renders!

And the final Effect!

Fixing jittering animation

First add a timeblend1 sop next to the skirt file in sop

Add in a null node and call it SIM_TO_CHOPS

make a CHOP net and drop it now

Go into CHOP net and drop in a geometry sop that references SIM_TO_CHOPS

Switch from static method to animated method (change Common tab Units to frames)

Switch Channel start to $FSTART and end to $FEND

Tab in a filter sop (This is a pretty serious smoothing)

Play with Filter width until it works pretty well.

Add in another Null node and name it OUT

return to where the timeblend is and tab in a channel sop

for CHOP choose OUT

Demo Reel and Teaser

I've been working on my demo reel. Here is where you can see it:

Nick's Demo Reel

Also here's a teaser of my new project. Still got a lot of work to do though.

Update and problems

I'm working like crazy on the cloth renders for Papa and most of my work is done on bug fixing at this point and single shot fiddling. Usually people just show the polished perfect animated film but most of my time I stare at things like this until it finally looks ok. That's why I thought it would be funny to show you a few of the problems that I sometimes run into working on the characters skirts:

Exhibit A: I call this the Loincloth-Mindy. Mindy is the main female character of Papa and let me promise you, she's not as permiscuous as this picture makes her out to be. Turns out she was in one spot in one frame and then 10 yards away in the next frame. Well the skirt I set up is attached to her waist and tried to travel at the speed of sound while holding on for dear life to her waist. I guess the path of least resistance is straight through her. (note: the actual math would have stopped, then magically moving at 490.91 mph then instantly stopped again. My diagnosis: fatal) 

Exhibit B: I call this one Backless-Chaps-Papa. This is a tougher issue to pinpoint. I'm not sure exactly what happened, something about the way that he moved lead to this. The Skirt kinda explodes. It kinda looks like fireworks in my view (see below) but I try to smooth it out a little bit before rendering which is why the image above doesn't look anything like the one below but believe it or not they are exactly the same frame.

Here's a little render of what it Papa looks like after this issue comes up if I were to render out the entire shot. Of course, I'm not going to so you don't get a background. Mostly because rendering out the entire shot would take forever:

This is a solution that I found that makes the skirt a little less excited to be alive, and a little more like cloth should actually look like:

I leave you now with a picture of what I have named Papa-after-meeting-Liam-Neeson. Also a huge problem with the cloth appears. Don't worry, this happens off screen so it's ok that he looks like that.

What a Cloth Sim looks like and how to do it.

This is our workaround for the problem of exporting a maya alembic file into houdini and then tyring to rig a cloth sim to it.

Tab in a geometry node, Dive in and tab in an alembic node. Click on the alembic node and select the alembic file that will eventually be your deforming geometry. Tab in a convert node that will convert the file into houdini polygons by default. Connect the alembic node to the convert node.

tab in another geometry node, (this one will be your cloth object). On the cloth object, you may need to drop in a sort node to reorganize the points "by Y". You do this by diving into the cloth object, turning on your point numbers (on the toolbar right by the perspective view) and if they are not obviously organized, tab in a sort node. Click the view button on the sort node and then under the point tab, select "by Y" on the drop down menu and then click the "reverse" checkbox if you want it to go from top to bottom.

Open up your cloth tab, then select your cloth object, select your deforming collider, then attack to body.

The Return of the Carrot

Oh how much time I put into this and how bad it still looks. Oh well. The point of the project was to learn how to draw things procedural-ly. That means that I don't paint any of the colors on, instead we use a node network to create the colors using built in math. What's a node network you ask?!

See that ugliness that looks like an evil graph? That's a node network. Each little square mathematically determines parts of the render. Some of them make random noises (like the bruising on the carrot), some of them make random vertical lines (like the yellowish streaks), and some of them make the texture (like the cracks in the carrot). Its hard making a carrot without being able to paint anything or use any of my usual approaches. The result was ok, I guess, but not as good (or as bad) as some of the other fruit in the class. Here was the process.

Basically the process went: Colors, Texture, Lighting, Redesign the model, Final Changes, Video. Enjoy

Photoshop Carrot

I've gotten a surface pro 3 and a trial version of photoshop. My assignment was to make a photo realistic carrot (eventually). Of course I don't know much about photoshop so this is my first ever photoshop project. I'm sure there's some really cool tricks that I could use if I knew more but hey I'm pretty satisfied with the end result. Hopefully this is good enough! I used a bunch of layers stacked on each other. I kinda skipped a few of the layers but here is the progression in general.

So hopefully that is adequate. It's not perfect but it is certainly a start! I hope that the critique tomorrow is soft on me but also helpful! I also have a little clip of some animation I've been working on. I'll post it later.