tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15539413541728255512024-03-13T11:40:51.042-07:00Art BlogPim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.comBlogger64125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-41173958078032259372017-01-29T09:27:00.003-08:002017-01-29T09:27:48.099-08:00Substance Designer - Sunray MosaïcAnd another! Couldn't stay away from Designer this weekend. Jumped on it again yesterday and watched a couple tutorials for reference and inspiration. Turned out I wanted to a mosaic pattern and so I watched some stuff by this guy called Sharpstance on YouTube.<br />
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I spent quite some time figuring out how to set up circular and curved mosaic patterns without having them sloppily blend into each other. Then the curved carve out pattern in the concrete was pretty cool to see come together and the sun was good fun as well. I guess more fun than skill went into this graph. Oh right.. and setting up the various curved colors came to me in a dream and I'm not kidding.<br />
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Visit my ArtStation page <a href="https://www.artstation.com/artwork/AabXN">here</a> or watch the images below.<br />
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Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-85996446029489042262017-01-27T15:33:00.002-08:002017-01-29T09:24:05.633-08:00Substance Designer - Concrete Ornament<div style="text-align: justify;">
I bought the Substance Indie Pack, on Steam, during the winter sales for a.. I think 50% discount? I'm not sure anymore. Spent some 20 hours in it since new years day... which reminds me.. Happy New Year!</div>
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So far I've not made anything noteworthy. Some tile-able stuff at work to get things going and testing out iRay renders at home.. but clearly not anything quantifiable. I got sick of only having some shitty tile pattern or test to show so I figured I'd just spend some time on getting a network done. Started it yesterday and finished it today with some inspirational input from a lv80.com post.<br />
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I guess the most interesting stuff about this graph is how I've used the height map and fed it through a normal map to single out the channel responsible for the vertical relief to create a mask for my moss. Otherwise, it's a pretty regular graph. I'm a big fan of the crackling though.</div>
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You could also go to the <a href="https://www.artstation.com/artwork/z9rPw">ArtStation page</a>; otherwise images below.</div>
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Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-1851014087885910722016-10-08T16:01:00.003-07:002016-10-08T16:20:59.854-07:00Back on Track<div style="text-align: justify;">
I got everything back to work again this afternoon and I think I got all the right versions as well. I was lucky I had most of my installs on my other drive, which really just means I didn't lose anything except for my windows OS. Afterwards I drank a couple cups of very strong coffee to celebrate and quickly painted an albedo in Mari to justify my effort. Below is a quick render of that with a soft roughness. All this data was saved on Dropbox, so I pretty much had an infinite copy of it.</div>
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Then, during the rest of the day I've been trying to get a Mari 2.6v5 license to try out the <a href="https://vimeo.com/161532647">Material Manager</a> on my home computer. I haven't been able to get a reply from The Foundry's support team yet and maybe they won't agree to it, but I hope they will. I've been working with that system at my job and it's great at distributing the workload and creating a nice overview of your project. In theory it should work quite well when you create a system that is clean. In practice you will need a GTX760 equivalent or better as it's sharing a lot of layers. Though regardless of system performance, Jens Kafitz did an absolutely amazing job.</div>
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Then I went on to write some scripts, to increase the speed of my workflow. I've always had a little interest in writing code. These are very simple, but exponentially increase my speed of working. I'm thinking about writing a windowed version but am a little afraid of QT.</div>
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So I don't have to go inside each mesh to change the smoothing method and iteration.</div>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br />import maya.cmds as cmds<br />mySel = <a href="http://cmds.ls/">cmds.ls</a>(dag=1, ap=1, sl=1, type='mesh')<br />for each in mySel: <br /><br /> cmds.setAttr (each+'.aiSubdivType',1)<br /><span style="color: red;"> #Sets subdivision method to catclark.</span><br /> cmds.setAttr (each+'.aiSubdivIterations',1)<br /> <span style="color: red;"> #Sets subdivision iteration to any number.</span><br /> cmds.setAttr (each+'.aiOpaque',0)<br /> <span style="color: red;"> #Sets shape to transparant in combination with opacity or transmission in shader.</span><br /> cmds.setAttr(each+'.aiSssSetname','SSS_Share', type="string")<br /> <span style="color: red;"> #Enables Sss sharing between two intersecting shapes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="text-align: justify;">The Maya dropdowns are way too small when I'm iterating a lot between textures.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">import maya.cmds as cmds<br /> cmds.arnoldFlushCache( all=True ) <br /> <span style="color: red;"> #Flushes all caches (Texture, SSS, BG, Hair, Quad)</span></span><br />
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And, since I built this lightrig and hate clicking the right mouse button.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">import maya.cmds as cmds</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: justify;">I gotta thank Wijnand Koreman for helping me out on the last one. Couldn't get the for loop to work. I felt pretty dumb when he showed me, since I found the solution a couple hours earlier but didn't implement it correctly. </span>In total, that was still a busy day. Glad I got a couple things done this weekend.</div>
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Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-53293555287031586282016-10-07T12:27:00.001-07:002016-10-07T13:54:12.419-07:00Windows 10 Anniversary Corruption<div style="text-align: justify;">
So yesterday I was (finally) confronted with the Windows 10 Anniversary update and figured I didn't have much of a choice so gave the installation a whirl. It rounded up nicely and I went to sleep. Then, when I came home from work my machine didn't boot. Ran as far as the BIOS, but I wasn't able to enter it and it sure as sh*t didn't boot all the way through. This almost makes me a yearly victim of Microsoft updates.</div>
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So now, after a couple hours of troubleshooting I think I can come to the conclusion that my windows OS has somehow corrupted during the Anniversary installation. Yesterday night it was fine and now it doesn't do anything. At first I was afraid my SSD was dead; then my suspicions lead me to believe it may be my SATA hub or mobo were dead, but that wasn't the case fortunately!</div>
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I have a windows 7 install as a backup to check for these sorts of things, so when I tried installing it on a HDD, everything went fine and I was able to conclude that the problem was with the SSD. So I tested that, with a SATA docking station I had lying around. Turns out the SSD is fine too and even the windows install looked fine... apart from the fact that it doesn't boot... which defeats the purpose of having a fine looking windows install.</div>
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To fix the whole thing I figured I'd just delete everything on the drive and start from scratch seeing as it's an SSD. Hopefully it was just a corruption and not a drive wide failure. We'll see. Safe to say I won't be working on my project tonight.<br />
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edit: Succes! I got Windows 10 working again so I should be set somewhere tomorrow. Right now I'm working on getting everything installed and tomorrow I'll make it workable again.</div>
Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-21756298664431208312016-10-06T13:11:00.000-07:002016-10-07T12:15:21.189-07:00Lightrig v1.0, Mari 3v0 and Substance Designer<div style="text-align: justify;">
It's been a little while since I've updated this blog and not because of lack of attention to my hobbies. I've been quite busy at work and personal life took over for the past 8 months. Time flies when you're having fun or something like that. It's worth noting that, since my last blogpost, I've had a small 'revelation'; purchased Mari 3 and subscribed to a couple of personal learning editions of various types of software. I hate the limitations, but whatcha gonna do.</div>
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To start things off I built a little light rig using HDR images from <a href="http://www.hdrlabs.com/">HDRlabs</a>. They've got a very nice library with images pretty much in the same value range. There were some inconsistencies between the ones I took, so I comped them in Fusion to get similar value ranges. I also resized the bigger ones down to 2k images because I don't think I'll need any bigger, Below are a couple of renders. I tried going for a wide variety of lighting conditions and reflective detail. Satisfied with the current results but I'm calling this v1.0.</div>
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I've also taken a violin from Turbosquid <a href="http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/violin-zbrush-strings-obj/690162">here</a> to start texturing and get my game on at home, since personal studying has been on a low burner lately. The violin itself was exported directly from Zbrush so it's hardly clean but has an 'acceptable' topology. The UVs were okay, but since I will be the guy who's texturing it, I figured it'd be good practice to just do the UVs from scratch. Took me little over an hour but I think I can work with the results. I'm planning to do much of the detailing in Maya instead of Mari so I can shave off some texturing work. Below is the violin and rig behaving as intended. I could show you the UVs, but nothing is quite so boring as looking at UVs.</div>
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Then, a little over a week ago I jumped on the Substance bandwagon and created an account at Allegorithmic to try out their software. I haven't bought their software yet, but it's so much fun I'm definitely considering it. Maybe during the next Steam sale... I've done the absolute first tutorial on their youtube page. Afterwards I went a little deeper and came accross a guy called CynicatPro who had a 4-part tutorial on making a simple tile pattern. Below is the result of that, including a link to my Artstation account which I really just solely made for the purpose of stalking my idols.</div>
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<a href="https://cdnb3.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/518/471/large/pim-hendriks-victorian-brick-cube.jpg?1474572726" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://cdnb3.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/518/471/large/pim-hendriks-victorian-brick-cube.jpg?1474572726" width="200" /></a><a href="https://cdna2.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/518/474/large/pim-hendriks-victorian-brick-cylinder.jpg?1474572730" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://cdna2.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/518/474/large/pim-hendriks-victorian-brick-cylinder.jpg?1474572730" width="200" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.artstation.com/artist/phendriks">My empty Artstation</a></div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;">That's it for now. Probably will update within now and 6 months.</span><br />
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Kind regards,</div>
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Pim</div>
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ps. I've also updated my portfolio website, but since there's so little on there that I am actually happy with, I feel like I should just have it link to my Artstation page. Not sure yet what I'll do.</div>
Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-85417731926383183582016-01-29T15:39:00.002-08:002016-01-30T12:15:17.396-08:003D Render.com Render Challenges<div class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
