By The Lake.

[Andz]

Hi guys,

So, after watching most of the video tutorials at Buzz, this is my first projetc to see what I realy learned.

There are no shders yet, only an displacement on the grid that will be the water. As for the lighting, I used 2 area light so make everything softer. But it is temporary.

Modeling went ok, i think. I might add some hills on the back. So I`ll ask some modeling questions I have first, and save the shaders question for later.

Main questions I have about my scene is related to work flow. If I did the right thing, the best way, etc...

1. I started modeling the fence, did all the wood part starting with a box with divisions along it. Edited some points with soft selection to take out its shape perfection. Then wanted to apply an noise function to move around vertices to make small uneven details. But for that, i had to add an Sort(random) + Group + Transform for that. Do I need all that? Even thow I wanted to use the noise in all vertices?

2. I copied the log around and also did the nails. Should I`ve done them in a diferent object? I know I can apply different shaders in there, so I kept them in the same obj so it was easyer to move every thing around.

3. Last question on the fence. I had to turn off Smooth Shading so that Mantra doesn't try to shade the log all round. But now I can see every single face. I`m sure there must be an operator for me to set the smoothing angle for the faces. Can any one tell me what is its name? Or is this in the shader?

Thank you for now. I`ll try to solve these 3 things first... and then I`ll go on for the other questions.

[DaJuice]

Hey Andz, looking good so far.

1) If you just need some general noise, you can use the VEX Mountain SOP. If you need a more specialized effect you could make your own noise in VEX/VOPs.

2) Meh, I think that would have been overkill. I'd have just kept it as one object like you did.

3) I don't know how you can set the smoothing angle for geometry in Houdini. If it can be done, I'd like to know how too. What you can do is cusp edges which will actually split the points. To do this you could use the Facet SOP which has an angle parameter, or use the EdgeCusp SOP, which will let you pick the edges to cusp. I actually don't like either method because it will add additional points (which sucks when you want to further edit the model), and I don't like my models to be open.

What I would actually do in this case is use the PolyBevel SOP to add small bevels to the boards. It's more realistic like that anyways.

[Andz]

Thanks for the help!

About the smoothing, There must be some way to control it.

Attached are the smoothing on/off options. Those edges are beveled. And still look wrong.

[DaJuice]

Hey Andz, you have to keep in mind how normals are interpolated. Look at the attached image. Basically you will want to add another cut parallel to your bevel on each side of the board (hope that makes sense). Also I think you can minimize what's going on in the picture by increasing the iterations in your bevel.

[edward]

3) If you just want to define a smoothing angle, just add a Facet SOP as the last SOP in your chain to render. Then turn on Cusp Polygons and give it an angle. Also turn on Post-Compute Normals. It will duplicate points but then it probably doesn't matter if it's the last SOP.

[Andz]

3) ...to define a smoothing angle, just add a Facet SOP as the  last SOP in your chain to render...

17432[/snapback]

Thank you Edward, that was exactly what I was looking for. While looking for this on the help file, I actualy believed that Facet was it for a moment, but all the naming is so different from what I`m used to that I geve it a try on my network but could not get it to work. Now with your tips on Cusp and Post-compute it worked fine.

Funny how it actualy make the extra points, I wonder if other softwares do that too, or they just fake a crease there in the shading. And one thing that I notice is that it really has to be all the way in the end of the network or other objetcs in there turn to black. Or just apply another Facet SOP to each of them, in case you want to define different smoothing angles.

DaJuice, thank your for all the help, my network looks a lot better with the VEX Mountain to move the verts around. As to the bevel, I prefer to use a simple 45o. chamfer, that makes more defined highlights Unless there is an extreme close up, then I'd have to use a round bevel.

See the attachment...

[Jason]

Good luck with this project - the composition looks promising.

[sibarrick]

One thing to watch out for are those little black triangles that appear when you put a heavy displacement on something. If that happens you need to turn up displacement bounds for that object. It can be found on the render tab of the object parameters. Turn it up in small amount until the problem is fixed. Turning it up to high can really slow your renders down, so try and get it set to just the right amount to fix the problem but no more than that.

[Andz]

sibarrick - Thank you for the info, I knew that was something like that. It was actualy my question number 233-b By the way, I'm tring to model this in scale, but never went far enough to see some measuring system. So I just addopted 1 unit as 1 cm Last night, before I went to bed, I added some hills in the background, fog, DOF and played a bit with the lights. That is when I notice tha my scene was pretty bit ( in scale). I had to adjust the FAR camera range up to 20000, was that to extreme? Would it have anything to do with the displacement performace?

