Animated spritesheets mapped onto a point cloud

[benne5]

Hi All,

 

I am trying to implement an alternative method to the material mentioned on the Inside Unreal - Visual Effects - Part 3" video. https://youtu.be/nyWpxJU5s4U?t=198 I would like to accomplish this inside of Houdini.   

 

The idea being that animated sprite sheets are mapped onto a point cloud. The point position outputs the appropriate color value.  It seems to me that VOPs is the way to go with this and there is a texture3D node.  I have begun to piece together a vop but am admittedly a bit lost as to how to approach this.  Please see the attached image for my WIP.

 

Any information ideas or feedback would be much appreciated!  

 

 

[Juraj]

Hi

I watched that video and their technique has nice results. Attaching textures to points shouldn't be difficult. You can check Peter Quin't tutorial about sprites.

However what may be difficult is to generate the texture. I am not sure how they did it. After they had generated 3D texture they used many slices layered on top of each other to create feeling of depth.

Maybe you could do a pyro simulation and then somehow sample fields from pyro to 3d texture.

I am not sure how those things are done.

 

Does anybody have any ideas of generating interesting textures for sprites? (I played once with stacking noises and even using practical footage but it looked quite bad )

 

Juraj

[Nico]

Hi,

you can use volumelice to render a pyro simulation in slices.

If you use the pyro shelf tool:

Delete the resize Container node in your pyro sim. You need a fixed container size for your simulation so you can slice your pyro sim at the same height.

In you pyro-import add a volumeslice node after import-pyrofiels and change the method of volumeslice to volume.

Add camera and light and your are ready to render the sim in slices.

 

Nico

[benne5]

Thanks for your replies.  It was good to review the mosaic node tutorial.  If you are user like me and you are in need of stitching very large resolution renders you can always use glue-it.  Here is the link: http://www.varcade.com/blog/glueit-sprite-sheet-maker-download/ 

 

In the future I will give the volume slicer a try.  This time around I used the volumemix to boolean each slice and rendered them out individually. 

 

[fathom]

if you slice your volume, you'd want to make sure to use the original volume as a phantom (and remove the sliced volume from any shadows) otherwise your slices will give a different look.