I've found that 3drender.com has one of the nicest setups for personal improvement in terms of lighting and shading. I remember visiting their website a while ago so it was an easy find. For this personal project I've taken Challenge #1, the fruitbowl, as I think fruit is one of most difficult subjects to shade tastefully. Yesterday night I've set up a few lighting keys, but I think of them as just tests. Tonight I will prepare the models for texturing in Mari.</div>
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The darkest of them all has a nice key however, clearly too dark. The others are just tests with different HDRi's as a feed for the lighting. Not sure yet if I want to keep the model in the center of the image, but seeing as this is a presentation of materialism, I don't think I need to spend much time on composition.</div>
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I've also looked into using Ptex as a viable option for rendering in Arnold, but I have found only little support for it. A two year old workflow presented by <a href="http://therenderblog.com/ptex-workflow-with-arnold-and-mari/">therenderblog.com</a> offers more insight in the availability of this method, but alas nothing more. <a href="http://arnoldrender.ru/?p=670">This Russian website</a> has a working plug-in called 'BeshaPtex' which works... but at the cost of having to downgrade your Arnold version. I'd rather not... so I'll do it the old-fasion way.</div>
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Fast forward a little over an hour, the UVs are done. Ready for texturing.<br />
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As I continued, I noticed the pear appeared missing from the scene. How had I not noticed this? Then I wrote a small script to enable Catmull Clark smoothing on all assets and exported my file to an alembic for painting in Mari. The visual difference of the smooth is slight but, surprisingly, shaved half a minute off of the rendertime. Now to see whether or not the UVs hold up; stranger artifacts have occurred.</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Gj7loqO5OG4/Vq0VUtnAOPI/AAAAAAAABz8/Vyd8H0fDOt4/s1600/clay_sunrise_cam8.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Gj7loqO5OG4/Vq0VUtnAOPI/AAAAAAAABz8/Vyd8H0fDOt4/s320/clay_sunrise_cam8.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Current UVs are placed in an orderly fashion and I am planning on using udim's just so I can avoid having to export and manage so many different folders, locations and file names. </div>
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Kind regards,</div>
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Pim</div>
Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-85266251113026032152016-01-17T11:47:00.001-08:002016-01-22T10:44:02.887-08:00Autumn to Winter in Ghent<div style="text-align: justify;">
<u>edit: Seeing as I am getting more and more into photography I thought it would be a good idea to create a profile on 500xp; a sort of portfolio website. <a href="https://500px.com/pimhendriks09">This</a> is me.</u><br />
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Photographic update on life in Ghent and with that a written start of the search for a Minolta AF 135mm f2.8 (100mm is fine as well) and perhaps a better (affordable) all-round lens for my a-mount bajonet as the one I am using right now -although fine- is giving me poor results in low-light conditions. A tripod may be a better solution to this nuisance.</div>
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Anyway, I've shot the occasional panorama during my walks from work. Below are the two best ones. The camera on my phone performs (unsurprisingly) even more poorly in low-light conditions, so both panoramas are from quite a while ago.</div>
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6th of October at 6.26pm</div>
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9th of October at 6.17pm</div>
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The following pictures (not the ones in this blog), taken this weekend, have offered me the insight that my lens might need calibration or replacement soon. Many of the pictures suffered from the same type of blurriness that I was not able to adjust by manually focusing the ring.</div>
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Shoppingcenter Zuid (by Karlijn).</div>
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Miniature cyclists.</div>
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Sint-Simon en Sint-Judaskerk from the Gentbruggebrug.</div>
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River Schelde from the Gentbruggebrug.</div>
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Thanks,</div>
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Pim</div>
Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-16603409629989922142015-11-07T15:10:00.000-08:002015-11-07T16:01:19.837-08:00ZOOToday, we decided to visit the Zoo of Antwerp. It was a nice train trip, the weather was great and there were some Belgian youth hopping in and out of the queue for the tickets. Probably because they were smash hammered and kept forgetting what they were waiting for in the first place. The mental image makes me smirk.<br />
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Took along my camera, but I didn't check the battery at home and had only 20% to shoot with. Alas.</div>
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Thanks,</div>
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Pim</div>
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Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-29712192289208342042015-10-19T14:46:00.004-07:002015-10-19T14:47:26.302-07:00Rendering with jf_nested_dielectric<div style="text-align: justify;">
Lately I've been trying to try to achieve realistic dispersion and refraction for my Arnold shaders and noticed a massive increase in render time. Switching to alShaders solved most of this, by their Russian Roulette concept. Today I found the "jf_nested_dielectric" Arnold shader and it is perfect for super light and realistic results, only I can't find a way to include an albedo map. As far as I know, and this knowledge is based on an hour of reading documents and trying the shaders myself, this shader doesn't have any input. I wonder if I can nest it into a shader group and just use it's refractive and dispersive attributes.</div>
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Anyways, pictures. Really basic setup. Displacement map in the shader group works like a charm.</div>
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Kind regards,</div>
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Pim</div>
Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-3267152439953103972015-09-20T09:53:00.000-07:002015-09-20T10:01:48.051-07:00Paul Cézanne: Master StudyToday I decided to try and mimic the style and compositions of Paul Cézanne, a French post-impressionist. I don't know too much about him, just that he's done a mash of landscapes / objects and cubist stuff. I found it quite challenging, working from already stylized paintings.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EVw8aVMQakw/Vf7j9fVQ5ZI/AAAAAAAABuA/zO3O8FVCyhU/s1600/20150920.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EVw8aVMQakw/Vf7j9fVQ5ZI/AAAAAAAABuA/zO3O8FVCyhU/s400/20150920.png" width="373" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;">Like yesterday, I took around 20 minutes for the value sketch and 10 minutes for the color pass. So 30 minutes per sketch.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;">Kind regards,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;">Pim</span></div>
Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-64734863139078348652015-09-19T11:33:00.001-07:002015-09-19T11:33:31.425-07:00Rembrandt van Rijn: Master Study<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Since I'm quite enjoying practicing digital painting, I felt like making it a little more interesting by doing a couple of studies based on one artist. Today, Rembrandt van Rijn. Tomorrow, I'm not sure, but since it is the weekend I'll have plenty of time to find an artist I like.</div>
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For the value sketch I took around 20 minutes to get sufficient amount of detail in. The color didn't take as long, so I guess about 30 minutes per sketch.</div>
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Kind regards,</div>
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Pim</div>
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Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-73922209739247273842015-09-17T13:41:00.001-07:002015-09-19T11:26:02.292-07:00Noah Bradley: Master StudyI've started working on my paint skills as I am having a blast at Grid doing look development but am looking for more painterly activities next to texturing and shading.<br />
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Currently following the advice of Noah Bradley and making very fast / short (~10 minute) lighting sketches from other paintings. So far I've used a book called "Color and Light" by James Gurney as my main reference as I know myself and can't cheat like this. Below are the results from the past three days.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MLgcO5eHkps/VfsjTIYemoI/AAAAAAAABps/igkPO7PQw8E/s1600/20150916.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MLgcO5eHkps/VfsjTIYemoI/AAAAAAAABps/igkPO7PQw8E/s200/20150916.png" width="141" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z2S2o9hMSto/VfsjTxCktwI/AAAAAAAABp0/XwEaWcNwpQE/s1600/20150915.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z2S2o9hMSto/VfsjTxCktwI/AAAAAAAABp0/XwEaWcNwpQE/s200/20150915.png" width="141" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3ozW4orXHU0/VfsjS9rwX7I/AAAAAAAABpw/u_RjTXibdBc/s1600/20150917.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3ozW4orXHU0/VfsjS9rwX7I/AAAAAAAABpw/u_RjTXibdBc/s200/20150917.png" width="141" /></a></div>
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Kind regards,<br />
PimPim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-86771506679212439982015-09-17T13:04:00.001-07:002015-09-18T11:19:09.607-07:00Müllerthal HikeWent on a small hike with my girlfriend. 70 km along the Müllerthal Trail in Luxembourg. Fantastic environment but the weather could have been better.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">First day. Wrong turn made for 3km of asphalt.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Second day. Working our way up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Third day. Change of scenery.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Cows.</span></div>
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I'm into taking square pictures now. Kind regards,</div>
PimPim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-30851702629842697712015-08-08T13:00:00.002-07:002015-08-08T13:15:40.613-07:00Dr. Guislain Psychiatric Center Museum<div style="text-align: justify;">
So I've thought about several ways to boot this blog up again since I'm starting to feel creative again but can't really figure out the best way to provide some nice content. I picked up my camera a while ago and started shooting pictures, practicing my eyes for color combinations, compositions and possible tiny details and nice places. I'm still in the process of learning, which really just translates to hating everything I shoot and keeping the 1%.</div>
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A small while before starting work at Grid-vfx I really got into photographing the sky. We had some heavy storms, lots of rain and thunder, which provided nice material to practice on. Below some of the ones I liked.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1NbQTGK7piA/VcZXMpPPIFI/AAAAAAAABWY/ghOI70vO2Q0/s1600/DSC03595.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1NbQTGK7piA/VcZXMpPPIFI/AAAAAAAABWY/ghOI70vO2Q0/s320/DSC03595.png" width="206" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dy15G2sWeUo/VcZXO6GS9yI/AAAAAAAABWg/ORKGTb23M7w/s1600/DSC03602.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dy15G2sWeUo/VcZXO6GS9yI/AAAAAAAABWg/ORKGTb23M7w/s320/DSC03602.png" width="243" /></a></div>
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Then my girlfriend did a photo shoot with our small plant collection, currently consisting out of a bunch of vegetable plants and herbs and while she is even more trigger happy than I am, the pictures turned out quite nice. I did some -arguable okay- cropping and color correction on a number of them. Below some of the ones we liked.</div>
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Lavender</div>
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Literally no idea</div>