Jason Thank you! If you need any pro-help in Hodini over at DD just give me a call... :whistling: ... in 10 years!! When I start to get used to all the op.

Here is one more image i rendered. A bit dark, I'll play more with the lights. But the first step now, is re work on the plants, I think they are to alien right now.

[deecue]

actually, i kind like 'em the way they are now.. the scene as a whole is coming across quite nicely..

[DaJuice]

Yeah, the plants look cool. Also one thing folks will tell you is that you are better off doing your depth of field in post. You add a P channel to your render in the deep raster page of mantra. This is used by the DoF COP, which will in turn spit out an M channel to be used by the Blur COP. Voila, you can now interactively adjust the strength and focal point of your DoF in the compositor.

[edward]

I like the plants too. But of course on my non-gamme corrected monitor, I can't really see them anymore.

Hmm ... you might want to render the hills separately so that your NEAR plane is as close to your far plane as allowed. The general rule of thumb is to make sure that the range between your far/near planes is less than 5-6 significant digits.

[malexander]

Talking about DOF in compositing, I'd recommend using the DOF Cop with the Defocus Cop. Set the option 'Per Pixel Defocus' in defocus. It looks a little nicer, and it's actually a bit faster. Your render times will also drop, which is always good.

[sibarrick]

Just adding to the near/far thing, if you don't fancy rendering the hills seperately you can always create false/forced perspective by making them much smaller and bringing them closer to the camera. No one will ever know unless you fly the camera up in the air to much. Since there is no frame of reference you can't actually tell how far away they are or how big!

[Andz]

deecue, DaJuice, edward Sorry for the plants, but they are gone Those two taller ones were buggin' me. Maybe if they were behaving like vines twisting holding on to the fence would have worked, but they were too tall and simetrical. So they are still there but shorter and always two or three together not alone. Also there were the other type of plant with little spheres that looked weird to, no is almost like a rice or weat (sorry I dont know how to spell it).

Also, thanks for the tip on the far/near thing, most probably I'll make the forced perspective, lets first see how will the waves on the lake behave.

Another thing that I will invest in, is to take a look at post effects, because I'm having a realy hard time with the fog attenuation, and also the light attenuation. I'm still not happy with it. The light I only have the option to the inverse squared or the physically correct (that right now is only doing physically nothing to help me). Isn't there a way to hack this and tell the light start fade in,end fade in, start fade out & end fade out? The same thing for the fog, I'd like to adjust the fog like start at this pole, fade in until this mountais then continue the same value all the way until this last mountain.

Here is the latest render... I think I'm done modeling. Who knows... wouldnt it be nice to have a fairy there? The lighting looks better, but I wish I could have the yellow light coming for the left a bit lighter but not go as far down the fence As for the plants in the foreground (out of focus) I might add them in post afterwards because I want them darker than they are, so the focus of the scene is around the plant right by the water... I think this scene is asking for a character in there

Let's start with the shaders and lights to setle down the mood here, then we'll see if there is anything missing.

[Jason]

Hi Andz,

If you're looking for a fairly useful light, you can take a look at the UberLight on odforce, submitted by WolfWood. Here is the UberLight Codex Entry. It has many of the useful features you are talking about, such as cutoff and cuton and uses a super-ellipse for a cone. A superellipse gives a smooth blend from a rectangular "cone" to a circular cone.

As for a Fog shader, the linear fog shader that is supplied with Houdini doesn't give very realistic results for views to the horizon - it gives acceptable results for a medium distances. If you can, put together an fog with exponential attenuation and you'll get better looking results, especially if you attenuate the three colour bands seperately. Do you know how to do that? If you don't, I'll try and put together a simple version for you.

[DaJuice]

What package are you coming from Andz? Sounds like max.

I agree, the attenuation options are not the best in the default Houdini lights, max is much more flexible in this regard (all I really want is 0-at-distance attenuation). I'll check out the UberLight.

How did you model the plants btw?

[Andz]

Jason - I'll take a look at the UberLight when I get home tonight, that is where I have Houdini installed. But first I also have to read the OTL best practices. Because last night before I went to bed, I wanted to see how those plants would look with the SSS shader you guys have done here in the forum, and I could not find it after install (if I did install it right). Do you think that would work in such a complex mesh? Is there another way to fake translucency on thin object? Most of my plants leafs are 2D, either a closed spline or a deformed grid.

As for the fog shader Jason, thank you verry much but there is no need for you to do it for me. Let

[Andz]

Here is the rendered :-)

I love houdini, specialy de shading system! But huh, There is still so much to learn.

Thank you every one for the help in the process!!!

[michael]

very nice !....

for an alternate method for grass...check out :

http://cade.scope.edu/courseware/notes/houdini/script.html