Day41: Missing Title!

Showed Evan my latest update, he pointed out the stuffs that is not working in the shots like camera angle and framing etc.

I've so much to learn...

Anyway been working on the animation and it took quite awhile but here is another update.

Weekends09: USS

Day40: Thor is here!

Something cool from Toronto office, they have a super computer nicknamed Thor.
Equipped with 80 CPU cores and 256 GB of ram, ensures no outta memory problem.

Also saw a low res smoke sim of 2 million voxels and a high res of 2 billion voxels.

Saw some new and exciting features in the up coming of you know what.

On to the project, re worked the animation.
Major work done, left to test those animation before I could fine tune it...

Day39: Lace Up

New animation test

A wobble lace animation to a static pose.

When the pose hits static position, it animates like dance sequence.

More animation test

Day38: Title of the day

Test render

Evan talked to me about the poses, how certain poses works on certain shots and etc.

So he told me that it took a few plays for him to figure out what those shapes are/doing.

I could try giving it a more abstract shape or adding more points to get a better definition.

I've also ask him about how he go about with camera animation, he pointed a camera rig video tutorial to me.

The camera rig would give a movement like a real life camera on a crane would.


So I've reshaped the human figures.
Retimed the animation.

Day37: Click Click Boom!

Worked on building custom shaders for the floor, wall and border part which covers the connection between the walls and floor.

Even tho the three shaders are more base on texture map, I could have just use mantra surface shader but creating a custom shader is more efficient.

The mantra surface shader have lots of stuffs that needs to be calculated during the render where as a custom shader only loads in the codes that is needed.


Also creating a custom shader to show it's color or texture map in the viewport needs a little bit of work.

I needed to add in the ogl parameters for the custom shader and either reference the ogl diffuse color to the custom shader's diffuse color or reference the texture map path of the custom shader's to the ogl's.

Making the displacement through the use of the same texture map, I simply use the luminance value of the texture map and use it as the displacement map.

Using my displacement as the color information to better visualized the displacement.

Lowering the value to make it less bumpy

render!

:)

Day36: Calculating Velocity

So the animation on my geometry does not have any velocity, hence no motion blur could occur.

So I've tried at the end branching out with a timeshift sop, offseting the frame by 1.
Connect the main branch with the point sop and using the timeshifted as the second input.
I wanted to use the difference in point position of the next frame and the current frame as the velocity.

I use the expression on the velocity attribute

$TX2 - $TX, $TY2 - $TY, $TZ2 - $TZ

What happen tho was not what I was expecting, I was expecting the velocity to be point in the direction of the next frame. But instead I got a weird direction.

So this method would probably only work if the animation is traveling linearly.

So I tried using the trail sop to compute the velocity.
Which I got the correct direction but the problem is the velocity grows over time and towards the end the motion blur was just too crazy.

So to fix that problem I append a vopsop to clamp my velocity so that it's within a certain range.
Inside the vopsop I get the point velocity attribute and connect it into the clamp vop and normalized it.

Everything works great but to further fine tune I wanted a velocity multipler so that I could control the motion blur's blurriness.

All I had to do was to append a multiply constant after the normalized vop.
Now I could change the value in the constant to tweak the motion blur.



Some test to compare displacement vs bump
And negative values vs positive values.

Far Shots
Negative True Displacement of 0.05

Positive True Displacement of 0.05

Bump map of 0.05
Positive vs Negative does not have much difference so I'll just use the negative one.

Close up shots
Negative True Displacement of 0.05

Positive True Displacement of 0.05

Bump map of 0.05

weekends08: Production Summit

Smoking time

So I've been experimenting with smoke simulations in Houdini.
This is just a test render among other test renders that are more presentable.

Rendered in passes.

I think it took 2 days to sim/light/render etc
on the school's laptop...

Day35: BootCamp02

Second day covered

Rigid body dynamics
Flip Fluid
Pyro Simulations

Day34: BootCamp01

The start of boot camp.
Topic covered are

Shading Lighting and Rendering
Attributes, what are they and how are they used in production
Sop solver

Day33: Move along

Finally got a solution without much drawbacks!

Transferring uv from a static shoelace to the animated one.
Both must have equal number of points tho.

From this

To this

Due to the change of uv, my shader's parameter needed to be re-tweaked

Dragon scales anyone?

