Moose Posted December 2, 2004 Share Posted December 2, 2004 I've just seen some of Taron333's work over on CGtalk. He's morphing between two animated ZBrush disp maps using Messiah - This Thread and was totally blown away with the results - so was wondering if this technique was at all possible in Houdini. I have to say I haven't investigated properly yet, so may be it is, and is standard knowledge. Anyone...? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Posted December 2, 2004 Share Posted December 2, 2004 Not to belittle his work, but animated displacements are a common solution. There are good reasons why its not immensely wise to do it for large scale displacements however. Jonah Hall here animated displacement for several characters faces eroding and burning to ashes. All the remodelling was caused by animated displacements. In fact, instead of using simple "weight-spot(s)", he drove interesting erosion patterns of CHOP networks and several clever layers of procedural, map-driven and procedurally image-processed masks and displacements. All in all, a far more refined and intricate solution with great results - just not packaged in a Another Cool Alien Head cgtalk thread. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moose Posted December 2, 2004 Author Share Posted December 2, 2004 Thanks for that. I should know better by now than to doubt a Houdini solution for most things. It was just the impression I was getting from reading Tarron333 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deecue Posted December 2, 2004 Share Posted December 2, 2004 i did a displacement morph in houdini about a year ago.. it wasn't much, just a test of a grid with two different skin-looking textures on them morphing from one to another (both their displacements and diffuse). it wasn't nearly as sophisticated as what jason is talking about, but it worked well nonetheless. basically done through vops and thats about it. the morph blended over the whole model evenly over time, but you could easily change that. i have a video of it lying around somewhere but it's not online.. i can upload it tonight after work though if you're interested. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deecue Posted December 3, 2004 Share Posted December 3, 2004 so here is that morphing video i was talking about yesterday. like i said before, nothing great and done quickly, but shows that it can be done.. put a little more refinement in to it and could easily get very nice results. (the animation of the grid also looks a little odd and it's somewhat hard to tell whats going on. just imagine the four corners of the grid are coming towards the camera and sort of curling over.) 8 Meg Quicktime -dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moose Posted December 4, 2004 Author Share Posted December 4, 2004 Thanks for letting us see that deecue, it doesn't look half bad at all. I've just gone and jumped on the ZBrush bandwagon with the intention of creating some nice disps to bring back into Houdini and give Marios SSS shader a workout. Just got to get my head round ZBs quirky ui first - what joy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Posted December 4, 2004 Share Posted December 4, 2004 Thanks for letting us see that deecue, it doesn't look half bad at all. I've just gone and jumped on the ZBrush bandwagon with the intention of creating some nice disps to bring back into Houdini and give Marios SSS shader a workout. Just got to get my head round ZBs quirky ui first - what joy 15339[/snapback] When you get around to the SSS part, just remember that if you're doing large-scale displacements then you'll have to take the displacements into account when you're scattering your points. This may well mean that you'll have to mimic your displacement shader as a VEXsop and displace the head base geometry before you scatter the points for the shader to read. Usually displacement shaders just displace off the normal, but if you're doing "non-linear" displacements, take care to re-create that in the VexSOP. Am I clear at all? I'm sure I can come up with an example file if you're not sure what I'm talking about. Take care, Jason Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moose Posted December 4, 2004 Author Share Posted December 4, 2004 If I'm following you, I think Mario included a vex Sop example of doing this in one of his wip shader hips (or at least I'm sure I've seen something like this posted fairly resently), but I'll have to check. If you mean something different, then of course I'll be gratefull of any help that could be thrown my way. Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
birras Posted December 17, 2004 Share Posted December 17, 2004 so here is that morphing video i was talking about yesterday. like i said before, nothing great and done quickly, but shows that it can be done.. put a little more refinement in to it and could easily get very nice results.(the animation of the grid also looks a little odd and it's somewhat hard to tell whats going on. just imagine the four corners of the grid are coming towards the camera and sort of curling over.) 8 Meg Quicktime -dave 15317[/snapback] hi deecue would it be to much if Id ask you for the .hip? houdini is all pretty new to me and I tend to learn a lot from reconstructing networks from other .hips, seeing how the network is build up/parameters, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deecue Posted December 17, 2004 Share Posted December 17, 2004 yea, that should be no problem but i'm at work right now and dont know if i'll get to it tonight. sometime this weekend though.. dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deecue Posted December 24, 2004 Share Posted December 24, 2004 Alright, so i found that file, but it was kind of a mess of things going on from different tests for different ideas.. So instead of cleaning that up, I went ahead and just made a new one from scratch. I also added some other ways of approaching the multiple displacement map idea: One being a straight morph*, another being able to paint on what displacement goes where, and the last one being an animated group that sets where one displacement map will be rather than the other. hth, dave Displacement Morph HIP *anothing thing: when i refer to "morphing" in my solution, please note that it actually isn't a true "morph". it is merely a fading from one displacement to another over time. like mentioned above, it's a simple solution meant to provide a way to visually fake morphing from one displacement to another. as a side note, I tried uploading the hipnc file to the thread and it yelled at me saying I wasn't permitted to upload a file with that extension.. so yea.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deecue Posted January 7, 2005 Share Posted January 7, 2005 After getting a PM about this, I thought I'd add it to the thread.. I moved the above files to a subdir to clean up some stuff.. Here are the updated links for those interested: HIP File QT Movie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
altbighead Posted April 8, 2005 Share Posted April 8, 2005 QT Movie 15699[/snapback] Thanks alot for the HIP file. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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