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Rosemary (crawling)</div>
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Tomatoplant</div>
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And I am still not finished yet. Today, my girlfriend's parents visited us in Ghent and we headed to the Psychiatric Center Dr. Guislain. It's a seriously awesome place, the building is beautiful and the inside is unique and interesting. We even saw some guys walking around that made us think the psychiatric ward was actually still in use. Anyways, pictures!</div>
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<span style="color: #999999;">EDIT: After a quick google, apparently the actual psychiatric ward shares the ground with the museum. This probably explains our encounter.</span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Kd7WSkC_EfU/VcZb0bTnJ9I/AAAAAAAABXg/RQLsqvfkWnQ/s1600/DSC03853.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="228" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Kd7WSkC_EfU/VcZb0bTnJ9I/AAAAAAAABXg/RQLsqvfkWnQ/s320/DSC03853.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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And that was it again. Probably going to do this a little more often as I really like shooting pictures. I feel that for me it's not as creatively fulfilling as CG art or VFXing is. It comes close though, so that's good enough for me to continue playing around with it.</div>
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Thanks for watching and reading like always!</div>
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Kind regards,</div>
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Pim</div>
Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-42437943758093329142015-07-20T15:16:00.003-07:002015-07-21T13:34:49.732-07:00Game Design graduate & Look Development at Grid-VFXIt's been quite a while since I've blogged about anything. This is partly due to the fact that my graduation was a brutal period but also because my colleague (<a href="http://nevg.nl/" target="_blank">Niek van Gorp</a>) and I made a deal not to post anything related to our graduation online. This was motivated by the fact that we set up a really ambitious project and didn't want to spoil anything.<br />
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So first a quick heads up of the last couple of months. I started my graduation, finished my final retake, got my driving license, graduated from IGAD, celebrated my birthday (24 aye), moved back to Ghent, took up some freelance work and applied at Grid-VFX for a spot in their Look Development team and was accepted! I'm a week in now and although Mari is a tough cracker, I'm having a lot of fun. Cool beans!<br />
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To fill the downtime I got in contact with a small studio in Nuenen, near Eindhoven, called <a href="http://www.sommedia.nl/" target="_blank">SoMMedia</a> and made some models for them. Hopefully they'll be of use in their production. For me it was good practice as I hadn't modeled in some time.<br />
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As for my graduation, this was accompanied by a presentation, or oral defense as the institution likes to call it. I'd rather call it more like a semi-professional assessment of "what-went-right-and-what-went-wrong".<br />
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Right now I'm settling into the working life, doing 9 to 6 everyday, groceries in the weekend, DIYing during the evenings, studying and partying during the time that is left (none). My girlfriend set up a small garden project so now we're growing broccoli, tomatoes and bunch of herbs in an old euro pallet. I guess all I do is eat them with eggs for breakfast.<br />
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And we saw that new Disney movie the other day, Inside Out. Awesome stuff! The subject matter is very relatable and incredibly polished. The intro is so wonderfully choreographed while the rest of the movie lets you focus on the story, which was actually quite deep. To my amazement, at the end of the film, much of the theater was whimpering and squalling. It was terrific!<br />
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Off to sleep now, tomorrow (a day off) a long day of Dungeons and Dragons. I'm terrified.<br />
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Kind regards,<br />
Pim<br />
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ps. I noticed this blog post was featured on Walvin Media Daily News so <a href="http://paper.li/wallywalvin/1295872611" target="_blank">here's an infinite loop</a>. In case you're actually coming from there, please <a href="http://pimhendriks.blogspot.nl/" target="_blank">go here to read some actual blogging</a> instead. I'm sure you're not actually interested in reading this 'life'-update.</div>
Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-8221591616182312112015-02-11T15:59:00.000-08:002015-02-15T05:25:48.440-08:00Miniature Town VFX Compositing Breakdown<div style="text-align: justify;">
In the downtime between the final two phases of my education I've rounded up a final course and decided to start working on a compositing breakdown for the finished phase. Can't say I've spent much time getting it picture perfect, but alas; putting it out there anyways. Below is a Vimeo video. I like their layout much better than YouTube's layout for blog formats.</div>
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Secondly, since graduating has come into the picture there had been a necessity to figure something out for that as well. I was carrying a fairly solid idea around for quite a while and contacted a few ex-colleagues at Grid-VFX about it. However, after discussing the subject with a lecturer at my education, the idea was quickly dropped. The scope, for a single person project, was far too ambitious and the market too saturated for this type of work. I'd like to spill the beans, but it's still something I'd like to work on. Just not for my graduation project.</div>
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Then a <a href="http://niekvangorp.weebly.com/" target="_blank">colleague student and good friend</a> suggested we could try and combine our graduation projects as he found himself at the same crossroads. This, of course, is very risky business, but would undoubtedly enable us to create something much more impressive. A safe gamble was put on a cinematic '<i>space scene</i>' short focused around a comet in a sort of <i>perpetual motion</i>. Unfortunately the "<i>cinematic short market</i>" is so incredibly saturated with these type of videos, even the notion of it was quickly disapproved by our supervisor. Although we were unpleasantly surprised by this response, we had to acknowledge the fact that it was true. A link to an animated storyboard is found below.</div>
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As for the future of this blog in relation to updates regarding this graduation of ours, I'll have to discuss whether or not my companion is okay with me writing monthly updates. It's safe to say that since that moment the creative juices have been flowing.<br />
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In the meantime I've spent some time learning this software package called <a href="http://www.agisoft.com/" target="_blank">Agisoft Photoscan</a>. It can generate dense points clouds using a process called photogrammetry. It's really awesome. Below are some quick results. The results are especially great for measurements.<br />
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Living room chair</div>
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Garden pots and junk</div>
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Basement full circular capture pt. 1</div>
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Basement full circular capture pt. 2</div>
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In any case, thanks for reading,</div>
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Pim<br />
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Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-11161394076177130592015-01-13T08:50:00.002-08:002015-02-15T05:31:34.102-08:00Graduation Full Speed Ahead<div style="text-align: justify;">
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas Holiday and a Happy New Year. Resolutions for this year are to work more efficiently, graduate and start my career in VFX. My holiday was great. I spent the first week finishing my specialization dissertation to actually fully finish my Specialization Phase and just over a week ago I finished my final course for my study, which was writing a short academic paper on stuff related to CG. Although I officially haven't received any grades for these courses yet, I'm fairly positive I've passed the both of them. This effectively means that I'm in the all clear for graduating and, obviously, I've already started thinking about all the possibilities. There's so much time in 5 months. That's like... almost 150 days. Doesn't sound like that much anymore.</div>
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Anyways, I've uploaded the finished live-action short to both my <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/HendriksPim" target="_blank">YouTube </a>and <a href="https://vimeo.com/pimhendriks" target="_blank">Vimeo </a>channel. There's a million things I would have done differently and looking back at the work I've done I'm hardly satisfied. But I guess that's the thing with studying. You learn by failing to apply the things you've learned. I thought I was making some really smart choices during the process. In hindsight, some of these proved irrelevant or just plain wrong. Below is the YouTube short and below that the Vimeo one. I dislike seeing it, though I do feel a sense of pride. I can't deny, managing to stay motivated through five months of working solitary, often 80 hours a week, and actually working directly off of a planning I made at the start, does feel really good.</div>
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The dissertation, written along the project, is about 25.000 words strong and touches all workflow components that were part of the live-action short. Each chapter is introduced by a short theoretical analysis of the discussed component, succeeded by a practical approach. These practical approaches are supported by illustrations taken from the work-in-progress of the live-action short. In case you are interested in reading this dissertation, I can send it to you through private mail. Below are the <i>Abstract</i>, <i>Table of Contents</i> and <i>Introduction</i>.</div>
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Then in the meantime I'm killing time with photography, recording footage, playing this game called Starbound and working out (losing the weight from Christmas). Starting tomorrow I'm going to following tutorials on how to create custom effects in Houdini and probably some Nuke matte painting combination techniques. I'll keep posting all the results here.</div>
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Below is the video I recorded today. I'm really trying to keep everything as natural as possible because I'm starting to get really sick of all these modern movie post-processing effects. I like it way better when it's just colored naturally. Orange people and teal backgrounds are weird.</div>
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Birds and rain
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That's it again. There's a lot I can't say about my graduation project, but that'll come in due time. I need to discuss and determine many things before I can start detailing this project. There's certainly an application for Houdini Effects and Nuke Matte's. That's for sure.</div>
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Kind regards,</div>
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Pim<br />
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ps. I'm having a little problem in Nuke where my nodes boxes and pipes disappear from my node graph. All I see is text. The picture below illustrates what I mean. This happened after installing Nuke 9.0. I have since uninstalled everything and re-installed just Nuke 8.0, which seemed to work for a few days, but the problem has returned. I'm pretty sure it's a graphics card compatibility issue, but I can't find anything about this on the web.<br />
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Resolved! The issue only occurred on my laptop, which has two graphic processors. The problem was caused by w7 not prioritizing the Nvidia processor, thereby forcing Nuke to use the Intel processor.</div>
