[WIP] Houdini 2009 Apprentice Challenge - DrMerman

[drmerman]

Final Video :

Hey guys.

I've entered myself into the Apprentice Challenge currently being run by SideFX and I have exactly one month from today to put together my shot.

After entering I had a look around a few sites and noticed that there are no other WIP threads open for this competition, and as such I have been debating whether or not opening one would be a good idea - people seem to be keeping things close to their chests on this one!

The decider for me was that whilst winning would obviously be pretty darn cool, ultimately it's an excuse to learn the basics of a program I've been meaning to pick up for a while. Yes, starting a thread could give people ideas and drum up more competition, but I prefer the less-cynical, more-positive side - it both spurs me on to create and finish the shot, and it ingratiates me in (judging from having a good look around here before posting,) a talented and helpful community.

I have no real experience with Houdini although I have worked through the 'fundamentals' tutorial set over at 3DBuzz. Other than that I'm fairly competent in Maya, After FX and Modo, and I have also attended 2 terms at FXPHD.

My nature is to drop myself in at the deep-end with learning, so I'm aiming for a suitably complicated (at least from where I'm standing now) final shot. Wise? Probably not. Fun? I really, really hope so I'm planning on starting by putting together a rough animatic, followed by small tests so that I can learn how to create the individual elements, and then finally I'll try and get everything composited together before the deadline. And I'm aiming to do everything in Houdini.

Thanks in advance for any help I might get in the next few weeks! I'm off to manically read the help file...

Matt

Edited May 2, 2009 by drmerman

[Jason]

Welcome to od[force]!

We'd love to see some WIP threads here on odforce, please feel encouraged to open one. I hope you find all the hope you need over here.

Looking forward to seeing what you're going to attempt.

Jason

[Netvudu]

I was going to warn you about the rendering challenges considering you

[Matt_K]

Hey welcome!

Look forward to seeing your progress.

Matt.

[drmerman]

Thanks for the welcome, guys! I'm looking forward to trying to muddle my way through this one I've got some other work to get finished today, but I'm planning on getting the rough animatic completed tonight. It's likely to be VERY crude but should help to explain the idea if I provide some reference images as well.

In the meantime, here's a link to the supplied footage that I will be using :

Cheers!

Matt

Edited April 1, 2009 by drmerman

[quinniusmaximus]

Cheers Matt...

I too came over from fxphd.I've been curious about Houdini for a long time. I made a stab at it once a couple of versions ago when I had a spare octane to play with (at least I think that was the box). Anyway, I'm back at it with more experience, knowledge (though not of houdini) and determination. I've been lurking about on odforce for a bit now. I can't wait to get up to scratch and post something. Odforce seems to be a really good community.

-quinn

[drmerman]

Hey guys.

Well here as promised is the animatic. I'm pretty much completely embarrassed by the quality of it, but I keep reminding myself that starting knowing absolutely nothing and getting better is kind of the point of this! So I gave myself one hour to try and rough out the timings, and pretty much ignored the overall look, which will hopefully develop during the next two weeks of tests. Because of this things are a little (/very) rough around the edges, so please excuse that (especially the masking out of the original footage - I had NO idea what I was up to!)

To break it down, there are four main elements as I see it. The building destruction, the evil vortex of doom in the sky, the secondary particles (rain, newspapers blowing around etc) and the 'creature', which I want to be almost completely hidden by the rain/dust/grading - more of a 'did I see that' kind of thing. I realise that the one leg 'walking' across the screen doesn't really convey that all that well, and I might end up dropping the creature entirely if I'm pressed for time (it would be very cool to try and learn the basics of rigging if I can though!)

I'm planning on grading the footage to give it more of a dusk/night-time look that should bring things together, and then I'll add audio. As I said before, I'm hoping to achieve as much as possible within Houdini, as well as to cover as many of the network types as I can. I realise this is wildly ambitious coming from a complete Houdini novice, and judging from the quality of the animatic you must think I'm insane or just an idiot But I think that if I break everything down and attack it one tiny bit at a time I might get somewhere close. It might even look vaguely good.

Thanks again for the welcome, and let the fun begin. It can only get better from here

Matt

Quinn : I was planning on signing up to the Houdini 101 course at FXPHD last term, but work got in the way and I just didn't have the time. This competition seems like a good excuse to try and figure it out as much as I can myself. Everyone here certainly seems to know their stuff, so I thought it would be an ideal place to drop myself in at the deep end!

