TRON WIP

[jim c]

Some work from the weekend. Spent most of Sat on shaders, took a break on Sun to work on something else. City environment models, buildings. Used the cmivfx tutorial on road building to make an asset for the roads.

Some shots of some of the building types:

Shots of Tron City

The bridge units close up.

Guard model

wires:

quickie render in modo to just test what it looks like

[jim c]

Some various additions. Redid the helmet, got some work done on some of the animation (nothing much to show yet), started to make the rig for the rez effect for the bike. Testing working with the environment, geometry created in Houdini and rendered in Vue.

[jim c]

animated Wireframe render shows animating the alpha of the wireframe material and how it's gradually applied across the wireframe curves.

[lisux]

This is fantastic jimc.

I really like the stuff you are doing, specially because is a one person project.

I am with jason, would be intersting to give it a try to PBR in H11, your rendres looks like the prefect scenario for PBR.

Keep the good work.

[jim c]

Thanks! I wish I had a little more time for it and a few more updates to post. Most of what I've been doing is trying to figure out how to correctly get animation into H from Messiah, and setting up various rigs for things, like the light cycle, the ID disk (i.e. the ID disk DA is set up so that you can either animate it in Houdini or attach an MDD file to it, you can easily adjust the spin rate, there's a controller to animate the "power up" amount which adjusts the material/shader values, and there's a controller to cause the inset material to "glow", basically a factor that get's multiplied with the final out color for that shader, and finally the disc emits a "wall" trail that can be rendered out to create some sort distortion/blur effect in the final comp).

One final pic I found - this is from the previz for the opening shot where she leaps out the window. Just her and some lights with one version of the exploding glass behind her. Still very much up in the air on this.

[jim c]

Couple more updates - the guard is mostly done. Comped in AE to get the glow and adjust for color color corrections.

Edited November 5, 2011 by jim c

[eetu]

Couple more updates - the guard is mostly done. Comped in AE to get the glow and adjust for color color corrections.

I hear Nuke is really good for getting the redguard1.glow ..

(apologies for the inside baseball..)

[jim c]

Haven't gotten much done lately, had a major case of "writers block" for the last month or so Blech.

But got a little bit done during the holidays, and in the last few days have started to feel a little more inspired...

First the city - some images experimenting with a procedural road system and a system that lays out the buildings. A rough map of building elements and road ways is laid out using Moi 3d - you can get really precise curve control. I'm using some images of circuit boards to get ideas for where to put the roads. The map is imported into PS as an AI file, and then I layer on colored shaped for where the buildings would be placed. This color file is then brought into Houdini where it's imported into the Compositor (COPs) module. This is used to generate a series of B&W image maps for each "layer"/color of buildings so I can control things a little better. The colors are masked out separated using a Rotoscope node. The idea is borrowed from David Gary's CMIOvfx tutorial on city building.

Then I take reference each of these different layer nodes in a geometry context and build up a series of points (placed at the center of each primitive that is traced out from the B&W image). These points get pumped into a Copy SOP. Buildings are loaded by ID (which in turn get glommed into a file name that is then loaded up) and the ids can vary by adjusting a ramp control. The ramp control get's fed the current item being copied, and you can vary it visually. All of this is done inside a custom SOP VOP. Right now I have 23 different building types that can be loaded up. Some of them aren't so hot though and probably need to be redone. In addition the density is nowhere near high enough, but at least the system is in place to tinker with.

The road is also procedurally generated. The road map generated from Moi is exported as an IGS file, imported into Houdini, cleaned up a bit, and then each curve is used as a path to generate a road based on some road profile. This also automatically generates the UVs using techniques from Kim's CMI Vfx tutorial on road creation.

[jim c]

Further updates - Tron character - just in case I need him...

Base mesh from modo, then altered a bit here and there. Brought into ZBrush and the rest of the sculpting there. Final pic is a render from Houdini. Interesting to note that I had to turn up the geometry shading quality from 1 to 2 to get it to look good. I've got to try and remember that and try it with my other models to see if helps there as well.

[jim c]

Working on trying to finalize the models for the opening test shot. This is the safehouse, mostly done now except for trying to get the exploding glass to look better. Any thoughts, C&C would be most welcome! The scene went from having no innards to having a modeled room to make it look more interesting. Currently at around 357K polys, with around 3K cubes in the explosion sim.

The glass shatter is done using a couple of techniques. First I bring in the glass "pane" and then strip it down to flat surface and chop off the ends giving me a rectangular area that's then converted to a NURBs surface. This is what I'll creep the grid onto. The grid is created and set up to have basically square blocks. Then I apply a technique I picked up from Peter Quint's tutorial (http://vimeo.com/15104370) that basically breaks up the grid in squares of 3 different sizes. He uses a technique to assign random numbers to the prims, then groups the prims into low, medium, and high groups. The low group is left alone, the mid group is subdivided once (no smoothing), and the high group is subdivided twice. I also used a weight attribute to refine this so that the randomness is more heavily applied on the prims closer to the center than at the edges.

Once I have this I partioned up the squares and end up with a set of geometry objects with a point cloud for each low, mid, and high groups and the points centered on each primitive. I made a singel cube for each low, mid, and high groups of the same thickness. The all this got brought into DOPs using a 3 different RBD point objects (one for each low, mid and high), merged and then attached to a rigid body solver configured for ODE. Added a group DOP and active DOP to turn off some of the cubes along the edges, and then added fan, noise field, and gravity DOPs. Sim takes about 1 or less per frame.

[jim c]

A few more updates, these are stills from a simulation with a little over 8900 objects.

[ryew]

Nice work, I'm looking forward to seeing this all in motion!

[jim c]

A couple of renders of the Tron character, posed/rigged in Messiah, imported into Houdini via mdd. Post done in AE. Post included a little bit of re-lighting (the first time I've ever tried that).