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pps. Let's make it a habit of incorporating everything remotely interesting.</div>
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<a href="http://tinyurl.com/lexqlc8">Cinematographic breakdown of Prisoners</a><br />
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/owd979e">Cinematographic breakdown of Inglourious Basterds</a><br />
<a href="https://vimeo.com/18467488">Collection of awesome shots by Matthew Scott</a><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2U3NG1TdEc">Professor Kliq - Wire and Flashing Lights - Plastic and Flashing Lights</a></div>
Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-53219127168071074062014-12-04T12:28:00.000-08:002015-02-15T05:44:56.080-08:00Specialisation Progress Pt. 3<div style="text-align: justify;">
To usher this blog post in <a href="http://www.allocine.fr/article/fichearticle_gen_carticle=18638459.html" target="_blank">here's some news in French</a> explaining how last week Astérix apparently overtook Interstellar and the new Hunger Games film in French cinema's. I feel like there's a whole lotta snowballing going on with this movie. Pretty awesome! I saw it Wednesday a week ago and it was pretty sweet. Also, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3066886/" target="_blank">Wiplala</a>, a movie I never posted about, also premiered and although it's a children's movie spoken completely in Dutch.. it's actually pretty cool.</div>
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So specialisation wise, here we go again. I'm pretty much on schedule with it so far, though during the last few weeks have been a little bit busy if I'm honest. As the deadline was getting closer it kind of closed in a lot more than I had anticipated. Due to a fairly large misunderstanding between me, my supervisor and my old curricular terms I now have to complete this project on December 19th instead of Januari 9th... which is kind of a bummer! On the other hand, it did push me to take the next step instead of dwelling some more on my renders, so that's good I think!</div>
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Like previous blogposts I'll structurize this one into chapters so it's easier to read. So let's see where I left off... ah yes. Simulations.</div>
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<b><span style="color: #444444;">Simulations</span></b></div>
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A bunch of, admittedly, very ugly renders of very ugly simulations. That's the first thing I changed. I upped the anti and scaled my realflow scene's with a factor x20 because I wasn't getting the right resolution. This gave me much better results at the cost of taking 7 to 8 hours of calculating the simulation.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SAQrJtxSk2o/VICRxQsm5SI/AAAAAAAABAA/ctI0GJ4Oyus/s1600/6.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SAQrJtxSk2o/VICRxQsm5SI/AAAAAAAABAA/ctI0GJ4Oyus/s1600/6.png" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
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Vorticity of the fluid.</div>
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Velocity of the fluid.</div>
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I then went on attempted to render these simulations in separate VRay scenes but quickly found that VRay actually didn't render this stuff very fast. The renders themselves also weren't very impressive quality wise as a lot of the refractions just seemed to be internal reflections. Something which I still don't completely understand but alas. Because of this I decided to switch to Mental Ray as I had been getting decent results rendering the limited amount of BiFrost fluid simulations I had previously created. This turned out to be a good decision as this allowed me to cut render times in half for double the resolution I was rendering at in VRay. A test result below:</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QrzGO6-M3f8/VICjNSqsqCI/AAAAAAAABBE/nIL_pwJi3Zw/s1600/test.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QrzGO6-M3f8/VICjNSqsqCI/AAAAAAAABBE/nIL_pwJi3Zw/s1600/test.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
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The problem with this was that it took the color for refractions and reflections from lamberts I really quickly set up. I didn't think it was an accurate representation of what refractions would look like using the actual VRay shaders, so I transferred my VRay materials to Mental Ray. Arguably they could have looked much better than this if I had spent more time on them, but really all I needed was the base color and maybe some surface definition.</div>
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The tests using these shaders turned out to be much better than I had expected. Another one in the pocket and something less to worry about. Some results below.</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nkWUMVV4d2M/VICT5J7bnAI/AAAAAAAABAc/EdXjcV9akqo/s1600/sh0020_final3-6m03s.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nkWUMVV4d2M/VICT5J7bnAI/AAAAAAAABAc/EdXjcV9akqo/s1600/sh0020_final3-6m03s.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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Simulation 1 </div>
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Simulation 2</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xF0PwqB_1oc/VICT6XVesTI/AAAAAAAABAs/N6HzYEIkDk0/s1600/sh0040_final3-2m26s.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xF0PwqB_1oc/VICT6XVesTI/AAAAAAAABAs/N6HzYEIkDk0/s1600/sh0040_final3-2m26s.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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Simulation 3</div>
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<span style="text-align: center;">I am least satisfied with the first one as it almost seems like I had forgotten to turn up the liquids viscosity. Or maybe it's the gravity daemon I didn't turn up high enough in Realflow. I'll be returning to this simulation in the end but only if I have enough time to finish this short. That's including the documentation I have to write about workflow and partly pipeline. Fortunately, because I am writing all these blogs I'll have a lot to look back and reflect on. Hurrah!</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #444444;">Shading revisited</span></b></span></div>
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I was really unhappy with how my shading looked on the larger surfaces. Very undefined and really not fitting the style I wanted to go for. During one of several bi-weekly meetings with my supervisor we both agreed my maquette looked like something out of a clown horror movie and I decided to mash up all the shaders. Below are some images I stuck together to show the difference in both lighting conditions and shaders.</div>
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<span style="text-align: center;">I also made the windmills turn in their opposing direction because it didn't feel natural to me. Might have been the lighting or the way I've set up the camera paths. I felt the windmills should have turned against the camera movement.</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #444444;">Final Pre-vis</span></b></span></div>
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Then, finally, before I could let myself start rendering I created playblasts of each shot and composed a short of them. Similar to my previous blog post I simply stitched the clips together using the same Sony Vegas template I used before, although this time I though it would be nice to make it more alive. This way it was also easier to understand what exactly was going on. It also helped guesstimate the rhythm of the clips so it wouldn't feel rushed.</div>
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The applause at the end is a joke, plz...
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<span style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #444444;">Rendering</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="text-align: center;">After this step I spent some time setting up all my render scenes and render layers. For this I used several common setups like disabling the primary visibility for reflection meshes and adding a holdout material to a duplicate of those meshes, but with primary visibility enabled. This is a really neat trick and it turned out to render my stuff even faster. Next up was setting up some render layers in both Mental Ray and VRay. Fortunately I didn't need that many as I only wanted a shadow layer and a beauty layer.</span></div>
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I set up my renders in such a way that it would first output a beauty layer so I could start creating simple pre-comps. I was then planning on recreating my beauty pass, steal the alpha just in case and keep the whole comp script the same for every shot. This didn't work perfectly, but I'm sure I shaved a lot of time off by creating these comps before my renders were finished. Below are the results of some quick and dirty pre-comps.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jTANznc_t9k/VICsRDJM76I/AAAAAAAABCQ/J6_cb_dfBT4/s1600/precomp-2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jTANznc_t9k/VICsRDJM76I/AAAAAAAABCQ/J6_cb_dfBT4/s1600/precomp-2.png" height="171" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fFCi6lWqF3A/VICsaLH2p8I/AAAAAAAABCY/WwRSO1mHv9c/s1600/precomp.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fFCi6lWqF3A/VICsaLH2p8I/AAAAAAAABCY/WwRSO1mHv9c/s1600/precomp.png" height="171" width="400" /></a></div>
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Then, when the rendering was underway, I made a render sheet so I could calculate drive space and timely start new renders without losing much time due to bodily needs like sleeping, eating and visiting the toilet. That was last week and I feel like I'm still recovering from the 150+ hours of managing all my renders on two machines. I'm glad that stuff is over. Lessen learned. Next time I'm going to write a macro that simply just batches through all that stuff. Or use a render manager like Thinkbox's Deadline. Below is an image of my total render time. This excludes many of the tests and creation of irradiance and light caches.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mflVL51gOoI/VICtgaEynLI/AAAAAAAABCg/dqfF35xRTio/s1600/rendersheet.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mflVL51gOoI/VICtgaEynLI/AAAAAAAABCg/dqfF35xRTio/s1600/rendersheet.png" height="287" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;">To summarize. I've rendered out the following passes.</span></div>
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<u>Mental Ray</u>: </div>
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<i>Alpha - </i><i>Beauty - Diffuse - Reflection - Refraction - Shadow - Specular</i></div>
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<u>VRay</u>:</div>
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<i>Alpha - </i><i>Beauty - </i><i>Diffuse - GI - Lighting - Normals - ObjectID - Reflections - Refractions - Shadows - Specular - Velocity - zDepth</i></div>
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After some thought I decided I'd render everything to a drive which from that point on would act as my plate drive. It's only 500GB's but for the current purpose that's more than enough. It's also extremely handy that it's a 2.5" external drive because this way I am not limited to my workstation. If, for a moment I don't feel like working at that location I simply move to my laptop. It's absolutely fabulous.</div>
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<b><span style="color: #444444;">Compositing</span></b></div>
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Immediately after the first batch of passes were ready I spent some time setting up base comps for all the shots. For some this required just to gather all the render layers and merge them together to mimic the beauty. For the first and last shot this required me to export the original shot footage to a sequence plate that needed to be 24.97fps opposed to 29.97fps. At first this gave some issues, though with a short expression in combination with forcing it to calculate in integers I was able to cut out frames without seeing an actual difference in the footage.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mxb4LBfwfvM/VIC2eDGfRwI/AAAAAAAABDI/sRka0S8ZiIE/s1600/comp-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mxb4LBfwfvM/VIC2eDGfRwI/AAAAAAAABDI/sRka0S8ZiIE/s1600/comp-1.png" height="320" width="258" /></a></div>
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Base comp to mimic the beauty. Another one of this is on the right for the fluid render passes.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-o3f3-q2-aaw/VIC0uLSmeAI/AAAAAAAABC0/LqtW_DkzCkg/s1600/comp-2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-o3f3-q2-aaw/VIC0uLSmeAI/AAAAAAAABC0/LqtW_DkzCkg/s1600/comp-2.png" height="189" width="320" /></a></div>
