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LA-HUG Meetup: Ink Underwater and Tornado FX with Alessandro Pepe


pclaes

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Hey all,

just a shoutout that next week Alessandro will give a presentation at the Los Angeles Houdini User Group:
https://www.meetup.com/LA-Houdini-User-Group/events/235146114

 

  • Wednesday, November 30, 2016

    7:30 PMto 10:00 PM
  • Framestore LA

    8616 National Blvd, Culver City, CA (map)

     

  • Please join us for a presentation by Alessandro Pepe! 

    Alessandro will present production workflows to tackle challenging tasks like ink underwater and tornado FX.

    He will first cover the overall workflow and then the setup inside Houdini with simplified examples.

    Topics covered:

    ●  Dealing with hundreds of millions of particles

    ●  Clustering

    ●  Particles Gap Filling

    ●  Taming a Pyro Sim into a tornado

    ●  How to add complexity at render time (a quick overview to Volume Procedural Shaders).

    Mid-Advanced Level Class: This class assumes a basic knowledge of Houdini SOP, DOP and SHOP contexts.



-- In case you can't make that one, the next one will be on Dec 15 @ Gnomon:
https://www.meetup.com/LA-Houdini-User-Group/events/235771747/
LA-HUG Meetup: Using Booleans and Volume Meshing to Fracture Geometry


Perhaps see you there!
Peter

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Peter thank you for posting this !

I really enjoyed talking with you all yesterday , the vibe was really good and despite the length of the presentation (2.5 hrs ! luckily we had beer :D) I got really good feedback. I was totally not expecting such a response and I'm happy there is such an alive, vibrant and apparently growing Houdini community in L.A.

Thank you all for attending !

@Eetu : totally ! I'll get the pdf and hip files ready in a nice zip file and post it tonight in this thread.

 

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Thanks Allesandro! Your presentation kicked 4ss!

Sidefx recorded it as well, so I think it will make it's way online at some point. Perhaps Ben and Debra can chime in on when that might happen.
Or when the video is online we can link it here too.

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Hey Alessandro,

out of curiousity, could you share one of the shell scripts that you used to showcase those multiple flipbooks at once?
That was quite a nice litte trick to quickly present the work. Myself and a few others were kind of curious about that.

Thanks again!

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14 minutes ago, pclaes said:

Hey Alessandro,

out of curiousity, could you share one of the shell scripts that you used to showcase those multiple flipbooks at once?
That was quite a nice litte trick to quickly present the work. Myself and a few others were kind of curious about that.

Thanks again!

Hey Peter,

it was just a bash script containing one mplay command reading more than one sequence, and with -V option to create specific row / column layout so I could visualize more than one file sequence per time.

Example:

mplay -V 2 2 -g flipbooks/03_tenPoints/* flipbooks/04_thousandPoints/* flipbooks/05_millionPoints/*

.. this line will open mplay with a 2x2 row-column layout (in total 4, but since I'm specifying only 3 image sequences, the 4th spot in the lower right corner will be ignored) and 3 file sequences.

The -g option " ... groups the command line images into separate sequences, based on base name and extension".

An option that I use a lot is the option -C. This will pre-cache all the files before opening the actual player view, so that when the viewer finally shows up, the play is in real time. I didn't use this one during the presentation cause I thought it's less boring to watch the frames pre-caching opposed to a progress bar slowly reaching 100%

The reason cause I was using the syntax "bash ... script.sh" was because I was storing the presentation on an FAT formatted HD, which doesn't allow to chmod +x to flag the script as executable, so I had to run a bash shell and the script as a parameter. 

p.s.
mplay is awesome , pity it doesn't play videos

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Great presentation Alessandro and thanks for hosting the group at Framestore!

I did see a video camera set up and recording, but it was not SideFX's, so the mystery of who recorded the presentation begins.... 

EDIT: Does anyone know who the guy at the camera is in this pic? I'm assuming he works at Framestore. 

Edited by Ben Mears
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21 hours ago, Ben Mears said:

Great presentation Alessandro and thanks for hosting the group at Framestore!

I did see a video camera set up and recording, but it was not SideFX's, so the mystery of who recorded the presentation begins.... 

EDIT: Does anyone know who the guy at the camera is in this pic? I'm assuming he works at Framestore. 

hey Ben !

the presentation was recorded by Framestore. It is being edited in these days and hopefully it'll be ready soon. I'll get you in touch with who's dealing with this so you'll be the first person to know.

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  • 7 months later...

Hello guys

When I want to learn this course, I re-rendered Alessandro's project file from the attachment, but the looking is very different from the tornado,

 

Could anyone point me out where is problem? 

 

On 2016/12/2 at 2:48 AM, mrWolf said:

 

@Eetu : totally ! I'll get the pdf and hip files ready in a nice zip file and post it tonight in this thread.

 

 

hugla2016_tornado.hipnc

 

2.mov

Edited by horizon1231
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10 hours ago, horizon1231 said:

Hello guys

When I want to learn this course, I re-rendered Alessandro's project file from the attachment, but the looking is very different from the tornado,

 

Could anyone point me out where is problem? 

 

 

hugla2016_tornado.hipnc

 

2.mov

hi Horizon !

The hip files included are supposed to present a technique more than matching a specific look and they are a simplified version of the setup I created to achieve those effects in production.
The purpose of the presentation was to inspire and trigger the desire to learn more. It's up to you to tweak parameters , use bits and pieces in your setup or maybe re-create the setup from scratch to understand the details and maybe come up with your own flavor.
If you've a specific question about technical details in the setup please let me know and I'll definitely try to help.

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10 hours ago, mrWolf said:

hi Horizon !

The hip files included are supposed to present a technique more than matching a specific look and they are a simplified version of the setup I created to achieve those effects in production.
The purpose of the presentation was to inspire and trigger the desire to learn more. It's up to you to tweak parameters , use bits and pieces in your setup or maybe re-create the setup from scratch to understand the details and maybe come up with your own flavor.
If you've a specific question about technical details in the setup please let me know and I'll definitely try to help.

thanks you for clarify that.

 

Did you use some pc scattering on the volume for rendering also ? I noticed your tornado have much more "translucency"

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10 hours ago, horizon1231 said:

thanks you for clarify that.

 

Did you use some pc scattering on the volume for rendering also ? I noticed your tornado have much more "translucency"

hey Horizon,

no, I didn't use any sss. I worked in comp to achieve a satisfactory result.

Something that really helps with smoke is finding the right density value.

High density can give you great details, reduces render times (cause the ray tracer has to travel less samples before accumulating the full opacity), shadows really dark, smoke very thick and dirty and not a lot of transparency (like in your render).
I would recommend playing with density values in the volume procedural shader and in the material shader too.

On top of that, play with the ramp associated with the material shader, that changes a lot the look of the smoke too.

I hope this helps.

Edited by mrWolf
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  • 10 months later...

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