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Dot Generator


medieval_cortex

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This is my first project with Houdini that feel like my own as I haven't used a specific tutorial to make it happen.

It's basically a tool that scatter dots alongside curves to get a cool noisy hand drawn style. This image was made from hand drawn curves in Houdini:

rendu.thumb.png.965af4a28abfee4a5388e47ccb0ebb13.png

 

The nice thing about it is that the curves can easily be animated with a P attribute randomize, which give this result:

0001_2.thumb.gif.715f40739fa61684df04d45f48422f47.gif

 

Of course you can also feed images or videos with a Trace node. I got this result from an image by animating the threshold value of the node:

image_trace.thumb.gif.fd2d1553797c2520c7b498ee35bff83b.gif

 

Coming back to the first image, here is how the curves look like in the Draw Curve node for one of the tree:

srehh.thumb.JPG.b06925e377ded03a6a4bbe9c2739540d.JPG

 

Then I created a grid and painted a density attribute alongside the middle:

arthjr.JPG.92f123abf058098cd4ee7f42c3d6f6ed.JPG

 

Then I sweep the grid alongside the curves, as you can see (in white) the density attributes is passed along:

aedrh.thumb.JPG.b7aef2d41741f01e63381d0b8a5167eb.JPG

 

Then I scatter points based on that density attribute, so the majority of them are toward the center of the branches:

tykytuk.thumb.JPG.b7a27cf93102c69331841c03da56b23b.JPG


Then I remap the density attribute to basically invert it's value and rename it to pscale. Finally I copy to points circles (actual geometry), and thanks to that pscale value the circles furthest from the curves tend to be bigger which I find give the best look:

srhh.thumb.JPG.ac947f4f6e0280dcf8cae75818bd0976.JPG

Some final notes:
- I actually have 3 scatter system with 3 different grid size, this give more control over the end result and make the inherent CGI-ness of the scattering less obvious.
- I've exported all the objects in the first image as alembic and did my render in Blender where I feel more at ease to do my layout.
- Even though I think it look better in 2D, this effect can totally be done in 3D with this setup, here is how a squab look like in the viewport:

squab_viewport.gif.e02f5e458d8f9abb9b4c8269a20c95b9.gif

 

Let me know what you think, critics are more than welcome, if someone has done something similar (and most likely a lot better!) I'd love to see it.

dot_generator.hiplc

Edited by human_robot
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31 minutes ago, Librarian said:

Love it !
If you can explain How you do ? Particles or ? What drive those colors ? just some process ....maybe some File example :wub:

Thank you! It's funny I was looking at your work 5 minutes ago, great stuff!

Actually I wanted to upload the file but forgot... I've added it to my post!

dot_generator.hiplc

Edited by human_robot
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