edward Posted June 20, 2007 Share Posted June 20, 2007 Thanks for the heads up! I know it's still early but any ideas on which of the two may have more Houdini content? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel Posted June 20, 2007 Share Posted June 20, 2007 Thanks for the heads up! I know it's still early but any ideas on which of the two may have more Houdini content? Hmm.. that's hard to say. The talks will mostly be about the techniques for how we built a wave rig along with the data stored on the geometry and how that drives secondary effects and lighting effects etc.. and how that data flowed from dept to dept to handle the large quantity (about 20min of waves in the film). Almost everything we do ends up in a plugin .. for example our "wave trains" (ocean texture disp.. much like the ocean toolkit) was a lib written independent of packages and then implemented in prman, houdini and maya.. I guess what I'm saying is most of this is sort of package agnostic. All the fx guys pretty much worked in Houdini to execute shots.. but the talks will be more geared to developing tools and methods for the 3d packages. We actually had a fairly convincing wave just a couple of months into dev.. then it took the next 10 months or so building wave pipeline to handle a large number of shots where the wave geometry needed to pass though several depts, each with it's own needs... so that will be covered The "Go with the Flow" one will have 3 diff sketches.. debbie carlson who wrote many of the core plugins, she will show our wavetrain system. Eric Miller will show only maya stuff as he worked on the maya rig. Tom K. will talk about the beachbreak sys.. that was soley in Houdini and mostly built with avail tools.. don't think there was much plugin work for that.. that might be a good one. We'll certainly mention houdini in the 1/2 course as we go over specific systems.. but maybe not what your looking for. The fx talks are just a small section of that course, so check out the timeline they post.. when it's mine, or Matt Hausman's turn to talk you have the best chance for that. the other guys won't be talking about houdini specifically d Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sibarrick Posted June 20, 2007 Share Posted June 20, 2007 10 months of developement just so you can use the same system in different packages seems like a lot of effort. I assume there are good reasons to do it that way, is it more so that you always own the code and then don't have to worry about the future developement of one package or is it because its more expensive to re train animators to use package A rather than package B than it is to do the dev work ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whalerider Posted June 20, 2007 Share Posted June 20, 2007 Really liked the movie. I saw it again yesterday. Everything looked gorgeous, the water was just unbelievable. Congratulations to everyone who worked on it. Hopefully it will be a hit DVD title. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel Posted June 21, 2007 Share Posted June 21, 2007 10 months of developement just so you can use the same system in different packages seems like a lot of effort. Well, the 10months isn't a reflection on developing outside of a package. Once the libs or functions were doing what we wanted it was more like a couple of days to implement it into a package. I guess the point I was making was it didn't take too long to get a good looking wave for a test shot from a particular angle. That was during early dev when we really don't care about how we do it, just the result. That 10 months includes developing all the various fx (water ripples, whitewater, wave shaders, foam, beachbreak.. ) and pipelining everything to handle the large number of shots etc. to make sure once in production we could pump out the shots in an assembly line fashion. I assume there are good reasons to do it that way, is it more so that you always own the code and then don't have to worry about the future developement of one package or is it because its more expensive to re train animators to use package A rather than package B than it is to do the dev work ? we certainly like to own the code, but not everything was developed independent of a package. For the ocean surface we needed it to look exactly the same in all 3 places.. so a custom sys made sense. Other tools like our sand simulation system for footprints was written in the hdk since that wasn't needed elsewhere. Really depends. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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