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Bubble Rd


capinXcrunch

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  • 3 weeks later...

I was waiting for a new customer profile for some time. I must say, I'm very pleased :lol:

I loved the article almost as much as the animation, which was excellently done. I wonder though, was it rendered in Mantra? or PRMan?

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What makes this extra special is it was done with alpha software. The very first use of digital assets and our evolving character tools. Lots was learned and many bugs fixed doing this piece with Paul.

It also proved the point that maya animators could be brought up to speed in a couple days to animate with Houdini. It is all in the rigs now, not in the interface when it comes to animation. Yes, you can split hairs about the niggly details but to an animator, a job's a job and it is all in delivering the shots, not in how many people use a particular piece of animation software.

In some ways, his work opened up very large doors for us elsewhere.

Thank-you Paul.

-jeff

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old school > are your characters OTLs?...I love to hear of your experiences with them...I don't think the digital assest idea is catching on as much as it should, while there are some added complications in some situations having an entire character as an OTL is a brilliant idea

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Paul's ants were custom operators from the start. It allowed him to work on the ants while the animators were doing their thing. It worked the way it should.

Using library files with entire charcters as custom objects, it allows you to bring on the animators earlier, if you can handle the stresses involved in delivering immature character objects. Small projects like this one are perfect for starting off with digital assets. Small, only one or two unique characters, a couple of contract animators and turn it around real quick.

I hate to say it but animators are a commodity now and using assets in this way allows you to hire them early and get the animation out of them. You can give them rigs that they can readily understand.

Now how many of you are in Paul's position, where you decide how jobs are being done, who get's hired when, etc. Very few I suspect. One reason why Digital Assets are taking a bit longer to catch on. They involve existing pipelines to be re-tooled a bit. Instead of tracking hip files, you now have to worry about your library files (.otl) and managing the operators inside these files. Remember if houdini can't find your custom operator definitions that are used in a hip file, you can't work on your file as the custom operators are swapped out for whatever Houdini standard operators.

Utilizing Digital Assets optimally involves quite a lot of testing and thinking. Takes time. Once users start to really understand the possibilities, then I can see your .otl files taking on as much importance as the .hip files, even more in some cases. So important that you deal with your .otl files first!

-jeff

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