Animatic1.mov.MOV

Edited April 2, 2009 by drmerman

[drmerman]

Well that was frustrating As soon as I start getting ready for the competition I get another paying project that leaves me with no real houdini time at all! It's now been completed however, and although I have only 2 weeks remaining (1/6 of the full competition time,) I'm still determined to put something together.

I'm going to approach this slightly differently now due to the timing and concentrate on the different elements in order of importance to the shot, starting with the building destruction. I've decided to do away with the walking giant/hand destroying the building and go for something perhaps a little more down-to-earth. So now the buildings going to be destroyed by a giant octopus' arm (leg?) Much more sensible...

I've got a few days free now to experiment with this, and hopefully I'll be able to get something submitted by the May 1st deadline. I'm off now to try to construct a few dop networks to see which way is the best way to achieve the first element (softbody arm, rigged arm, arm and building destruction in the same network or in separate ones etc...) and I'll post the results once I have something half-decent or interesting.

Thanks again,

Matt

[drmerman]

Hey guys,

So I've figured out how I'm going to attack everything, and have made a start on the re-modelling in Modo (whilst I would have loved to have kept this Houdini only, I don't think I really have the time any more.) Attached is a picture of the roughly remodelled main building along with the reference image. I've added in some very basic mats in Modo just to help with the modelling process. I'm now going to go in and fracture the windows, columns and the main building structure, and then bring them back into houdini for lighting. I'm then going to add in the power cables, traffic lights and an LSystem tree to complete the scene.

I've also been experimenting with how best to animate the tentacle. I'm about to try the wire solver and will post my results.

Thanks again,

Matt

Edited April 18, 2009 by drmerman

[drmerman]

Hey all,

Well after a good few hours of playing, I've finally figured out that using the 'follow curve' option with bones is probably going to give me the most control over the tentacle. I've now successfully got this setup, but I can't seem to figure out quite how to make the tentacle interact with other RBD objects. I've tried setting it up as both static and rigid, active and not active, and I figure it must be a silly mistake I've made somewhere along the line. I've attached the tentacle scene file, and was hoping someone might be able to have a quick look and let me know where I'm going wrong! It would be a huge help!

Other than that I've started to think about the other RBD objects, and I've now got a rough setup for the building itself, however I think that it might just take a ridiculous time to compute the sim if I have every bit of glass fractured. As an alternative, I'm looking into doing a separate simulation for the glass, using an activation plane travelling vertically down Y to blow-out the windows as the tentacle crashes through the building. Early days on this one yet though, and I might just be barking up the wrong DOP.

So far I've gotta say I'm loving Houdini. It's tricky, and so very very deep (I keep opening subnets by mistake and panic wildly before realising,) but I feel as though it's one giant playground. I can't wait to start looking at the rendering side of things - I'm very curious as to the power of Mantra on short little shots like this one.

I'll be back on to this tomorrow evening (it's five in the morning where I am now ) and any help/pointers you might be able to give me in the meantime would be very much appreciated.

Thanks guys,

Matt

tentacleProblem.hipnc

[drmerman]

Hey guys,

First of all, I've managed to figure out the tentacle problem. I had to plug everything into the RBDSolver (making sure to uncheck 'Create Active Object' on the tentacle so that it didn't get affected by the gravity force,) and then check 'Use Volume Velocity for Collisions' on the RBDSolver node.

Secondly, I think I'm finally getting somewhere. Attached is a small quicktime movie showing the proxy destruction, which I'm pretty happy about, rough as it is. I used both the tentacle and an expanding cylinder placed on each floor, which moved in the direction of the tentacle force as it expanded, to create the overall look. I'm also experimenting with the RBDAutoFreeze node, which could explain the two pieces that seem to hover in mid-air towards the end I don't think I'm going to have a huge amount of time to tweak the final sim so I'm trying to do as much with the proxy as I can.

I've also been looking for a way to add motion blur, but I can't seem to figure it out. I've enabled it in mantra (using micropolygon rendering,) and turned the samples up to 3x3. I've also gone into the individual obj nodes and turned on geometry velocity blur as I'm using deforming geometry, but still nothing. If anybody has any ideas they'd be much appreciated!