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A pre-comp to throw away all unnecessary information. At this point I am not using 32-bit float values for the image sequence I am exporting since that will take up too much time to write/read and I want to fly through this part of comping. For now the 16-bit .png format keeps the size small and maintains nearly all RGBA information. For the final image output I will go back and rerender all of this to 32-bit tiff's so I am not throwing away information that would otherwise increase the quality of this short.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IfZkkiCP25M/VIC2FVUYj8I/AAAAAAAABDA/BeCyIzS9SU4/s1600/comp-3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IfZkkiCP25M/VIC2FVUYj8I/AAAAAAAABDA/BeCyIzS9SU4/s1600/comp-3.png" height="175" width="320" /></a></div>
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This is an image from the presentation I gave yesterday to indicate what I've done in comp so far and what I am still planning on adding. During this presentation my supervisor and I came to the conclusion that the floor is reflective and that the maquette needed a reflections. I had not thought about that while rendering so I needed to faked one. I also added another global discoloration overlay to integrate the CG better into the scene and I used my normal pass to increase the lighting/shadows effects from both windows.</div>
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Something else entirely, GenArts is doing gods work with their plugins. I'm having a great time using their plugins and the only downside to 'em is that they rely heavily
on GPU acceleration, which is something the Nuke dedicated nodes do also. When
both are present in the same comp and both are being allowed to use the GPU (if
available) a mismatch occurs and the Sapphire plugins stop working. Not one of
them. All of them. I have yet to find a suiting solution to this issue. I've kind of circumvented this problem by recreating this effect using regular blur nodes. The difference will probably not be noticeable when the
camera is causing motion blur however, I will
need to find a proper solution for this because I am now missing camera lens information
like lens shaped artifacts, bokeh, lens noise and highlights. Below a comparison.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KQ5AU3JQcpQ/VIC4wThtx0I/AAAAAAAABDU/r12OxE1T5eM/s1600/defocus-2.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KQ5AU3JQcpQ/VIC4wThtx0I/AAAAAAAABDU/r12OxE1T5eM/s1600/defocus-2.PNG" height="200" width="160" /></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PZja79aNtiQ/VIC5IxiTt5I/AAAAAAAABDc/3S-dbFDQQlo/s1600/defocus.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PZja79aNtiQ/VIC5IxiTt5I/AAAAAAAABDc/3S-dbFDQQlo/s1600/defocus.PNG" height="200" width="164" /></a></div>
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And after all of this I built something similar to the pre-comp above, only this is for the final touches, like grain, re-formatting, camera shaking and re-framing. I felt I didn't have enough processing speed left to make the final judgement and I definitely didn't want to do it in proxy mode as I would lose a lot of information right there. For this step I simply render the "final" sequence out to my plate drive and then import it again. This is also using 16-bit png's, but I'll be sure to upgrade to 32-bit tiff's once I feel the shot is ready to go.</div>
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<b><span style="color: #444444;">2.35:1 anamorphic format</span></b></div>
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I'm considering reformatting the footage to a 2.35:1 anamorphic format since that will probably feel more cinematic than a short at 1.77:1 widescreen format, though I don't want to lose the 'home-video' vibe that's going on right now. It's something I can decide on later, so I'll postpone that decision for now. Right now, I just went ahead and did it anamorphic. Below is the result.</div>
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<b><span style="color: #444444;">Livestreaming</span></b></div>
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I've been live-streaming on and off because of the amount of bandwidth it generates.. or better yet, consumes. The videos are only for a number of days available on Twitch, however it gives you an option to export your recordings to 2-hours chunks to YouTube if you link your account to it. So really what I'm saying is, all my work can be found on YouTube. This is also incredibly useful for when I having to write my documentation. Weeee!</div>
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That's it again. Lots and lots of text. Hope I didn't bore you. Thanks for reading,</div>
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Pim</div>
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Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-31665226949896472992014-11-04T02:02:00.000-08:002019-08-23T11:05:49.878-07:00Specialisation Progress Pt. 2Almost exactly two months ago I started this phase called my 'Specialization' and nearly a month ago I posted a fairly elaborate blog post in which I explained what I had done up to that moment. This time is no different.<br />
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It's funny how I keep making these posts when I'm in Ghent and not at home. Clearly my productivity spikes every time I move to this city. I should be here more often, I would make great progress! Anyways, without further ado, below a wall of Facebook-esque proportions.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9wDxbJDn25w/VDe6PQLHTiI/AAAAAAAAA5c/t-YjI7S4pTs/s1600/4.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9wDxbJDn25w/VDe6PQLHTiI/AAAAAAAAA5c/t-YjI7S4pTs/s1600/4.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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A tiny stab at my previous blog post. This is what I ended up with after some tweaking inside Arnold and Maya. I was quite happy with the result of the render even though there was still a LOT of noise left in the render. I figured I'd up the anti for the AA multiplication render setting and leave the rest of the camera multipliers as they were. While doing this I also downgraded the number of passes for all the lights and set up my scene using various references and ultimately also a number of AOV's. (render layers). Unfortunately my render times exploded and I found no way to decrease them to an acceptable amount.</div>
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<b><span style="color: #444444;">Switching from Arnold to VRay:</span></b></div>
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I discussed the problem with my supervisor and he suggested I'd forget about Arnold and started using VRay for the bulk of the rendering. This way he could also help me out and actually practically supervise me. I thought that was a pretty good idea. Another thing we discussed was cutting the 20 second shot into several parts so a) it will be a more interesting combination of shots that may or may not actually tell a short story, b) added difficulty by forcing me to set up a coherent folder structure that allows for quick iteration, c) increase the workload since according to my supervisor I am racing through it and d) provide a compositing challenge by requiring different ways of image merging.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/B6mw9EBN9ZM?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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This is the original 20 second shot. In this case I cut it down to about 14 seconds because track wasn't perfect yet. It yanked the scale model down for a short moment and I didn't want to show that in my presentation. Normally a track would be perfect after shooting something like this and making notes regarding focal length, shutter speed, etc. Unfortunately though my camera lens was featuring zoom creep at the time and slid my focal length from 28mm to 32mm without me noticing. Really tricky to figure that out once you're in PFTrack.</div>
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After a few iterations with cutting up the shot, playing around with camera angles and mixing up the timing of the different shots I figured I wouldn't want to spend more time on that. Getting my angles right and camera's to look interesting was a lot of fun but there was also a lot still left to do. I wanted everything to be as complete as possible so I also rewrote the script, drew a whole new storyboard with notes regarding VFX and sound as well as create an animatic; something I didn't need to do before as there was only a single shot.</div>
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<b><span style="color: #444444;">Animatic:</span></b></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rdh8h4vwrVs?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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This is the third version of animatic. The previous two are view-able on my YouTube channel also, though I've cluttered them with so many annotation it's probably not a lot of fun watching those. I know you can turn those off, but still; they're just less OK versions of the one above.</div>
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So after getting all these camera's in order and the timing okay I figured it was time to jump into VRay. I follow a few tutorials and shredded the support file so casually made available by ChaosGroup. I ran into a few issues here and there with the VRay buffer and its color management, but eventually found my way around most things and managed to get a similar result to the Arnold render all the way at the top. Transferring the shaders gave a few issues as some nodes I had used in the Arnold shaders were not available in VRay, though that was solved fairly quickly also. Not a lot of set-backs in this transfer from Arnold to VRay as they're quite similar in the end. I do LOVE the light cache setting for VRay though and I wish Arnold had it. This is shaving off so much of my render time. Anyways, without more talk-a-doo, here are some images.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-prR85q3fhlE/VFf1TB0ph9I/AAAAAAAAA7Y/W2yuqW5UCtI/s1600/1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-prR85q3fhlE/VFf1TB0ph9I/AAAAAAAAA7Y/W2yuqW5UCtI/s1600/1.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Simple Physical Sun and Physical Camera setup.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PnfCaM0GZSQ/VFf1QifjW2I/AAAAAAAAA7E/NX_8QcW4Tb0/s1600/8.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="186" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PnfCaM0GZSQ/VFf1QifjW2I/AAAAAAAAA7E/NX_8QcW4Tb0/s1600/8.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Same as the above including a directional light that provides for the shadows.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RnkR3c2WJiQ/VFf1SO_72dI/AAAAAAAAA7I/lFxkoMy7kc4/s1600/2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RnkR3c2WJiQ/VFf1SO_72dI/AAAAAAAAA7I/lFxkoMy7kc4/s1600/2.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Same as the above but with preliminary shaders. I wasn't happy with the pale discolorations. Took some time before I figured out how to get rid of those but managed eventually.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-C3yXYqJPtys/VFf1S-J95wI/AAAAAAAAA7Q/yLOIN58swUI/s1600/3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-C3yXYqJPtys/VFf1S-J95wI/AAAAAAAAA7Q/yLOIN58swUI/s1600/3.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Discolorations gotten rid off and a very simple reflection shader to calculate render times in VRay. The light artifact on the floor plane is negligible as I will be turning off its primary visibility in the final renders. It will only serve as a shadow catcher.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zJLMG8R7P5E/VFf1U0NS-kI/AAAAAAAAA7s/Ke8xKs5aMec/s1600/5.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zJLMG8R7P5E/VFf1U0NS-kI/AAAAAAAAA7s/Ke8xKs5aMec/s1600/5.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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The soil seems very reflective in this though for some reason its actually VERY light subsurface scattering attribute that's causing the highlights. I have since turned that off and it looks much better.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-b5OQIpiWRXI/VFf1U5EAJ9I/AAAAAAAAA7o/CD1TQg0-v0s/s1600/6.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-b5OQIpiWRXI/VFf1U5EAJ9I/AAAAAAAAA7o/CD1TQg0-v0s/s1600/6.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Similar setup to the second image, but this time with a Physical Sky; hence the blue reflections.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-T38F6NO1lT0/VFf1VxSvs2I/AAAAAAAAA70/bvPS4kAfGys/s1600/lel.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-T38F6NO1lT0/VFf1VxSvs2I/AAAAAAAAA70/bvPS4kAfGys/s1600/lel.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Crazy render featuring buggy color management in the VRay render buffer. I was stuck on this quite some time without actually knowing what was going on. Silly VRay.</div>
