Macros

Hey I have tried some tests and im getting far from desirable results, if you could show me a test I could maybe work back from it. - Its been 2 years since worked with houdini so having to re-learn everything!

That would greatly help. I have been tinkering in Maya and tried a displacement map using granite noise and car paint shader for mental ray and the results arnt looking great, also tried using ncloth and instanced particles. Will try get them to get houdini at the office, will do some tests on Houdini when I get home in the meantime.

Displacement for? Ground plane with displacement and shader? What about particles? Is mantra good with creating those glitter sparkles and bokei?

I am trying to recreate something I made in Compositing in 3D and been wondering which would be the best way for me to go about it. I have used Houdini quite alot in the past and because I am leaning toward using particles to make this, I thought I would ask the forum and get some professional opinions about how to go about creating this. Whats the best method with least render time to create a groundplane like this and for it to look as good? Should I rather just use maya or is Houdini the right place for this?

Thanks this is really awesome, a great base to work off. Think this might work although been doing some tests with vray which are great too. Will have to make some tweaks and see what the result is.

Surely houdini can manage this... If not there is talk of going with a maya solution. Anyone given it a shot? Surely I must be missing something.

I have been tasked with doing some RnD of an array of lightbulbs within a decent render time but havent really been able to get anything that is manageable. So I have removed some of the bulbs, turned the reflect and refract down to one and tried different methods of rendering but beginning to think I am on a fools errand, and now the render looks terrible. The glass doesn't look anything like glass, and with all the 'cheats' Ive done It doesn't look like anything decent. Any advice would be welcome. So far my render sits at 8min a frame which is about what I need but looks terrible... and with some shortcuts. bulb_RnD_v31.hip