Also have been reading on linear workflow...

some test
Without gamma correction:

With Gamma correction:

http://www.pixsim.co.uk/video_tutorials/The_Beginners_Explanation_of_Gamma_Correction_and_Linear_Workflow.zip

http://www.pixsim.co.uk/downloads/The_Beginners_Explanation_of_Gamma_Correction_and_Linear_Workflow.pdf

Day32: What up

More HDRI test

tbu...

Day31: Blur Sotong

The project is just not moving forward...

Spiral movement with MB

 

tbu

Weekends07: Loose Booze

Day30: Stuck-O-Matic

Started to test render the animation.

Now I'm facing flickering problem...

Tried render with/without motion blur
Tried render with/without material

Turning off motion blur seems to stops the flickering...

Dan also gave a class on command line linux 101.
Browse through directories and list folders etc.
Make folders, copy, move, removes loads of stuffs.
The very cool stuff is rendering through command line, saves memory from loading houdini because we could render without opening up houdini and the file.

Day29: Betty Wii Wu?

Current set up does not have proper uvs hence the issue with the shader...

Render as polygon with attribute transfer of uv from other shoelace to the current. [Image 1 and 2]

Render as NURBs and subdivision. [Image 3 and 4]

Day28: atan2?

After James showed me how to get the first tip and body to connect/blend, I started trying to get it work for the other end.

I managed to get it but because I branch out connecting the ends, there are two shoelace overlapping when I merge the end product.

I gotta either get the connection to work with only a single vopsop without branching out connection, or find a way to delete one of the shoelace while keeping the other and making it look like it's one whole piece of shoelace...

It's really complicated to explain...

And I was also trying to apply my shader to it, but it doesn't have any UVs.
So I've tried attribute transfering from another shoelace to the current one but it doesn't really work out due to the fact that both are very different system and have different topology.
Tried using it as a NURBS but doesn't really work out either...

Today there was also a Maths for visual effect class.
Pretty cool stuff but really difficult for me to get it...

Day27: Reviews

Just a test...

Had a review session with James, he was saying that we gotta really figure out how to get things around and start making progress and move on to other things.

He suggested some solution which involves tweaking of the capture setting of the bones.
Up res the model.

I tried both and it did smooth out the deformation but I was still not getting the sharp deformation that I need.

He came over after office hours, still time round he used a vopsop to connect/blend the shoelace tip and the shoelace body.

Weekends06: Sin City

Las Vegas!

Day26: Fly In So Low

07-10-11

Flying solo today.

Got two example files from Douglas,
The first file which I've tried is to generate points on the curve and sweep the cross section and then skin those cross sections to generate my surface.

Main problem is the connection between the shoelace tip and the shoelace itself.

Second file is quite interesting, Haven dug deep into it.

Spiral animation test as well as shadow test

depth map shadow.

ray trace shadow.

Was testing out rendering motion blur, but my object doesn't have velocity attribute.

So I added a trail sop and set it to compute velocity.

In the middle the motion blur got a little crazy tho...

Day25: Mo money, mo problem, no solution

06-10-11

Worked on the close up animation.
Reference videos of snakes movements/animations

Day23: R.I.P

05-10-11

Revised schedule.

Listed down things that is needed to be done.

Link:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Arv4zCAAYizFdDJpeHI4QkF4amZkRjFRbGg2YnJHT2c&hl=en_US#gid=0

Tried adding more bones to my shoelace.

60 bones, still not getting the deformation that I'm looking for...
Did a lot of tweaks to the resample sop, but results are pretty much the same.

R.I.P
SJ

Day23: Light up the sky

04-10-11

Test renders:

Had a review session with James, He was saying I could try adding more bones so that the bend would be smoother.

He also mentioned that motion blur, in his production experiences usually are rendered with the software package. Not saying that people doesn't add motion blur in post but rendering in the 3D package is common especially for mantra.

He also suggested that we should revise our schedule. It's good to see where we are at now and compare to what we wanna achieve. It's always better to have an end product vs one good solution.

Day22: Cool-ops

03-10-11

Today did RnD on HDRI workflow
Unfortunately all test renders are gone except this.

Did a little research on wedge node in the output context.
wedge allows multiple renders with vary settings on the specified parameter.

Weekends05: Pico Festival?

02-10-11

reserved