J.Santos Posted October 9, 2013 Share Posted October 9, 2013 Hi All! For my next learning/portfolio enhancing project, I decided to use and age old proved method of learning... copy the masters! I was looking for something with Pyro/Fluids to do and the volcano idea was nagging me. So logical step... big volcano eruption in European culture: Vesuvius! I decided to re-do, in 3D, using Houdini and Nuke, this piece from the painter Joseph Wright More info about it can be found here The basic still image I want to do will be as close as possible to this one. I also plan to do a camera pull of around 25 secs, that will start from the volcano crater, with the beginning of the smoke being spat out and as the camera pulls away back towards the still frame position, you'll see the lava coming down, the smoke and so on... What I expect to learn from this (and/or how I expect to approach the challenge): - Procedural approach all the way; - Pyro and Fluids in general (viscosity in lava etc...); - shader build, -use of Vopsops/wrangler nodes; - the new cloud tools; -lighting and rendering; - particles. What I know so far... I know that if you look at the scene, you could probably make it happen quite fast, by faking/approaching it smartly. The lava being spat out can be a simple Pop network with a Force and for good measure a particle fluid assigned to it (or just a bunch of particles, since it is far away!) and I could use the already existing lava shader, provided in the examples that ship out with Houdini, namely: downhill lava and fire pit example. But... since I want to later on do the camera pull, instead of building 2 scenes, one static, with lot's of faking and re-using stuff, I decided to maximize the learning (that's the important part, right?) and so a full New stuff scene! So I'll be posting lot's of questions! For maximizing the questions, I'm thinking about opening threads in the appropriate places and then linking them to this one. Like this I think I can get 2 things: more visibility which translates in faster answers and easier to read information for future users... they'll not have to read through all the posts in the wip section, they can find the "to the point" thread somewhere else... I hope this is not against the rules, somehow! So, stay tuned and I'll be seeing you guys! Cheers! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.Santos Posted November 8, 2013 Author Share Posted November 8, 2013 Wow... almost a month (tomorrow would be exactly one month!) another post! I think that if I had dived into the effects themselves (pyro stuff, particles and smoke... and probably a few bits more) I would have more to show already, BUT... life is complicated and time isn't that much since I'm trying to juggle several balls and I'm trying to build most of it in VOPS and other ways that allow me to learn more and re-use some stuff later on. So this is going to take some time, I guess! As always I'll try to document my work, when needed so others can use it to learn more (not from me, my ego is big but not that big ) Most of this has been based on the excellent "Working with noise" from SideFx - I even use a test bed like Ari and lot's of his concepts - and the CmiVFX video on Fractals - probably some of the best money I spent was with Houdini HD license and CMI... And now that I tried to give an explanation to my (lack of) progress, here's my file and some images: This first VOPSOP node allows you to visually see the noise that you're applying. Since it will be picked up by a displacement, you already guessed that whiter areas will be higher and darker areas will be lower! With the Ramp you can really "go to town" in creating cool shapes! And that's our shape with the Displacement applied to it! Cool right? This is after removing the colour and scaling the displacement in a previous VOP. In this one you apply a finer detail/overall noise, that again you can control in various aspects, through a Ramp and frequency... (and others but these are the main). And of course all works well with UV's! And that noise pattern applied to a mountain... My only issue with the approach I've been following is that for now I have to sculpt (in Houdini) a basic shape for my mountain (according to reference) and then apply the VOP's. But of course this makes the Digital Asset approach a bit difficult because you cannot re-enter the sculpt when it is a Digital Asset, as far as I know! Of course you can unlock it and dive in it, but I mean applying the DA... So, any thoughts? Cheers guys! vesuvius_v001_13.hipnc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.Santos Posted November 11, 2013 Author Share Posted November 11, 2013 Hi all, if someone wants the improved file, here it is! In this one you can now choose to have a second degree of noise on top of the first one and see it happen visually (through Cd). This wasn't working very well before! It was just a simple case of exporting 2 parameters with the same name and one was probably overriding the other! Still some stuff to investigate and check before getting it to work just like I want but for now I'm going to follow along! Cheers! vesuvius_v001_14.hipnc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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