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.

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.

Brief Summary

As mentioned in the commentary, this scene was quite problematic throughout all of its iterations, mainly due to various rendering glitches that seemed to persist across the different machines that I had attempted to render these scenes on. The first problem as seen in the commentary track, was that my initial beach tanks whitewater simulation did not work entirely for the first half of the render, appearing to be stuck in place. This was a very difficult problem to solve as I could not find any documentation on this problem anywhere, the way I ended up partially fixing this was just creating multiple test renders until I arrived on one that worked, and even then there are still visible rendering glitches viewable in my final output.

With the time it took to render, as well as the problems that arose, this was a very frustrating experience as I didn’t have many resources available to me in terms of fixing the problem. I ended up having to move onto the other shots in my final output, following the advice of my tutors and peers I decided to leave the shot as it was.

Moving forward and looking back on this shot, obviously there are many things that I would change, aside from the render errors, I would spend more time achieving a more uniform set of waves, as well as making them slightly slower and larger, to create a bigger splash down on the beach geometry. But because of the errors involved, this is something that I will pursue in my own free time.

My beach tank renders can be viewed here.

Brief Summary

For this render, there were not too many problems encountered when it came to the actual overall quality of the scene, there was however some initial difficulty in getting the render to work on my machine. The problem was that while the in viewport simulation was easily manipulated and relatively intuitive, attempting to see the rendered view resulted in a number of errors, once again, I took to the SideFX forums to look for a fix, and as it turned out it was a relatively simple one which involved connected two pre existing nodes in the OUT menu context.

After this it was fairly smooth sailing, I spent a considerable amount of time playing around with the wave instancing parameters until i achieved a look that I liked, after which I began to render the scene, which to my surprise took an incredible amount of time at 30+ hours, this surprised me initially because there were no actual particles to be simulated within the scene, but as I later found out, most of the rendering time was due to the complex material shaders being applied to the grid.

In terms of changes I would make looking back on this shot, I would definitely spend more time on the foam and white top sections of the material builder, which I think would have elevated the realism of my ocean, as well as this, I potentially would have created a large tiled version of the ocean to show off the capabilities of the tools, but this would have increased my render times significantly.

My final render can be viewed here.