[WIP] Houdini 2009 Apprentice Challenge - DrMerman

[drmerman]

That's great news, thanks, Robert!

Apologies that I haven't been posting much but I've been rushing through this to get it done in time (in time being 11:59 Thursday evening,) and I also had a few more small projects come up. However, now I'm gonna grab a coffee and relax...slightly

I have hit a few snags along the way, mainly during the rendering process (which as I've already been warned, was pretty much always going to happen ) I'm getting a few weird artefacts along the edges of the buckets when rendering out heavily motion blurred frames, but I haven't done a good search for a solution yet and hopefully there'll be a refine-esque option somewhere. There are also some bright white areas that I initially thought were blown out highlights, but they now seem to be something else. At least now I have a bit more time to investigate and tweak a little further.

I'm going to render out a small version for the next few hours and I'll post it here roughly composited early this afternoon. I have a few more things I'd like to add but overall I'm really quite happy with it, and I'm glad to say that I'm beginning to find my way around the networks alot faster thanks to a few days of intense dynamics and lighting.

Cheers,

Matt

[Matt_K]

Look forward to seeing more!

Matt.

[drmerman]

Thanks Matt

Attached is a small version of the roughly composited shot. I've yet to add rain and smoke/dust so it's looking a little empty towards the end. If you scrub through it you can see the render errors I mentioned earlier, and there's one particular frame just as the building starts to get destroyed that looks INSANE, although I'm pretty sure I now have that under control The light leak around the base of the building has also now been fixed.

Todos

I'm going to tweak the specular on the tentacle as well as pull back on some of the rim light when it starts to fall.

Add in smoke/dust + rain

Add in wire to the top of the traffic light pole and use dynamics to simulate this falling.

Add in tree (if I have time...) and add destruction.

Add in helicopter search light towards end of scene.

Cut to black at the end.

Sort alpha at the top of the building.

Add in audio.

It's going to be an interesting few hours, but it's alot of fun so I can't complain

Please feel free to let me know what you think (be as critical as you like!) As I've said, overall I'm pretty happy with it, and I think the rain/smoke/sound will go a long way towards selling the shot. There are obviously things I'd like to spend more time on, and I likely will over the next week or so, but it's turned out quite close to my original idea which is always a good thing!

Thanks,

Matt

smallVersion.mov

[drmerman]

Hey all,

Just a quick update to say that I've figured out the render problems I had earlier. It turned out to be a combination of motion blur adjustments and material alterations - pretty much what you'd expect

I've attached a quick, lo-quality update showing just the main destruction. This is straight out of MPlay so the foreground elements aren't colour corrected yet, and good-old quicktime is messing with my gamma, but I'm still pretty happy with it and still having a lot of fun

Now it's onto dust and rain...I hope.

Cheers,

Matt

destructionWithBG.mov

EDIT : I've just realised that the window struts jump around just before the tentacle hits - turns out I had a bypassed node somewhere along the line and it's now sorted

Edited May 1, 2009 by drmerman

[drmerman]

Hey guys,

So the deadline has passed and I've submitted my entry. You can see it at

It finally finished rendering out at around 10:50pm, after which I ran it through a quick colour-correction and then used the remaining twenty minutes for the sound (which I know, as explained in the video info, is really under-developed.) Overall I'm really quite happy with how it turned out, but as always the more I look at it, the more things I see that are wrong or could be improved. I'm going to continue to work on the shot when I have some time in order to try and make it as good as possible. To help me with this I'd really like it if you could critique it; let me know what does and doesn't work and please feel free to be as negative as you'd like!

I'll start... :

* The tentacle just sitting there as the camera pans round looks worse than I'd expected. I thought I could make it blend in with the background further, and perhaps with further colour correction and the addition of some smoke (see below) this would be true. Ideally I'd like to use CHOPS to make it rise up out of the ground and wriggle slightly before falling.

* There is smoke visible on about 4 frames of the animation. I had to take it out of the scene as it was just taking too long to render (and given the time of my submission email - 11:59pm - I'm glad I did!)

* I'd like to add extra items to the windows of the building, as it looks very bare and un-realistic as it stands. There also needs to be something added in the lobby to provide a little extra detail there.

* The suckers on the tentacle look pretty bad. They were a late addition, and I didn't have the time to refine the textures. Ideally I'd like to look into an SSS solution across the entire tentacle.

* Extra things to add to the scene : two l-system trees, fire hydrants, sparks, lights in the buildings on the matte painting.

I just also want to say a big thanks to everyone who posted in this thread, and also the forum in general. I couldn't have done half of what I achieved without the tips/scenes that you guys have posted here, so thankyou for that. It's been alot of fun

Cheers,

Matt