Day07: Tutorials Part 01(Intro & Pinboards)

Started the day off with two recorded tutorials.
Each is about an hour long.

The first tutorial was more like getting started in Houdini, things like navigating around Houdini's interface, using the shelf tool to create geometries, creating a camera, attaching camera to a curve, key-framing and fine tuning of key-frames.

The second tutorial was about creating this pin board like effect. Just to highlight some key points.

• Use of point sop to generate normals.
• Use of ray sop to displace points.
• Use of cookie sop to perform boolean operation.

Here is a MTV that have such effect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDsqpeiTqg8

This is what I got after following through the tutorial.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UL9p7EroMA

And another tutorial from cgtut plus

http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/side-effects-houdini/3d_cg_vfx_tutorial_sidefx_houdini_premium_pinboard_alvaro_day1/

And back to work on my project!
Just when I was done converting my non commercial shoelace asset into commercial the Houdini window froze.
An hour worth of effort gone in an blink of an eye.

Managed to redo and made some minor changes.

• Better parameter names, eg. Height was changed to Length.
• A stronger color netbox making it more appealing.

 

Rigging info from Evan(SESI Intern)

As I've tried FK rigging and both attempts doesn't yield the result that I want, I approach Evan (SESI Intern) and told him about the rig that I'm going for and my failed attempts at it. Asked about how he would go about rigging a shoelace.

He then showed me a character with the rig, it's the spline IK style, I believe it also have a stretchy bone/joint.

He also did a quick demo on how to create the curve and bones.

To sum it up.

Path tool

Bones from curve(follow curve)

Custom controls(nulls)

If there is loop the loop problem, negative scale in which ever axis it's in.

And to make stretchy bones, divides the length of the curve and averages out the scale of the bones in Z axis.

A quick test

This method gives me the controls and behavior that I'm looking for.

Thank you Evan! 

Got an email from Mr Douglas, a sample file on how he rig his dragon's neck.

The file is a great help, there are stuffs that I've not yet seen and I'm gonna figure it out.

Thank you, Mr Douglas.