michael Posted July 23, 2003 Share Posted July 23, 2003 just wanted to provide a little thread for chatting about Houdini 6.1 It will be out next week and looks like it's yet another great update from Side Effects. Feature highlights for Houdini 6.1 include; drag-and-drop support forpromoting handles and parameters onto a digital asset; a streamlined Pose tool that makes it easier to animate digital asset characters; support for inverse kinematic squash-and-stretch of bones; pick-walking in a bone chain; new muscle and wire deformers; the ability to transfer attributes to a new piece of geometry; and a Flipbook feature for fast preview of OpenGL-rendered animations with audio. Additional features range from a new pelt surface operator for "unwrapping" texture UVs in a manner similar to real-world pelting to numerous interface and compositing enhancements, such as the customer-requested return of the Render COP. my first reaction to this is : "holy shit!" I'll wait till I can try it out before I make any further comments also it might be an idea to give some fedback about things that are not yet in Houdini but you feel should be...can't hurt also if anyone knows if the Early Access 6.1 can be picked up in Toronto - let me know Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheUsualAlex Posted July 24, 2003 Share Posted July 24, 2003 whoohoo. The ability to bypass i3d generation. less artifact. wrock on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Posted July 24, 2003 Share Posted July 24, 2003 Yep - it's looking like a GREAT release coming up! Enough good stuff to tide us over until and get some good character work in there! I'm pretty excited by it all, I'll admit! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael Posted July 24, 2003 Author Share Posted July 24, 2003 yeah, I'm really feeling good about the continued work being done on the character tools...'new muscle and wire deformers' raises my eyebrow a bit , and IK squash-and-stretch of bones wooohooo! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfwood Posted July 24, 2003 Share Posted July 24, 2003 Bah..all that is fluff...its all about the Pelt SOP people. Get your drool bibs ready. jim. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaJuice Posted July 24, 2003 Share Posted July 24, 2003 Sounds great, especially the pelt sop thingy. I remember there was a thread on the old odforce forum talking about this. Curious to see how it works. One thing that I would like to see is direct avi output from mantra, and the ability to use avi files as textures, a la max. Not a huge deal, just a matter of convenience. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfwood Posted July 25, 2003 Share Posted July 25, 2003 Just so you know what to expect. http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~krmoule/talks...pelt/intro.html For the impatient http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~krmoule/talks...lt/cutting.html http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~krmoule/talks...lt/results.html http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~krmoule/talks...t/results2.html jim. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael Posted July 25, 2003 Author Share Posted July 25, 2003 ah ye olde 'explicit euler integration' trick...I've been saying something very simillar for years now... looks very cool...moving UVs around always made my hand hurt like hell after ~8 hours.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MG Posted July 31, 2003 Share Posted July 31, 2003 Sounds great, especially the pelt sop thingy. I remember there was a thread on the old odforce forum talking about this. Curious to see how it works.One thing that I would like to see is direct avi output from mantra, and the ability to use avi files as textures, a la max. Not a huge deal, just a matter of convenience. What's so bad about image sequences? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaJuice Posted July 31, 2003 Share Posted July 31, 2003 Nothing at all, but if I didn't have Premiere I wouldn't have a way to string all those bitmaps into an avi. And it would be kinda inconvenient to have to break up an existing avi into an image sequence to use it as a texture. Unless there's a way around that which I'm not aware of, which could very well be. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mcronin Posted July 31, 2003 Share Posted July 31, 2003 Nothing at all, but if I didn't have Premiere I wouldn't have a way to string all those bitmaps into an avi. And it would be kinda inconvenient to have to break up an existing avi into an image sequence to use it as a texture. Unless there's a way around that which I'm not aware of, which could very well be. Well Houdini does have a way to convert an image sequence into an AVI, it's a standalone tool called MCP. It couldn't hurt to support some movie formats for textures, or render directly to a movie format, but that's probably not something SESI's clients are clamoring for so it's not on their priority list. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaJuice Posted July 31, 2003 Share Posted July 31, 2003 but that's probably not something SESI's clients are clamoring for so it's not on their priority list. Exactly, I doubt any of them would use such a feature. But like you said it wouldn't hurt to implement it in the future, Houdini is becoming more and more user friendly anyways. Well Houdini does have a way to convert an image sequence into an AVI, it's a standalone tool called MCP. I knew it. Thanks for the tip. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted August 4, 2003 Share Posted August 4, 2003 I wrote detailed instructions over at the main sesi forums to compress using mcp into divx. Maybe someone would put it in a FAQ or something. I'll repost it here: Let's assume that we are on Windows. To combine all your images into an .avi file, you will need to use the command line tools. I'll try to outline a series of steps for compressing into DivX on Windows since I've done that before. 1. First make sure that you have the DivX codec from http://www.divx.com 2. Make sure that you rendered out your images in a resolution that is evenly divisible by 4 in both width and height. This took me awhile before I figured out that the DivX codec was incapable of encoding arbitrary sizes. I just did a web search and apparently if you have the Flask DivX encoder, it only encodes resolutions that are divisible by 16. 3. I'll assume that you rendered out your sequence as filename.$F.tiff. If your file sequence was rendered out differently. Then substitute with the appropriate file name below. 4. Ok, now from the Start Menu, go to Programs > Side Effects Software > Houdini 5.5.xxx (ie. where you launch Houdini from), and choose Command Line Tools 5. This brings up a DOS prompt with its enviroment initialized to use Houdini's command line tools. 6. Use the cd command to change your current working directory to where your pictures were rendered. If you've have never done this before, you might want to type help cd first. For example, if you rendered to c:/mypics, type cd /d c:/mypics 7. Now type mcp -f FSTART FEND filename.$F.tiff -o -r FPS -w WIDTH -h HEIGHT filename.avi. Replace FSTART with your first frame number, FEND with your last frame number, FPS with your frame rate, WIDTH with your picture width, HEIGHT with your picture height. 8. A dialog will pop up asking you to choose your encoder after entering this command. Find the DivX codec and press the OK button. 9. That should be it. You may be tempted to use other codecs to compress but I've found that very little of the default codecs that comes with Windows have encoding capability and even then, poor compression or poor quality. Of course, if you have some other encoding capable codecs installed, then you might want try those but no guarentees. 10. Note that if you want more details on how to use mcp, the command is mcp - (that's a single hyphen after mcp) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaJuice Posted August 4, 2003 Share Posted August 4, 2003 Stellar. Thanks Edward. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael Posted October 4, 2003 Author Share Posted October 4, 2003 just thought I'd throw this site in here - since we were talking about the UVPelt... interesting reading http://www.virtualcinematography.org/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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