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<b><span style="color: #444444;">HDRi lighting:</span></b><br />
After testing this Camera and Lighting setup for about a day I wanted to insert the HDR image I had prepared for my Arnold lighting scene into this VRay scene. For some reason I had to pump up the exposure settings for this map through the roof and I still don't know why, but the results are pretty good.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eL975Op5nlg/VFf4mchmsMI/AAAAAAAAA8Q/pX5sq60S-KE/s1600/1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eL975Op5nlg/VFf4mchmsMI/AAAAAAAAA8Q/pX5sq60S-KE/s1600/1.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Added my HDR image with an exposure of 1.0</div>
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Exposure: 3.0</div>
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Exposure: 10.0</div>
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Exposure: 14.0</div>
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I also changed the location of the light a little bit to see whether the shadows and highlights would eventually complement the model opposed to make everything look pale and bland. I also changed the hue emission of my HDR image to a more blue light.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--ePuIYgSkJ8/VFf4onmQ25I/AAAAAAAAA8Y/gnYg5tHgXHI/s1600/12.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--ePuIYgSkJ8/VFf4onmQ25I/AAAAAAAAA8Y/gnYg5tHgXHI/s1600/12.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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At this point I figured out why my chrome ball wasn't working. I also changed the location of the Sunlight emitter as I felt the shadows weren't working in favor of the model.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WeYf9dxQbIs/VFf4pBDtmRI/AAAAAAAAA8c/u7ZciG8YxtI/s1600/14.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WeYf9dxQbIs/VFf4pBDtmRI/AAAAAAAAA8c/u7ZciG8YxtI/s1600/14.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Another change of location of the Sunlight emitter. I quite like the placement of it here, It also resembles the bulk of light that comes into the actual shot footage.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Fkmv-DxN-C8/VFf4taGqrGI/AAAAAAAAA84/y0jYOPCn_5E/s1600/19.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Fkmv-DxN-C8/VFf4taGqrGI/AAAAAAAAA84/y0jYOPCn_5E/s1600/19.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Added ambient occlusion against a few seconds of render time. The amount of time added to the total render time per frame is only a few seconds and for that it adds so much to the scene. I was really surprised this was the ting that kept my render feeling flat and boring. I like it much better now.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tGy8yS0VFTs/VFf8FzzTt1I/AAAAAAAAA9c/yPlZhhJvU_8/s1600/0010_camShape_VRay-param1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tGy8yS0VFTs/VFf8FzzTt1I/AAAAAAAAA9c/yPlZhhJvU_8/s1600/0010_camShape_VRay-param1.png" width="171" /></a></div>
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Camera settings.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6CsZzooMIBg/VFf8Fwgn7NI/AAAAAAAAA9Y/Sk6KcPsvhe8/s1600/Render_GI-param.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6CsZzooMIBg/VFf8Fwgn7NI/AAAAAAAAA9Y/Sk6KcPsvhe8/s1600/Render_GI-param.png" width="143" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nR8q3zFBTVs/VFf8Ga4DS9I/AAAAAAAAA9g/KpyayQI-Mcc/s1600/Render_VRay-param1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nR8q3zFBTVs/VFf8Ga4DS9I/AAAAAAAAA9g/KpyayQI-Mcc/s1600/Render_VRay-param1.png" width="143" /></a></div>
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My current render settings. They're fairly straight forward as VRay needs very little input to output an excellent render. The majority of the personality of the render comes forth from the HDR image I've put into the Skydome but since that has such an incredibly large parameter window I'm not going to attach it to this blogpost. It's seriously so large I had to screenshot it ten times to be able to capture all those settings.</div>
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<b><span style="color: #444444;">Fluid Simulation in BiFrost:</span></b></div>
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Before I really did any of the stuff above I had been playing around in BiFrost and getting some nice results using simple boxes and low particle counts. At that point I felt my consumer grade workstation would provide for enough power to run a few stable simulation in Maya 2015 using BiFrost. I was wrong though. I spent about ten frustratingly slow, unproductive and inefficient days on BiFrost before finally giving up on it. Either my workstation or the software were not ready for this kind of use, while both really ought to be.</div>
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A quick and dirty representation in BiFrost that actually came really close to what I wanted it to look like. At this point this has only a single liquid emitter with many parameters left at their default settings. However, at this point already (frame 30) it took around 1 a minute to simulate each frame; much longer than it should take really.</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cfSRN3pjuZE/VFiQ4EYtTsI/AAAAAAAAA-E/CxEXlt2-5Oo/s1600/3.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="187" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cfSRN3pjuZE/VFiQ4EYtTsI/AAAAAAAAA-E/CxEXlt2-5Oo/s1600/3.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>
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7m26s to incompletely render a particle system using Mental Ray.</div>
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This brings me to another problem I couldn't figure out, but maybe someone reading this may know the solution to. Once I rounded up my simulation I didn't want to keep it in cache so I created cache files to my drive. However, once I did this I wasn't able to mesh the particle system anymore, so I was forced to render this in Mental Ray. The other way around, when I did start meshing the particle system before I wrote it to my disk I ended up with a shortage of RAM as doing both these operations simultaneously is incredibly heavy. I still can't find the solution to this.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d9lVZ_qzs78/VFiQ3y1GqtI/AAAAAAAAA-I/96dY-FoQAYg/s1600/sim3.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d9lVZ_qzs78/VFiQ3y1GqtI/AAAAAAAAA-I/96dY-FoQAYg/s1600/sim3.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Add reflection, refraction, ambient occlusion, a shadow catcher and a scene that needs to be visible in the semi-opaque water and it goes well over 20 minutes per frame. Unfortunately I don't have that kind of processing power, nor do I have the RAM and drive space necessary to render out files the size of what this was putting out.</div>
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At this point I committed to all the aforementioned steps excluding BiFrost and Maya 2015. I spent the holiday (autumn) 'rebooting' this project in a state that would actually be interesting to see and more challenging to complete. Doing more shoots for clean plates and preparing a proper folder structure was part of the challenge. Eventually I figured it out in eight days and am currently a week behind on schedule, though that should not be an issue as I've not accounted for the Christmas Holiday in my working schedule. This should give me plenty of time to get back on track.</div>
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<b><span style="color: #444444;">Fluid Simulation in RealFlow:</span></b></div>
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So after the BiFrost fiasco and all the additional work I had given myself a little more time to prepare for what is actually required for simulations. Emitters, colliders and environment factors. Realflow seemed the easier and more straightforward way of working so I followed a tutorial called 'Introduction to Realflow' by Digital Tutors. Thus far, the results have been pretty good and I'm glad I've switched to this program.</div>
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<object class="BLOGGER-youtube-video" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ag7n2_0gaPE/0.jpg" height="266" width="320"><param name="movie" value="https://www.youtube.com/v/Ag7n2_0gaPE?version=3&f=user_uploads&c=google-webdrive-0&app=youtube_gdata" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><embed width="320" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Ag7n2_0gaPE?version=3&f=user_uploads&c=google-webdrive-0&app=youtube_gdata" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object></div>
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This is the result of some quick and dirty fluid simulating in Realflow. I've spent half a day on getting this result and made enough mistakes to do it right next time. I'm glad meshing, exporting and stitching the alembic caches turned out so easy, though I'll be getting to that later.</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sNcQ4SWEyyg/VFiYEs1RN7I/AAAAAAAAA-k/4B8PQGLANGY/s1600/1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="175" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sNcQ4SWEyyg/VFiYEs1RN7I/AAAAAAAAA-k/4B8PQGLANGY/s1600/1.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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As you can see from the viewport in the right bottom part of the image I only used 5 nodes for the completion of layout for this scene. It managed to calculate the path of all particles along the sculpted river within 10 minutes and was much more accurate than BiFrost was. As long as the mesh is triangulated I have yet to have any funky results in RealFlow.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-axi25EG_dmc/VFiYEiD3g4I/AAAAAAAAA-c/32BQnKx9vng/s1600/3.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="171" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-axi25EG_dmc/VFiYEiD3g4I/AAAAAAAAA-c/32BQnKx9vng/s1600/3.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>
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The meshing is also fairly easy, though it does require some iteration. Once you have the right settings though it's a walk in the park. In some cases it may need a differentiation of about 0.001 to the polygonal size or the filtering, but usually these settings can be kept the some across all scenes.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AM0w7v_BKLA/VFiYExaunvI/AAAAAAAAA-g/EyMn3PiT0Ug/s1600/4.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="171" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AM0w7v_BKLA/VFiYExaunvI/AAAAAAAAA-g/EyMn3PiT0Ug/s1600/4.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>
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This simulation is a little more demanding as it was difficult to have to river flow through each bridge. What I've done to solve it is simply add more emitters that I manually activated once the particles from the previous would reach its location. It's a tacky thing to get right, but from the camera angle I'm using it's completely obstructed so I'm getting away with it. :)</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GhL2yi2JYCo/VFiYFiM-eII/AAAAAAAAA-s/dQgysFBHj1M/s1600/5.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="171" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GhL2yi2JYCo/VFiYFiM-eII/AAAAAAAAA-s/dQgysFBHj1M/s1600/5.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Meshing of the simulation above. Though the fluid is way to thick there's an easy way to fix this by reducing the viscosity of the fluid. By default this is set to 3.0, which resembles substances like mud and gooey fluids. Water, in this case, has a far lower viscosity. For future reference, I'm using a 1.0 viscosity in all my later simulations.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9C-BXGLBaZg/VFiavKQVczI/AAAAAAAAA_E/6jB8OsdnLKs/s1600/reaflow-export-param1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9C-BXGLBaZg/VFiavKQVczI/AAAAAAAAA_E/6jB8OsdnLKs/s1600/reaflow-export-param1.png" width="239" /></a></div>