EDIT : As is always the way with these things, you look for two more minutes and figure out the problem I've just appended a trail sop to my proxy geometry and set it to compute velocity. This coupled with the geometry velocity blur has solved the problem. I'll now re-render and re-attach the video.

Now it's onto sculpting the tentacle in Modo, and then lighting the re-modelled building.

Thanks again,

Matt

New version with mo-blur: proxyDestruction_withMoBlur.mov

proxyDestruction_noMoBlur.mov

Edited April 21, 2009 by drmerman

[Jason]

Starting to take shape, well done so far.

[drmerman]

Thanks, Jason As tricky as it can be I've been enjoying it alot so far.

Matt

Edited April 21, 2009 by drmerman

[drmerman]

Hey all,

I got caught up with some other work for most of the day, but I've just finished creating the base texture maps for the tentacle object. Attached is a quick render with only the colour map applied. I've also got seperate spec/bump maps created that should help to bring out the detail once I figure out where to put them

I'm going to begin work on the lighting and texturing of the scene now, and hopefully the next update will be a colour-corrected version of the original footage with the re-modelled and re-lit building in place.

Hopefully...

Cheers,

Matt

tentacleTest.mov

[stevenong]

Please keep the updates coming. It's looking pretty good!

Cheers!

steven

[drmerman]

Thanks, Steven, I appreciate the support!

I've just finished putting together the matte painting for the BG which will become visible once the building is destroyed (low-res version attached.) I had the idea to animate and composite this all in Halo, using the tracking data to trans/rot/scale the matte image, however the provided track has several issues (moving the camera instead of changing focal length etc..) and in the end I opted to just position a textured grid in the scene and render that out through the main camera. Crude, but given the res of the final it should look ok!

Now I'm going to bring that back into Halo for a rough day-to-night conversion, and then make a start on the scene lighting.

Cheers,

Matt

[drmerman]

Hey guys,

I'm currently trying to tweak the dynamics, and have hit a problem. To further control the building break-up I'm trying to change the glue value for every piece of the structure, based on the TY position of a grid moving down through the scene. I've been studying the 'Choreographed Break-up' example file, as it does the same thing moving sideways, however I cannot seem to get it to work in my version.

As I see it, the problem is that in the example they are using an RBDPointObject as the source for the sphere geometry - as all the spheres are the same this is a great method. However, when I try and apply the method to differing geometry I can't seem to get it to work.

I've included a scene and was hoping someone might be able to take a quick look at it for me. It contains the example from the help file, an altered example with coloured geometry, and my version of the scene, which is a stack of boxes that should fly up as the grid object passes through them. I've got it so that a point is placed in the centre of each group, with the same number as that in the group name (eg. point 0 is in the centre of group_0, point 11 is in the centre of group_11 etc...) but I can't figure out how to change the glue value in relation to the point's TY.

If anybody has any ideas it would be much appreciated, and I'm sorry if the above explanation seems somewhat complicated!

Thanks again,

Matt

boxSweepPlane.hipnc

[stevenong]

Hey Matt,

Someone has a similar question to yours & johner has kindly provided an example in that thread.

Cheers!

steven

[drmerman]

Wow, that's quite a coincidence! Thanks for pointing that out, Steven, I probably would have missed the thread entirely. Using the method suggested by Johner I now have the box stack scene working, and have attached an updated version of the scenefile. It kind of amazes me that this type of control is possible with what is essentially quite a simple expression (providing you know the internal variable names, which is one of the things I'm still working on!)

I'm now going to try to apply this to the building destruction, and will hopefully post an update later tonight. The deadline is Thursday so I think I have a few interesting days ahead

Thanks again,

Matt

boxSweepPlane_working.hipnc

[robert.magee]

Wow, that's quite a coincidence! Thanks for pointing that out, Steven, I probably would have missed the thread entirely. Using the method suggested by Johner I now have the box stack scene working, and have attached an updated version of the scenefile. It kind of amazes me that this type of control is possible with what is essentially quite a simple expression (providing you know the internal variable names, which is one of the things I'm still working on!)

I'm now going to try to apply this to the building destruction, and will hopefully post an update later tonight. The deadline is Thursday so I think I have a few interesting days ahead

Thanks again,

Matt

boxSweepPlane_working.hipnc

Actually Friday at Midnight is the deadline:

"Entries must be posted before Midnight, 1 May 2009 to be eligible."

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com...&Itemid=226