mightcouldb1 Posted March 17, 2010 Share Posted March 17, 2010 (edited) Well I made my first full project solely in Houdini this week. I spent about 10 hours total on it. When I started using Houdini I thought it was only useful for a small portion of the pipeline, but since I've worked on this project I've learned how versatile it is. Now I'm on the opposite end wondering if there is anything it can't do... Anyway, this isn't photo-real or anything advanced, nor is something you will pass around on the internet, but it was a good lesson for me. Here's the link: By the way, I have a blog that I consistently update that is found here: http://blog.naturetheory.net/ I made a post recently about my discovery of linear workflow; I would think it's useful if you haven't been exposed to it yet. Edited March 17, 2010 by mightcouldb1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mightcouldb1 Posted March 23, 2010 Author Share Posted March 23, 2010 (edited) I saw a post that pclaes made linking to this: http://thiagocosta.net/?p=136 It was made in ice and I thought I'd give it a try in Houdini. It's actually pretty relevant to something else I'm working on now and was simple enough to recreate. Here is my attempt: http://vimeo.com/10371915 By the way, does anyone know how I can grab the global variables for a second VOP input? I made a few toggles for the more obscure blending modes(overlay, color dodge) to play with my point color in the example above. I figured it might be a good idea to port them to COPs in a single VOP COP and wrap them in an otl since COPs doesn't have these blending modes. I made a vop cop2 filter which has 3 inputs. How can I grab rgba from input 2? Jason Edited March 23, 2010 by mightcouldb1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anim Posted March 23, 2010 Share Posted March 23, 2010 ... By the way, does anyone know how I can grab the global variables for a second VOP input? I made a few toggles for the more obscure blending modes(overlay, color dodge) to play with my point color in the example above. I figured it might be a good idea to port them to COPs in a single VOP COP and wrap them in an otl since COPs doesn't have these blending modes. I made a vop cop2 filter which has 3 inputs. How can I grab rgba from input 2? ... there is a copinput VOP node Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mightcouldb1 Posted March 23, 2010 Author Share Posted March 23, 2010 Ah! Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mightcouldb1 Posted April 2, 2010 Author Share Posted April 2, 2010 So I am working with some pyrofx and having ungodly render times. I am lighting with two spotlights using depth map shadows for one of the lights, and using MPR to render. I am currently using the max container size/max container res forumla to get the volume step size. My step size is supposed to be 0.012 but that was taking way too long, so I used a step size of 0.05. I am rendering the smoke through glass, so it seems that I have to use a high step size since my refraction rays are being shot off into random areas that might not be sampled in the volume. Well here is some stuff... This is the volume sample at 0.5: And the attached is my video with the volume step size at 0.05 that took about 24 hours for 45 frames. Am I missing something or is there no way to speed this up? smokeTest.mov Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mightcouldb1 Posted April 6, 2010 Author Share Posted April 6, 2010 Ok so I finished the test... It took about 100 hours to render with decent quality on my craptop. Here is the link: http://vimeo.com/10708472 I forgot to change any of the settings having to do with my rest field, so there is popping on certain frames. Can someone help me to figure out a better methodology for rendering this? Right now my thoughts are: raytraced reflections and refractions + smoke = taboo. I could probably get away with doing a pass for the smoke at a lower volume step size and composite it with the rest, but then I wouldn't have the cool raytraced business. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bandini Posted April 10, 2010 Share Posted April 10, 2010 Ok so I finished the test... It took about 100 hours to render with decent quality on my craptop. Here is the link: http://vimeo.com/10708472 I forgot to change any of the settings having to do with my rest field, so there is popping on certain frames. Can someone help me to figure out a better methodology for rendering this? Right now my thoughts are: raytraced reflections and refractions + smoke = taboo. I could probably get away with doing a pass for the smoke at a lower volume step size and composite it with the rest, but then I wouldn't have the cool raytraced business. The movie looks good! I haven't tried to render smoke through refractions or with reflections, so I'm not sure how to speed it up. In your glass material, you can try lowering the number of calculated reflection and refraction rays. You may be able to get away with only 1 reflected ray and 2 refracted. This will definitely help speed up render times. I've found rendering refractions in Mantra is very slow - at least using the pre-built materials. I haven't tried building my own material from scratch to compare. Maybe try building your own glass shader and see if there are any optimizations you can perform? The volume rendering should be fairly quick on its own, as long as you are using shadow maps, rather than raytraced shadows, which will kill your render times (and not look as nice anyway with volumes). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mightcouldb1 Posted April 11, 2010 Author Share Posted April 11, 2010 Hey thanks for the reply Adam. I am using deep shadow maps, and I got a response here if you are interested in the solution. http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/10981-raytaced-reflectionsrefractions-and-smoke/ It's an interesting workaround although it might take a little longer to setup than just hitting the render button. Haha. Nice stuff on your site by the way! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bandini Posted April 11, 2010 Share Posted April 11, 2010 Hey thanks for the reply Adam. I am using deep shadow maps, and I got a response here if you are interested in the solution. http://forums.odforc...ions-and-smoke/ It's an interesting workaround although it might take a little longer to setup than just hitting the render button. Haha. Nice stuff on your site by the way! Interesting solution. I'll have to remember that. And thanks for the compliment! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mightcouldb1 Posted April 26, 2010 Author Share Posted April 26, 2010 (edited) Well... although it's unrelated to work in progress in Houdini, I have made a generalist reel. You can view it on my website here: www.naturetheory.net Comments are most welcome and appreciated. Edited May 17, 2010 by mightcouldb1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bandini Posted April 26, 2010 Share Posted April 26, 2010 Well... although it's unrelated to work in progress in Houdini, I have made a generalist reel. You can view it on my website here: www.naturetheory.net Comments are most welcome appreciated. Nice stuff! The first shot is really great. I would like to see you replace the monitor graphics that say "replace me" with something Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.Santos Posted April 26, 2010 Share Posted April 26, 2010 Nice reel man! Bandini is right you could/should replace the monitor display... You can place in it a map of the place or something... I really liked the b/w lab... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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