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This bring us to exporting. RealFlow has a great exporting system which basically exports everything as you simulate it. The best thing to do is, once your satisfied with your simulation you reset your scene and go into Export Central. Check everything you want, include naming your files and export locations. After that, just hit simulate and it starts writing everything to your disk. It's absolutely fantastic.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4CuWLyxUvDc/VFiavPSOwTI/AAAAAAAAA_A/_QGbC0lL1FQ/s1600/stitcher.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4CuWLyxUvDc/VFiavPSOwTI/AAAAAAAAA_A/_QGbC0lL1FQ/s1600/stitcher.png" width="266" /></a></div>
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Realflow, for a reason I read somewhere on the internet but probably still don't fully understand, doesn't create a single alembic cache but creates one for each frame. This tool, simply situated in the RealFlow shelf, stitches those together into a single file so you can use that in Maya or any other application that allows to Pipeline Caches. Again, it's really awesome.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xXTfgbu0HP0/VFijDDxiGJI/AAAAAAAAA_g/V59l0e1g6rg/s1600/2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xXTfgbu0HP0/VFijDDxiGJI/AAAAAAAAA_g/V59l0e1g6rg/s1600/2.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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So far, this is the first result of a render and I quite like it. It's not really water nor is it really gooey, though I think due to the scale of it, it may really fit the scale model. I'll be testing this at the end of the day. The great thing right now is that this cache only takes 11 seconds to render entirely at 1280x720 and as long as each frame stays below 1m30s for the water I am a happy camper.</div>
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That's it again. A lot this time. Hope you enjoyed reading all of it.</div>
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Pim</div>
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ps. Asterix is almost here! Weeeee</div>
Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-32392097763300182822014-10-10T05:07:00.003-07:002014-10-10T05:07:53.308-07:00Specialisation Progress & Official Asterix Trailer!<div style="text-align: justify;">
A month ago I started the second to last course and it's actually a sort of phase called 'Specialisation'. I've mentioned this phase in a post before because I wanted to address some of the ideas I had for it. Unfortunately most of these ideas where really not executable because they either were incredibly over-scoped for someone still needing to learn everything; and secondly, they really didn't coincide with the intended learning goals. It's less about making a product and more about learning the bumpy road towards it; at least that's how I understood it.</div>
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So that's where I started studying kind of everything related to VFX workflow. I bought books and subscriptions to bring structure to my learning progress. I've set up a heavy duty roster so I can easily see what 'classes' I am taking on which day and at which time; including what chapters I should read and which I can skip... Writing and reading this aloud it sounds a little silly but it's definitely helping me progress a lot faster than I anticipated. So far it's a pretty solid ride.. and I guess now it's time to show some stuff.</div>
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Unfortunately I can only show the stuff I made this week because everything from the past 4 weeks is currently only on 2 drives, both of which are not accessible at this time. One is being used to render out a 400 frame sequence for a presentation next Wednesday and the other is at home - I am in Ghent. So here goes.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-m67sNQxg9Oc/VDe0R-y-ggI/AAAAAAAAA2k/IvHQd2X0jJo/s1600/swolla.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-m67sNQxg9Oc/VDe0R-y-ggI/AAAAAAAAA2k/IvHQd2X0jJo/s1600/swolla.jpg" height="322" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Swolla at around 1650. This is what I want to make into a scale model.</td></tr>
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<span style="color: #444444;"><b>Modeling Progress:</b></span></div>
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I started out with a design of Zwolle, a Dutch city in Overijssel. I used the old inner city as example, called Swolla, and drew a rough illustration of where the rivers, roads, walls, etc would be. Stylized of course because I want to create a scale model. In dutch that's called a "Maquette". In the image above I've started creating polygonal meshes to resemble the design.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gBMdrJ2J6y8/VDenc_W0YyI/AAAAAAAAA0U/0LbaMZCXRhY/s1600/5.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gBMdrJ2J6y8/VDenc_W0YyI/AAAAAAAAA0U/0LbaMZCXRhY/s1600/5.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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Trying to get a feel for the Maquette. At this point I wasn't sure why it didn't work yet as a scale model. The extruded part didn't make it feel more convincing but I figured it had something to do with shaders and a sense of scale; something that's completely missing here. I did figure out what colors I wanted everything to have.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0E8XXKEM7_o/VDengQ0vVBI/AAAAAAAAA0s/ZTcyI6My4Z0/s1600/8.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0E8XXKEM7_o/VDengQ0vVBI/AAAAAAAAA0s/ZTcyI6My4Z0/s1600/8.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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For this ugly image I used a random city generator MEL script I found on Creative Crash but I wasn't happy with it at all. It started looking like an industrial area or a large city with highways running through it and monster rivers flowing on each side. Totally broke the feeling of a old city. I did make the bridges a little prettier.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Fz5MvxhhQhc/VDenhMBEv5I/AAAAAAAAA04/QyOFrW5me5k/s1600/9.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Fz5MvxhhQhc/VDenhMBEv5I/AAAAAAAAA04/QyOFrW5me5k/s1600/9.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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So I created meshes around and overlapping the roads; effectively creating a much cozier environment. I also took some open source buildings from <a href="https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/" target="_blank">3D Warehouse</a> created in Google sKetchup and cleaned them. I had hoped this was quick, but it only turned out to be very dirty. Normals pointing in all direction, un-closed meshes and locked UV sets however, it's really good stuff nonetheless.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dZM5glTUHeI/VDena7CVcdI/AAAAAAAAA0A/Q97FaiOjHzU/s1600/10.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dZM5glTUHeI/VDena7CVcdI/AAAAAAAAA0A/Q97FaiOjHzU/s1600/10.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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Another shot of where I figured I had added enough detail. At this point I used a small script to randomly select faces on the buildings to make chimney's and scale them accordingly.</div>
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I also did some really easy rigging. I mean.. <a href="http://i.imgur.com/q8vGsde.png" target="_blank">really easy</a>.</div>
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<b style="color: #444444;">Shading Progress:</b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AHz0zFsJVu8/VDeuN5OvDrI/AAAAAAAAA1I/Q4ueFPvBYl0/s1600/1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AHz0zFsJVu8/VDeuN5OvDrI/AAAAAAAAA1I/Q4ueFPvBYl0/s1600/1.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Camera (AA): 3 ... Back lighting: 0.25 ... SSS: 0.1 ... Light passes: 3</td></tr>
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For this I took a small selection of the Maquette so I could cut down on render times so I could quickly iterate between attributes and values. I was trying to get papery / cardboard kind of feel to the models. After some research this was actually fairly easy to achieve as it's mostly back lighting and some sub surface scattering. Next to that I was trying to cut down on render time by reducing the multiplier in the Arnold render settings but also light passes, for softer shadows.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PkDndfMqIAY/VDeuN2ik2TI/AAAAAAAAA1M/zKfm0gvnVsQ/s1600/2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PkDndfMqIAY/VDeuN2ik2TI/AAAAAAAAA1M/zKfm0gvnVsQ/s1600/2.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Camera (AA): 4 ... Back lighting: 0.75 ... SSS: 0.25 ... Light passes: 2</td></tr>
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In this image I cut down render times by 50 percent and managed to increase the subsurface scattering. The back lighting in this image is increased by a factor three which in turn makes sure all the surfaces are lighter and have bright spots where the distance to the next side is smaller. For the time being I was happy with this result and decided that maybe a <a href="http://i.imgur.com/iMUXvHY.png" target="_blank">displacement map</a> or <a href="http://i.imgur.com/BnxE4wz.png" target="_blank">bump map</a> would make it more convincing, but as you can see from the images they made it worse. Although this is just a 'funny' stab at how it looked at one point, I really couldn't get those to look right. </div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-elbIpK0o91w/VDeuRVZq1KI/AAAAAAAAA14/IzXyYjabYkk/s1600/8.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-elbIpK0o91w/VDeuRVZq1KI/AAAAAAAAA14/IzXyYjabYkk/s1600/8.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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Terrain shader set up and bump map still applied to the rest of the objects. I quickly realized that even the smallest crack in anything resulted in the material definition being completely off from what I wanted it to be.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2C9yLaMSCi8/VDeuOHPnqpI/AAAAAAAAA1Q/wGubTJb3vdU/s1600/10.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2C9yLaMSCi8/VDeuOHPnqpI/AAAAAAAAA1Q/wGubTJb3vdU/s1600/10.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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At this point most of the shaders were done and I called it quits. <span style="text-align: center;">Here I tried out the focal distance option in the Arnold camera attributed and attached it to a measure distance node, which in turn would be attached to two locators, both of which were constraint to the camera settings. This way I can move the camera and focal point around and my focal distance will automatically shift. I'm thinking about using NURBS curves and animating locators along those curves to avoid having to manually change things.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444;"><b>Rendering progress:</b></span></div>
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I'm trying to become accustomed to separating my scenes into separate ones where I eventually use the render scene to reference all the one's holding shader, polygonal and others sorts of information. I feel this works best and keeps the working environment clean.</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zut51FTTfRI/VDe03c2EfOI/AAAAAAAAA2s/KLw2AAxO5pA/s1600/1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zut51FTTfRI/VDe03c2EfOI/AAAAAAAAA2s/KLw2AAxO5pA/s1600/1.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
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Testing shadow catcher in my render layers according to the support files provided by Arnold.</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PEu2vq9nB7M/VDe04fRd6jI/AAAAAAAAA24/1M4JZouWzdw/s1600/2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PEu2vq9nB7M/VDe04fRd6jI/AAAAAAAAA24/1M4JZouWzdw/s1600/2.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
