goebbels Posted October 5, 2004 Share Posted October 5, 2004 Hello all. Im quite a newbie in Houdini. Maya has been my choice of 3d for ... many years. For the sake of it, I tried apprentice for dynamics and stuff. So far Houdini just rocks and I really like the procedural workflow. Anyway, back to the question. If I make single i3d texture of one frame using for example "fluffy cloud" i3d shader, is there any change I could use that 3d volume as a "3d-sprite" on my particles? (referring to technique somebody mentioned in the forums using voxelBitch@dd...) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael Posted October 5, 2004 Share Posted October 5, 2004 ther is no automatic way....but you could just render a bunch of them in different ways to make your own sprites... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
old school Posted October 6, 2004 Share Posted October 6, 2004 There are a few different ways to do sprites in Houdini now. I like the built-in particle sprite solution or I use the curve primitives and set the width attribute that I create to the same as the length of the curve. Both render nice and fast. It is very common in Maya and Max to bake out normal maps for your geometry for games. Apply the uv flattened normal map back on your character and presto you have nice bump lighting on a low poly model. You can do the exact thing with rendered i3d sprites and the best part is that the sprite is flat so uv's are not required. What ever attribute is on the smoke can be a separate map. You could generate a series of looping i3d sprite flipbooks. The key is that they wrap. Most of the noise functions for mantra in vex (all if I am correct) are periodic (they repeat) so writing your own i3d function to render periodoc noise would be a good thing to do. The next step is to write a Mantra shader that uses these maps to do the correct thing when lighting the sprite. All standard proven games techniques. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goebbels Posted October 6, 2004 Author Share Posted October 6, 2004 Thanks for inspirational answer. I have never thought of that before, maybe because im used to render sprites with hardware in Maya (and it doesn't support any fancy new features like hw-shaders or such..). It definetly has its downsides. Going to try baking couple of normal maps and testing them on the sprites. Cheers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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