Gatorade Commercial - Digital Domain

[malexander]

another aspect in what i'm interesting is in compositing, will houdini 8 include new features for halo?, it's possible to advance some of these?

Compositing in H8 has received incremental updates, so the 'What's New' list there won't sound all that interesting, as there aren't any major features introduced. However, interactive cooking is much faster and a couple of troublesome workflows have been polished.

The biggest advances to compositing aren't very compositing related, but they'll definitely have an impact on COPs:

The first is support for 1D and 3D LUTs, and the ability to generate these through the color correction COPs in Houdini. These integrate into the COPs viewer, flipbooks and mplay, providing much needed general color correction throughout Houdini.

The second advance is in ROPs, which allows ROPs to be wired together in a dependency tree. When rendering a ROP, it will render all its input ROPs first. This really ties COPs in with the rest of the package, and smoothes out the process of compositing large numbers of layers in a shot. You can build a large ROP tree with all your rendering passes, simulations bakes & composite nets, and then render the final composited sequence with one click on the final ROP.

[lisux]

The second advance is in ROPs, which allows ROPs to be wired together in a dependency tree. When rendering a ROP, it will render all its input ROPs first. This really ties COPs in with the rest of the package, and smoothes out the process of compositing large numbers of layers in a shot.  You can build a large ROP tree with all your rendering passes, simulations bakes & composite nets, and then render the final composited sequence with one click on the final ROP.

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Cool. Renderpasses to a new level!

I'm agree with Mcronin, tools for painting will be great, anibody know a program for procedural painting, like photoshop but with a procedural approach.

And i'm agree with the textures too, a more intuitive way for using textures or gradients will be great, for example the ability to assign any float parameter a texture or a gradient like in LigthWave.

I remember that Jason pointed something bout ramp color sin a past post.

[aracid]

hey all

well done to the team who worked on it!!

cool work

btw, was there any crowd work done for the commercial?

thanks in advance

aracid

[Guest Guest]

The three major shatter shots are all done with DOPs and the RBD Solver. The marathon runner was pre-scored into over a thousand objects, the whole simulation utilising Glue bonds in the solver. The marathon runner was art directed to shatter in several discrete phases and the glue did the rest. The simulation ran in ~2 minutes a frame.

Do the *OPs in Houdini use multiple procs?

[edward]

It varies. Currently only COPs and VOPs use multi-threading.

[Jason]

... VOPs use multi-threading...

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...really all VEX operations (VEXsops, VEXpops, etc)- which naturally can be coded in native VEX code.

[lisux]

...really all VEX operations (VEXsops, VEXpops, etc)- which naturally can be coded in native VEX code.

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So why SOPs or POPs don't use multithreading? If VEX can do why "normal" operators can't?

I think that a tool that can use multithreading for modeling or even more for particles will be great, normally 3d packages uses multithreading only for rendering but it could be used in the rest of tasks.

[Jason]

So why SOPs or POPs don't use multithreading? If VEX can do why "normal" operators can't?

I think that a tool that can use multithreading for modeling or even more for particles will be great, normally 3d packages uses multithreading only for rendering but it could be used in the rest of tasks.

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VEX operators have the advantage that they use the SIMD engine - which operates strictly on entities of the same type - particles, points, shading samples - and SIMD is by its nature executes with parallel processes. Here as a VEX document you can read.

Other operators often perform random operations on various entities often in code thats hard to parallelize. Multithreading is hard to achieve *within* most nodes, but hopefully some day entire nodes could be made to run in different threads. That day is not quite here yet. After speaking with SESI a while back, they said they'd probably rather get DOPs working stably before introducing a fundamental thing like multithreading.

Its in the future though! Maybe some day we'll have threaded UI, threaded cooking and the several threaded OPs.

[agentex]

Multithreading is hard to achieve *within* most nodes, but hopefully some day entire nodes could be made to run in different threads. That day is not quite here yet. After speaking with SESI a while back, they said they'd probably rather get DOPs working stably before introducing a fundamental thing like multithreading.

Seems like this is an area that SESI might get ahead in, the ability to computer more complex sims is here it just seems like its isolated in more specialized fields and almost always parrelelized.

The spot rocks.

[michael]

we've been linked on http://www.cgchannel.com/

[meshsmooth]

CG Channel has a link to ODforce on there front page thanks to this ad

http://www.cgchannel.com/

[lisux]

Yes hopefully in a short future all were multithreading (multithreading GUIs alredy exists, gtk, qt, etc ...)

Thanks for the link jason very interesting, so VEX works in the same fashion that RSL, but fo more than only shaders.

The obviously question now is why all the operators aren't coded in VEX? or at least most of them? i believe that the benefits would be great.

[malexander]

VEX does have a few limitations which makes unable to be used for certain algorithms.

For SOPs, VEX cannot create or alter topology, which means that the majority of SOPs can't be programmed in VEX. In COPs there are more opportunities to use VEX because image processing is similar to shading, but many COPs give hints to the cook engine which vastly improve performance which couldn't be done with VEX (like collapsing transforms and color correction, and optimizing out contant regions).

Finally, you can't do a 'pre-run' in VEX to figure out global data (like 'what is the average color of the image') , nor can you do multiple discrete passes over an image to implement an algorithm in stages. In short, there are some things VEX can't do, and other things VEX can't do very optimally. However, the things VEX can do, it does very well

[Marc]

we've been linked on http://www.cgchannel.com/

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Nice!

[el_diablo]

I would love for H8 to have a GPU ROP. Right now it seems you cant use realtime ROP for some things other then rendering to disk, and there are no VOPs that use realtime shading pipelines. As GPUs increase in complexity and availble features the superside only realtime shading as most modern compositing programs can use GPU for rendering. Anyways as I work in field of product commercials I need speedy rendering for low complexity projects so sometimes I render passes in hardware if possible (XSI).

[Ratman]

Hey, just bumping this up, checking if there are any new tips or so that can be said about the commercial, i've been breaking up an object using the cookie and group method, it's way teedious, but i'm sure there are others ways to do it.

Thanks,

Rick