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.