Detailed displacement?

[caskal]

Hello community,

I'm trying to figure out how to get this effect, im pretty new to houdini and my thoughts are with some noise and displace along normals, I played a lot with vopsd and solver but I cant get the shapes and amount of detail, could this detail be done in mantra? (just wondering, I would prefer to do it just in sops)

Here is the video (min 7:39)

 

Any tip on how to achieve this kind of pattern/displace will be great, thanks!

[lukeiamyourfather]

If you're using micropolygon rendering you can displace and subdivide things practically infinitely. Generate the displacement map at render time so there's not a resolution limitation involved. I haven't tried with other render modes but it might work in other render modes as well.

[caskal]

On 15/2/2017 at 8:00 PM, lukeiamyourfather said:

If you're using micropolygon rendering you can displace and subdivide things practically infinitely. Generate the displacement map at render time so there's not a resolution limitation involved. I haven't tried with other render modes but it might work in other render modes as well.

Thanks @lukeiamyourfather never heard of micropolygon rendering but I'll do a google search to learn about, btw there is a way to see the displacement in real time? at least in low quality?, didnt dig intro mantra yet, I'll do a research thanks for the tip on this!

[haggi]

In micropolygon rendering a subdivied or displaced surface is divided until a certain limit is reached. In most cases this limit is a fraction of a pixel. That means if the length of a polygon projected to the sceen (final camera resolution) is larger than let's say half a pixel, it is subdiveded until it fits into the half pixel. This is a cool procedure because only the geometry is created which is needed to the current image resolution.

But you have to take care. If you want to use raytracing, mantra cannot simply throw away already rendered geometry and can eat up your memory very fast.

[lukeiamyourfather]

3 hours ago, caskal said:

Thanks @lukeiamyourfather never heard of micropolygon rendering but I'll do a google search to learn about, btw there is a way to see the displacement in real time? at least in low quality?, didnt dig intro mantra yet, I'll do a research thanks for the tip on this!

There's some information about it in the Houdini documentation.

http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini/render/understanding

You change the mode on the Mantra node.

http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/out/ifd#rendering

The setting that determines how much to subdivide things is called dicing. It can be global, per object, based on distance, all kinds of fun stuff.

[caskal]

Thanks a lot @lukeiamyourfather and @haggi I'm having a blast with Houdini, didn't read too much yet but started messing with the settings. Will play more as soon as I get to the studio since this requires a proper machine.

2 quick questions:

- When I added a UV texture and a mantra shader with displacer, I was able to see the displacement and tweak in realtime, can this be done with the noise too? tried with no luck (the noise on the mantra surface displacement)

- This is really dumb but couldnt figure out. I added a curl noise to the normals, to get a different displacement result, but I couldn't get rid of the black and white color on the object, added a "color" node but didnt work, a clean node deletes de curly normals, a uv texture also didnt take off, I wonder why this happens since I didn't connect the vop curl to the Cd but the normals. I tried a normal sop but that made the normals "normal" again.

Thanks a lot for the tip guys, really appreciate, I'm falling in love with this software.

 

Here is a procedural alphabet I did with houdini: https://www.behance.net/gallery/48528401/Procedural-Alphabets

Some curl experiments: https://www.behance.net/gallery/44281891/Abstract

And some nike concepts: https://www.behance.net/gallery/45405237/Inspired-by-Nature

 

Cheers!

 

 

microtest.hipnc

[caskal]

Learning mantra finally, tons of fun

[caskal]

Last one, still didnt played with the micropoly and dicing, learning mantra first, I tried to change the settings to micropoly and dice to 3 after a shader but it changed a lot, so I guess I should put those settings first and play with shader builder later, thanks guys!