Procedural effects creation - Collisions with sandy surface

[Emanuele Berti]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to share with you this RnD:

There are balls those impact on a plane, nothing is animated by hand and there are no particles at all at the beginning, everything is created if and how a collision happens.

http://www.leleberti.com/res.asp?job=6

I have created a HDA that creates, through a Vex node, surface deformations and particle simulations based on velocity and direction of the falling objects and, of course, when and where those collisions happen.

As soon as I can, I want to implement the $HITTIME attribute to animate the deformations, because at the moment those happen just in one frame.

But before that, I have a question.

The Vex node I built lets change the shape of the deformation using a spline ramp, but I'm not sure that is the best way to follow in production because I think that doesn't give us the freedom we need.

I think we could have more control using Chop or channel editor(we could zoom-in and out and change the tangents), but maybe these solutions are less animator oriented and difficult to put in a UI.

Does anyone have already tried both to test the level of freedom and/or which way is easier to use?

Cheers,

Emanuele

Edited August 1, 2010 by Emanuele Berti

[CeeGee]

Very nice work on RnD and Work in Progress page...

Great work...

Keep posting...

Edited November 5, 2009 by CeeGee

[Emanuele Berti]

Hi Igor,

Thanks for your compliments and for encourage me.

I hope to have something else to show you soon.

Cheers,

Emanuele

[Emanuele Berti]

Hi all,

I'm back with a couple of changes.

I've implemented the $HITTIME attribute, as I promised...

and, because nobody answered to my question about the choice between CHOP and VEX-ramp, I did some tests.

So, I decided to modify my VEX for using CHOP to have more freedom to model the outline (it can come back on itself and there are not resolution limits) as you can see in the attachments.

The CHOP takes the information from a curve SOP and it models the surface around the impacts.

... now the surface looks more make by mud than sand, but I'd like to test to possibility to model the outline in a way that was impossible to do with ramp.

Now, I thought it should be even better to put everything in a displacement map to avoid surface's resolution limits.

I haven't seen yet the displacement in houdini, does anybody have any advice to give to me to achieve the same result?

Cheers

Emanuele