Moving forward into the summer upon the completion of this project, I intend to continue to learn Houdini and its many facets, on top of this I will also be continuing on from last semesters project and developing my skills in Maya and also reading through multiple texts in preparation for future study and employment. Below I will list some areas that I would like to investigate, as well as the texts I will begin to read.

VOPS (Vector Operators) – Houdini

“Unlike many other contexts in which various data objects flow from one node to another, VOP nodes do not pass anything to each other. Instead, each node generates a piece of code which is then merged together with code from other nodes to form a complete function.”

Whilst I have already seen some of what is possible and the purpose of Vector Operators and VEX scripting within Houdini, it is still something that is completely alien to me, but is essential when working with procedural assets. I do understand that a knowledge of some scripting and coding is paramount to mastering Houdini, so because of this, learning VOPS will be on the top of my list of priorities over the summer, which I’m sure will be a very large challenge, but one that I am prepared to take on.

Architectural Destruction – Houdini

Even though I did already work somewhat with destruction in Houdini, I did not pursue it fully due to time commitments with other sections of the project, as well as the learning resources available being above my current skill level. Destruction in Houdini looks incredibly fun, and while other areas will definitely be more important towards learning the software, this is something that I will have a lot of fun with.

Procedural Assets & Terrain – Houdini

This area of Houdini was the original inspiration for taking on this project, it didn’t however, make it to the final cut, due to reasons listed above, since Proceduralism in Houdini naturally involves a lot of VOPS. In terms of a starting point, procedural terrains will most likely be where I begin to learn about VEX scripting and VOPS.

Literature

Below is a reading list sent to me by Escape Studios in preparation for studying an MA in 3D Visual Effects, which contains a wide range of books covering different areas of VFX. The VES handbook in particular is very interesting and was also recommended by one of my tutors earlier in the year, that and also the books on Maya specifically will most likely help me in developing my modelling skills. Whilst the texts do looks somewhat intimidating, I look forward to the challenge they present.

Summer Project

To achieve the above stated areas, I think my best path forward will be to continue this blog (Albeit on a different website) as a independent project, since writing down my thoughts, findings and experiments has proven to be very useful in helping me quantify what I have learned during my time with different 3D packages. Currently I think that this project will certainly be more free form than what I have accomplished over the semester, I look forward to challenging myself and pushing my abilities to the next level in preparation for working life.

Feedback for this project was fairly easy to gather throughout the semester, mainly due to the fact that I was queuing most of renders within the Digital Media lab where a lot of my classmates tend to congregate, and on top this living with two other Media Production students, so I definitely was in no shortage of gathering opinions on my work. What was surprising to me was the amount of support and encouragement that I had received from both fellow students and my tutors, as I delved deeper into Houdini and Dynamics, it became pretty clear that simulations had some sort of hypnotic quality that a lot of people respond positively to.

So most of the feedback for my shots was fairly positive, aside from some comments regarding the rendering glitches, which I was well aware of. While it was really encouraging to hear such positive comments from everybody viewing my work, since I had a fairly decent knowledge at this point, I myself didn’t manage to see the positives of my work and only where it could be improved. Whilst this was quite helpful in improving the quality of my renders, it was also somewhat of a double edged sword, since I went through multiple iterations of the same renders to make minor improvements that were bothering me. An example would be my fluid grid render, while the render functioned well, and was positively received by my tutors and peers, because of the problems which I percieved I probably spent more time than I should have improving this scene.

This problem is within my perception of my own work, and while it can be a positive when making the best possible work I can, when working with dynamics and it’s very high rendering times, can be a time management nightmare.

Feedback and improving shots aside, I also want to address the learning curve involved in Houdini. Initially, when I first pitched this idea to my tutors, I thought that Houdini, like other 3D packages I had worked with, would be relatively easy to pick up and find learning resources for. Unfortunately, I was quite wrong in this regard, outside of premium learning services like Pluralsight, the amount of tutorials available for even the most basic operations in Houdini is incredibly low. Finding basic tutorials on fluids and pyro wasn’t so hard, but learning aspects like vector operators and VEX scripting was near impossible, or undecipherable to a novice, while I acknowledge that these areas are well above my current skill level in Houdini, it would have been nice to research into these areas for future improvement.

