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Toms "Learning Houdini" Gallery


Thomas Helzle

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I might end up buying Redshift myself if nothing else pops up in time, it's just not my first choice. Can't be helped I guess...

Yeah, my impression so far was, that the engine is only relevant for game artists using it in Unreal or Unity. All I ever read is how it integrates into those or other 3D apps I don't use.

The network setup looks really longwinded. Not sure if it makes sense for use with my Laptop and an old 2008 MacPro (running windows) with only ~8 GB Ram each...

That is another point with Thea render: You install the client, you activate the server beacon in the main Thea instance, the client finds it and from then on you can transparently render on the network.

Cheers,

Tom

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The last two days I "wrangled" with a new solution to my render quest:
Houdini -> Alembic -> Blender 2.78a -> Thea Render

Proof of concept:

Balls.gif

So while file sizes are a bit scary and Blender has been it's usual unshaven pain in the ostrichs neck, this will at least enable me to get some animations done with what I have and love :-)

Yay :-)

Cheers,

Tom

Edited by Thomas Helzle
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1 hour ago, schwungsau said:

did look into Keyshot ? the fastest of CPU renderer out there ... it can take billions of polygon's and render fast... , its limitied but its design for product design's. awesome hdri editor and keyshot 7 will support animated alembics.

 

Hey Heribert. I looked at it in the past but never warmed up to it. Thea works best for me of all the unbiased renderers so far - very fast, CPU & GPU at the same time, good material system, affordable, great integration in Rhino, multiple render kernels...

If I invest in another engine, it probably would be one that is integrated into Houdini directly.

But thanks for the hint :-)

Cheers,

Tom

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On 11/27/2016 at 0:15 AM, fatboYYY said:

How were you able to get the spheres to travel so many different paths?

In a point wrangle with the points in the first input and the lines in the second input, I used the primuv command:

@P = primuv(1, 'P', prim, uv);

So the position @P for each point was set to a uv position (0-1) on the lines in input 1.
prim in this case was a random number in the range from 0 to the number of lines.
uv is a value I computed from several parameters in a way that I can animate all points with one slider. I have parameters for random start-time offset and it's spread, a speed value and some others. So this is not a simulation but a procedural animation based on @Time.

Cheers,

Tom

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Played with shortest path again, this time on an old face model I did ages ago in XSI. Watch in full size for the subtleties... :-)

"Face Flow"

FaceFlow.jpg

This is using the fast additive line rendering that MENOZ posted in this thread: 

12x12 pixel samples for smooth fade-outs.

I attached the shaders as Houdini gallery file, just drop them into your user gallery folder. One is for lines and the other for points (circles).

Cheers,

Tom

 

Additive.gal

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Following the Entagma Tutorial on variable subdivision but took it in a slightly different direction, combining a solid surface with a duplicate that is using the additive lines...

Nice record-sleeve feeling to it - I contemplate using it for my "GeneraT(i)on II" album on Bandcamp... :-)

VariableSubdivision.jpg

 

Cheers,

T:)m

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  • 3 weeks later...

For a job that did not happen I created this as R&D for importing .csv files with lat/long coordinates and placing them on a primitive sphere via VEX:

Europe.png

Every red dot is a town or city (or part of a larger city).

Test-data from here: https://www.maxmind.com/en/free-world-cities-database

Basically it's: Table Import to load -> Lat/Long remap to 0-1 in a point wrangle -> position points with primuv on a primitive sphere.

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Experimented with the Lsystem in Houdini - quite fascinating, somehow I never got into those things before.

Rendering in Thea Render (which has a special price until January 5th BTW if you should be interested: https://www.thearender.com/site/) using it's fast DOF and beautiful translucency.

LSystem3.jpg

Cheers and a good 2017 everybody!!!

Tom

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Since it came up earlier in this thread:
I finally have network rendering with the Houdini Indie Engine working after several weeks of back and forth with support (thanks guys).

- The first problem was, that the HQserver didn't work with a custom installation path (I never install stuff on C:). This is fixed now in 15.5.696.

- Then I struggled with getting the client (my laptop) to connect to the server (my main machine) and was thrown off by it creating tons of python errors. It turned out in the end that the problem was just the firewall settings on the server which I had created wrongly (I created a rule for the hqserverservice.exe - which does not work - instead of a general rule for port 5000).

- Finally I didn't understand how to get the Houdini Indie Engine Licenses for the client. Like Ikoon pointed out to me on this thread before, I had to "buy" those licenses for free (I didn't do so when I bought Indie since at the time I had no clue that they work for rendering and simulating, my impression was, that they are for Maya, C4D, Unity etc. which I don't use).

So I'm finally set up and running and my laptop does better than expected.

Cheers,

Tom

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4 minutes ago, 6ril said:

nice tests Tom !

The red town dot on sphere image is really nice! Tho, it seems to me that placing a red dot on each city town wouldn't look like that ! Is there more to it ?

I wondered that myself, but this is what I got from importing the data from the link I posted. In some areas it makes sense, in others less so (and the GPS-resolution is rather rough). But for instance for Berlin they list every part of town separately, so that is what makes it so dense I think. The company the data comes from offers services to find out where people come from from an IP-address, so I guess that's why it's more granular than one dot per town/city.

Cheers,

Tom

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