kleer001 Posted October 7, 2013 Share Posted October 7, 2013 In a fit of crazy love I promised my girlfriend a million butterflies. That's a big order. A million particles is no biggie, but a discernible butterfly is on the order of thousands of pixels. I thought I knew how big a million was... until I did the math. 100,000 doesn't sound quite as romantic, does it? Whoops. Well, here I go. It's still in progress, and in the early stages. I want to lay out the things I've learned so far, but all I have time for right now is an early test of variations in the wing designs. And it's still very much in progress. The colors are solid and the venation on the wings is a little fake. The colors aren't great. Also there's no body or antennae. Don't forget to watch full screen in HD, please. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
acey195 Posted October 7, 2013 Share Posted October 7, 2013 Very nice , I don't want to hi-jack the thread , but I did something similar with shields, using Lsystems: http://www.twandegraaf.nl/Art/Renders/ShieldTex1_B.png You could try using L-systems as well, that way the amount of wing profiles would not be limited by the amount of images used. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted October 8, 2013 Share Posted October 8, 2013 Just start randomly repeating the frames after a while. Who will know? ... so by my calculations at 24 FPS, you need about ~8 min worth of animation? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kleer001 Posted October 8, 2013 Author Share Posted October 8, 2013 (edited) I don't want to hi-jack the thread , No worries at all, any attention is good attention. Let's discuss everything in the subject! I've been pondering generative methods for a long time. I fell head over heels after down-loading the whopping 22meg movie flie back in 1995 of Karl Sims' creatures. I think it took a good few months to finally get and watch the 4 minute movie. Kids have it so easy today! As for l-systems? Maybe. I do have some experience with L-systems. At the moment I'm racing down a lot of different paths to get this to look as good as possible. I would like there to be a little more variation in the wing designs. What I'm really looking forward to is the shading. Wing scales! Edward, are you asking how sure I am there will be no repeated patterns? That's all in the care I take in creating the network, how much space I give for the parameters to scatter themselves in, how many variables there are and how much they change the final outcome. Funny though, you have predicted my next post Edited October 8, 2013 by kleer001 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kleer001 Posted October 9, 2013 Author Share Posted October 9, 2013 e.d.w.a.r.d. , this is for you. At the moment my variations are based off of the current frame ($F) so all I have to do is run the animation to see more. Well, I've got them at 91 a pop based off a 13x7 grid. So, of course I have to offset them. For some reason I offset them by 9999. Whoops. So when I went to the millionth butterfly I was way out of bounds and got these crazy repetitions. I tamed down my offset multiplier and the millionth was more well behaved. Yay! And here's some more work on the venation and coloring. Zoomed in for more detail. The veins are now based off of the actual profile and not some circles or random scatter. (only 3840 this time, quality over quantity I say) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pclaes Posted October 9, 2013 Share Posted October 9, 2013 fun stuff Instead of using a voronoi for the nerves, you could consider growing them. Based on some rules and parameters that might give you a lot of variation too. I would debug that in a sopsolver, but implement it in a foreach because you have so many butterflies. Once you figure out the rules for the growth, you should be able to get some pretty cool aggregation patterns. (Could be applied to lots of other things besides butterfly wings too). Nice exercise! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted October 9, 2013 Share Posted October 9, 2013 Very nice, very interesting. Would you consider uploading the .hip file too with each movie? Would be very interesting to see the construction. Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kleer001 Posted October 9, 2013 Author Share Posted October 9, 2013 fun stuff Instead of using a voronoi for the nerves, you could consider growing them. I'm sure that's what I'll eventually have to use as there's a linearity to the voronoi I'm having a hard time getting around. But I think it'll get me a long way. Thing is that growing stuff is super duper expensive. At least until I write my own plugin for venation, like this guy: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kleer001 Posted October 10, 2013 Author Share Posted October 10, 2013 Would you consider uploading the .hip file too with each movie? Normally I would, but I'm feeling a little more proprietary about this rig. I might release it on Orbolt though, when it's done and in a more useful state. Though, I might post segments of the whole thing here, or use what I've learned as small demos. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kleer001 Posted October 13, 2013 Author Share Posted October 13, 2013 I was so enamored of the colored patterns I was making that I zoomed in and made this movie of a few hundred of them: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
acey195 Posted October 14, 2013 Share Posted October 14, 2013 (edited) looks cool , I wonder though, how do you visualize these? are you using point colors or a shader for this? I tend to use point colors and render those out. Its pretty easy to do that way, and you can view the result in your view port, but it eats up RAM like a black-hole, if you want to render out 1024x1024 textures . Edited October 14, 2013 by acey195 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kleer001 Posted October 18, 2013 Author Share Posted October 18, 2013 looks cool , I wonder though, how do you visualize these? are you using point colors or a shader for this? Thanks mate! Exactly, I'm using point colors for this prototype stage. And I'll most likely render out a sequence for the textures. I'm thinking I won't need more than a tiny 60x120 final resolution for any individual map as the butterflies will be pretty small and the patterns pretty bold. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kleer001 Posted October 19, 2013 Author Share Posted October 19, 2013 (edited) Another pass at the color engine. Trying for more variation in the colors and shapes, but I'm getting a lot of dayglow stripes. Not that I mind actually, but I think there's more variation to be had. I can just imagine a booth at SIGGRAPH where this huge grid of colored noises is played, you can pick one, then a postcard of that pattern is printed out for you. Or even better a whole bunch of postcards are preprinted and when one is chosen it's taken off the grid. Also I'm getting far too into the colors and neglecting the actual insect part. I'm on to wing shapes next. Edited October 20, 2013 by kleer001 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kleer001 Posted November 23, 2013 Author Share Posted November 23, 2013 UPDATE Nov 22 2013 I spent an hour or so and was able to finally get a prototype butterfly from 1) 2 Houdini Renders, one for outline and one for colors 2) Back into Houdini to trace and extrude and apply UVs 3) Into blender as an obj and apply texture 4) Zipped into an archive and uploaded to Shapeways... 5) Tweaked for size 6) Ordered... And hopefully it'll be in my hot little hands in a couple weeks! And then you'll see... Then you will ALL SEE! Ha ha ha ha hah! And hopefully I'll find a way to automate that process so I can ramp up production. Blender is a wildly different paradigm than Houdini. Houdini however is a champ and I have 100 objs and 100 texture images ready to go. It's going from OBJ to X3D that's a pain in Blender, though native which is nice. Everything's a pain to me in Blender. Though I'm sure it's great once you get to know it. Wish me luck Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
magneto Posted November 24, 2013 Share Posted November 24, 2013 Edward and I think alike. Who could notice all those variations unless she has eidetic memory Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kleer001 Posted November 24, 2013 Author Share Posted November 24, 2013 Edward and I think alike. Who could notice all those variations unless she has eidetic memory Well, for me it's more about climbing that mountain than sending postcards. And how does it go? "Artists lie by telling the truth." 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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