stu

Wow, that's a blast from the past, great stuff! I do still occasionally still tinker around in the lego universe, here's an H13 render from about a year ago:

In the meantime I found that it helps if you copy and paste the SOP that you want to snap to.

You could try this: http://www.orbolt.com/asset/_danylyon::PBR_layered_material

While turning Faux Caustics on will reveal the volume it'll invalidate the shadow cast by the liquid given that I'm generating caustics with photons.

I've been looking at the uniform volume approach to do opacity attentuation with pbr using the method described above but I'm running into a render issue when I try to render both the "interior" volume and the "exterior" surface at the same time (for the sake of convenience). Here's the "exterior" only: The "interior" only: And when rendered together: Not the result that I was looking for obviously (too dark, red is all but gone, bucket artifacts). I know that you'd typically want to stay away from coincident geometry but I was hoping that it wouldn't be an issue here because the "interior" is being rendered as a volume. Here's the file: uniform_volume_test.1.hipnc Thoughts? What's the preffered method to get attentuated opacity with pbr?

Personally I'd un-squeeze the footage before working with it so that you remove that level of abstraction (re-squeezing the CG afterwards is a small price to pay for the benefit of working 1:1 throughout the execution of the shot IMHO). stu

Congratulations to both Mark and Andrew on a much deserved honour!

You might want to remove the fresnel calculation from the chrome's reflection contribution - it's just about equally reflective regardless as to which direction the faces are pointing in reference to the viewer.

Hey all, Can anyone recommend software for recording monitor activity as a video, kind of like the sort of thing that people use to record how-to videos for software demos, etc.? Thanks! stu

Use polygons, and avoid nurbs at all costs.

One has to keep in mind that for the most part you're recreating painted surfaces and not bare metal. I'd think that for modern aircraft you'd want something with a VERY low spec/reflective contribution (by design - the "low vis" paint scheme has been in practice for about 30 years now) and a fairly high diffuse roughness value. Low spec/reflection and a higher diffuse roughness should almost always go hand in hand IMHO. If you're looking towards a PBR render you're going to want to set the spec to 0, otherwise you're going to inadvertently double up your specular contribution because the renderer is going to add the specular highlight AND reflect the lightsource with a reflective shader - a no no. A handy generalization for sunlight is to create a disc shaped area light and set it's size to 8% of it's distance from the subject. If it's a 100 units away, it's size should be around 8 units.

If you don't reflect the object's opacity in it's alpha and leave the alpha at 0, the resulting combination is additive. ie. the object's transparency is something less than 1 but greater than 0, and the alpha is 0.

I actually like to model in houdini, specifically polygonally (just look in my profile for any of the topics that I've started ) I find that many of the problems that people run into with houdini as a modeller occur as a result of the inclination to shoehorn houdini into another software's workflow or approach. As opposed to describing the problem that you're having, I'd like to know what the result is that you'd like to achieve and speak to that.

Just use a Polysplit SOP or a Divide SOP (using the bricker polygons options) to add the vertical division before the cookie operation.

To go one step further, I prefer to lay the geometry out in this fashion, to be sure that any bevelling operations that I choose to perform later will work properly.