But overall, without ending this project on a negative, I did really enjoy my time with Houdini and dynamics, it was incredibly interesting and above all totally different from anything I have previously worked with, taking on the advice from members of the industry last semester, as well as that from tutors, who encouraged me to pursue the area, was one of the best decisions I could have made. In such a short amount of time, comparatively to the rest of my degree, I have probably learned more in the past 3 months on an independent basis, this project has left me with some incredibly useful skills in time management and independent learning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RalQA3aUwAA

REFLECTION

FLIP FLUIDS

Very proud of how these shots turned out. Initially, in my fluid grid, the fluid emitter itself came out very well, the effect of adding curl noise and a vortex to the source of the fluid was a very wise decision, as it gave off a very realistic effect, much like water pouring out of a faucet. To improve the scene from my first iteration, I first fixed my lighting setup by adding in a point light in addition to the environment, creating a nice amount of shadows and reflections within the interior of the fluid. Secondly I heavily edited the fluid material, by playing around with the refractions and diffuse intensity until I achieved a look I liked. The main problems encountered were to do with the fluids collisions with the static objects in the scene, but once I figured out how to apply the proper solver and fix the geometry of my grid, it began to work as intended.

OCEAN GRID

Also pleased with how this one turned out but there are definitely some things I would change, the main aspect to change would definitely be the foam generation and the whitecaps on the ocean itself, while I do have the ability to improve this scene quite easily, the time constraints on this project affected its quality quite a lot. Because the render itself took around 30-40 hours to generate all 240 frames, I had to make the difficult decision to leave it as it was and move onto the other shots in the my project. While I myself wasn’t totally happy with how it turned out, my peers and tutors encouraged me by telling me that it still looked quite realistic without these aspects.

PYRO FX

These shots, including the flame, smoke and explosion were probably the easiest section of the project, once I got past the initial hurdle of improving the resolution of my renders. There is room for improvement in all of these shots however, mainly the fact that the generation of these realistic looking effects relies heavily on vector operators, something which I found to be above my current ability in the software, moving forward I will definitely look into these aspects of Pyro FX and look forward to the challenge they present.

BEACH TANK

This shot is probably my least favorite out of all of my final output, mainly due to the errors I encountered when it came to rendering out the final shot. This was very confusing to me, since I had attempted to render out three separate iterations of my beach tank, to which I encountered a different rendering problem each time, with my whitewater simulation not working correctly, to graphical glitches in the surface of the water, this is something that was very hard for me to fix, as I did not personally know anyone familiar with Houdini who could help me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ums6_6ihPd8

Brief Summary

This is another shot that I am very proud of how it turned out, my initial experiments with the viscosity and density attributes, while satisfying to watch, consisted of far too many particles for what they were, and as a result, were near impossible to render when considering how long a 30 million particle simulation would take to render on consumer parts. My discovery of the combination of using scene scale, particle separation and radius scale, to create a detailed surface, while maintaining a relatively low particle count of 20 thousand, was very useful and without a doubt something I will use in my further development of Houdini skills.

In terms of changes that I would make there aren’t too many when it comes to this shot, the only thing that could stand to be improved is the lighting within the scene, looking back I had only used an environment light within the scene, which creates even lighting throughout. To change this I would also include a point or area light into the scene, much like I did with my fluid grid render, I believe that this inclusion would have improved the overall look and quality of my render by a decent amount, but this is only a small complaint.

My final viscosity render can be viewed here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIjWsQ1YGbY

Brief Summary

The Pyro FX section of my final output, past some initial difficulties with finding learning resources, was probably the easiest section of my final output. Mainly due to the ease of real time playback in the viewport, as well as the relatively quick renders compared to some of my other sections, both of these enabled me to implement quick changes and immediately see them fed back to me in the viewport.

Out of the 3 renders I made as part of the Pyro section of my output, my favourite was probably the billowy smoke that I had created, when compared to my initial render of smoke earlier in this blog, I feel like the improvement is very clear to see, whereas before the smoke looked quite unrealistic, I believe that progressing my skills resulted in a close to photoreal render.

There isn’t too much that I would change about any of these renders, the only thing that I feel like I could stand to improve is learning vector operators, which I came across in some initial Pyro tutorials, but decidedly left out my experiments since they were well above my current skill level, so this is something that I will detail further in my learning plan towards the end of this project.

My Pyro renders can be viewed here.