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Testing shadow catcher in combination with a clean plate I created of the living room floor. I managed to get the reflections right for what I wanted and prepare the scene for HDR image lighting. The right ball in this case is a chrome one to check the reflection. This is simply following another part of the Arnold support file.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LIRQ6hXxUAM/VDe04SCD-NI/AAAAAAAAA20/K3JIlFucgD8/s1600/3.png" imageanchor="1" style="display: inline !important; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LIRQ6hXxUAM/VDe04SCD-NI/AAAAAAAAA20/K3JIlFucgD8/s1600/3.png" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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HDR image reflection in the chrome ball and a change of coloration in the entire scene. The reflections are accurate and the lighting is almost identical to the recording circumstances. I set up another lighting scene to help with the appropriate discolorations due to spill light caused by blinds and a construction light. This should neutralize all the incorrect lighting.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vMrELAZqEn0/VDe07TQ6sQI/AAAAAAAAA3M/6o9kzOfg9-s/s1600/optimisation-test_1m03s.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vMrELAZqEn0/VDe07TQ6sQI/AAAAAAAAA3M/6o9kzOfg9-s/s1600/optimisation-test_1m03s.png" height="112" width="200" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-12i1fFfzoyQ/VDe07WeqdaI/AAAAAAAAA3E/1947kUMaMB0/s1600/optimisation-test_1m41s.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-12i1fFfzoyQ/VDe07WeqdaI/AAAAAAAAA3E/1947kUMaMB0/s1600/optimisation-test_1m41s.png" height="112" width="200" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Wqzy2tdE1qg/VDe07pLK9KI/AAAAAAAAA3I/Z99n_R4SDCc/s1600/optimisation-test_2m09s.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Wqzy2tdE1qg/VDe07pLK9KI/AAAAAAAAA3I/Z99n_R4SDCc/s1600/optimisation-test_2m09s.png" height="112" width="200" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nSjh50z1lfY/VDe081KFT4I/AAAAAAAAA3c/nOINwfzDP3M/s1600/optimisation-test_2m56s.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nSjh50z1lfY/VDe081KFT4I/AAAAAAAAA3c/nOINwfzDP3M/s1600/optimisation-test_2m56s.png" height="112" width="200" /></a></div>
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In the above four images I was trying out render settings. Like in the images above relating to shading I removed render passes for lights and tested the difference in duration for different kinds of lights (directional against area lights etc). I found that, against my expectation, the skydome is actually a really fast and accurate way of lighting. I stuck to that and added lights to keep an interesting image but optimized for rendering at the same time.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NaMG8SDbbDY/VDe6H_eIwrI/AAAAAAAAA4M/iADKaQ-l00I/s1600/0m42s.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NaMG8SDbbDY/VDe6H_eIwrI/AAAAAAAAA4M/iADKaQ-l00I/s1600/0m42s.png" height="112" width="200" /></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Jqailsm40es/VDe6IIS7QtI/AAAAAAAAA4U/rHdlca5LeHo/s1600/0m50s.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Jqailsm40es/VDe6IIS7QtI/AAAAAAAAA4U/rHdlca5LeHo/s1600/0m50s.png" height="112" width="200" /></a></div>
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0m42s - 0m50s</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JBlgBSRrp3A/VDe6JEJyeMI/AAAAAAAAA4g/DUOBgLspEAk/s1600/1m21s.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JBlgBSRrp3A/VDe6JEJyeMI/AAAAAAAAA4g/DUOBgLspEAk/s1600/1m21s.png" height="112" width="200" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-d1wbJ8iShnQ/VDe6KelTWDI/AAAAAAAAA48/HaiJcDLle9w/s1600/1m28s.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-d1wbJ8iShnQ/VDe6KelTWDI/AAAAAAAAA48/HaiJcDLle9w/s1600/1m28s.png" height="112" width="200" /></a></div>
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1m21s - 1m32s</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-E48CnQ4-CPE/VDe6LQ4WuYI/AAAAAAAAA5E/1-Rxjwf9lMs/s1600/1m49ss.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-E48CnQ4-CPE/VDe6LQ4WuYI/AAAAAAAAA5E/1-Rxjwf9lMs/s1600/1m49ss.png" height="112" width="200" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OEJ4c9ZGNzg/VDe6MM4l0DI/AAAAAAAAA5M/lp_F93c1Zck/s1600/1m59s.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OEJ4c9ZGNzg/VDe6MM4l0DI/AAAAAAAAA5M/lp_F93c1Zck/s1600/1m59s.png" height="112" width="200" /></a></div>
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1m49s - 1m59s</div>
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I didn't want render times for this little piece to exceed 2 minutes so I used the set up from the renders of the hand and played a little bit with the lighting and HDR image emission attributes. Turns out if I render this scene and try to avoid really heavy shadows I can set many of the lighting passes set to 1 or 2 iterations. The anti-aliasing fixes most of the ugly stuff.<br />
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EDIT: apparently Google is awesome and automatically made a .gif of the previous images!<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-g7IqF5tECsE/VDfK4j0XCGI/AAAAAAAAA58/NOlze1TcGgU/s1600/lightoptim-MOTION.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-g7IqF5tECsE/VDfK4j0XCGI/AAAAAAAAA58/NOlze1TcGgU/s1600/lightoptim-MOTION.gif" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Awesome .gif</td></tr>
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<b style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #444444;">Where I am currently:</span></b></div>
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As you can see I decided not to keep either of the two previously shown shapes and collection of scale models. I didn't understand at first why my Maquette wasn't feeling like a one and I think the reason for that is because Maquette nearly always just <i>cut off</i> the terrain. They're not keeping into account all the other stuff because it's really just not interesting enough to see. So that's what I did; Boolean-ed my way through hundreds of meshes, repaired all of them, UV'd them again and textured the cut up parts.</div>
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The lighting in this image is not final yet, but has to do for now because next week I'm going to dive into simulations. Fluid, smoke and fire. According to my roster (hehe) I have three weeks to learn and apply.</div>
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This is also the model that I am currently rendering for a presentation next Wednesday. The windmills (5 in total) are rigged and animated so it's not a completely static scene. Some things are still missing and I'm currently in the process of adding some final touches. In this case that's guard towers, benches and some fences.</div>
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I am also quietly thinking about redoing some of the footage I've shot. I talked about it with an ex-colleague and we kind of came to the conclusion that it might be much more interesting to shoot for action in the digital scene instead of just moving the camera around for 20 seconds. Still just food for thought.</div>
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<span style="color: #444444;"><b>Asterix!</b></span></div>
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Yes! Finally a trailer that is actually official. You'll see it also says in the title. It's 2 minutes long and no subtitles unfortunately, but really, you'll get what's going on without knowing a word in French.</div>
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<object width="320" height="266" class="BLOGGER-youtube-video" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" data-thumbnail-src="https://ytimg.googleusercontent.com/vi/U6y63JW_qv0/0.jpg"><param name="movie" value="https://youtube.googleapis.com/v/U6y63JW_qv0&source=uds" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><embed width="320" height="266" src="https://youtube.googleapis.com/v/U6y63JW_qv0&source=uds" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object></div>
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That was it again. Hope you enjoyed that wall of text,</div>
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Pim</div>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a>Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-72891351293873686662014-09-04T13:58:00.001-07:002014-09-05T07:30:36.444-07:00Houdini Great War Frontline v0.6<br />
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Another update as tomorrow is my deadline and tonight I managed to, with a gut wrenching nerve in my stomach, create a working digital asset which actually worked the first time around. I made it in a test library but as it did exactly what I wanted I think I'm going to keep it. Tomorrow I'll spend the day adding a metric ton of parameters so the tool is actually usable.</div>
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Also, because I'm really tired and don't feel like writing much I'll post a gallery of screenshots I took during the past few days with some explanations in the same format as I used in the previous blogpost.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0uZFbAeTbGo/VAjUCy_iBKI/AAAAAAAAAyI/WRO77rOw9aI/s1600/2a.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0uZFbAeTbGo/VAjUCy_iBKI/AAAAAAAAAyI/WRO77rOw9aI/s1600/2a.PNG" height="180" width="200" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2-hHIVVzCqU/VAjGASAF7DI/AAAAAAAAAwU/JowM5SgJeKY/s1600/2b.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="display: inline !important; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2-hHIVVzCqU/VAjGASAF7DI/AAAAAAAAAwU/JowM5SgJeKY/s1600/2b.PNG" height="180" width="200" /></a></div>
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These two images show that I've created a locator using a box geo to randomly change the location and shape of barracks. Additional parameters manipulate the size of the placement shape and the density of barracks placed on the terrain. To make sure the barracks don't go everywhere I've restricted their spread to between two trenches.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KNFqrFyPLzs/VAjGB3FyPlI/AAAAAAAAAw0/oE2H3WdIRDk/s1600/3b.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KNFqrFyPLzs/VAjGB3FyPlI/AAAAAAAAAw0/oE2H3WdIRDk/s1600/3b.PNG" height="171" width="320" /></a></div>
Although spoiled in the first two images, here I take a group selection and use a color attribute to alter the color of that color attribute. After this I transfer the color attribute of just the group selection to the terrain. Purely cosmetic change for presentation.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4lm8F-76RKg/VAjGEDxxRzI/AAAAAAAAAxE/QyA-g9m3moI/s1600/4.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4lm8F-76RKg/VAjGEDxxRzI/AAAAAAAAAxE/QyA-g9m3moI/s1600/4.PNG" height="148" width="320" /></a></div>
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A quick layout to explain to friends what exactly is going on in the terrain. I think it looks nice and clear enough to post it here as well. The blue lines are the basic trenches, defined by a set of curves. The yellow area is No Man's Land, the piece of land between opposed front lines. The red's are trenches that are dependent on the blue ones. The white is one that is dependent on the red trenches and the the red one in the background wasn't supposed to be red because it's not dependent on anything. The headquarters can be placed independently.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fveIcuz1aEw/VAjGDyzPKpI/AAAAAAAAAxA/n_O3m08sCYk/s1600/5-oops.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fveIcuz1aEw/VAjGDyzPKpI/AAAAAAAAAxA/n_O3m08sCYk/s1600/5-oops.PNG" height="283" width="320" /></a></div>
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The above two images are intended for comic relief. I accidentally created a loop and saved the file. Instead of using a foreach node I have become accustomed to using a delete node and a copy node with a stamp expression. Unfortunately I made a small mistake and had the copy node refer to a scatter node that spawned 10.000 points. Not cool.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nvJCaaGV6ZA/VAjGFathNLI/AAAAAAAAAxQ/wmXSoG6KcQY/s1600/8a.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nvJCaaGV6ZA/VAjGFathNLI/AAAAAAAAAxQ/wmXSoG6KcQY/s1600/8a.PNG" height="220" width="320" /></a></div>
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This is how my network looked this afternoon after finishing a clean up. I am using a LOT of object merge nodes to avoid having really long pipes. Also, I like how it looks like a clown network, though I assure you, all colors have meaning. For example, light blue indicates a "prep"-network, dark blue indicates an "edit"-box, purple "selection"-networks and red is either a "necessary evil" or "cleanup"-network.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-g4fLwq5Q5Nc/VAjGFtjdZkI/AAAAAAAAAxU/c4stZnBNH5s/s1600/8b.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-g4fLwq5Q5Nc/VAjGFtjdZkI/AAAAAAAAAxU/c4stZnBNH5s/s1600/8b.PNG" height="133" width="320" /></a></div>
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This is a zoomed in image of the input nodes from the network featured in the image above. These are all the inputs necessary for the digital asset I wanted to make. This worried me to no end. How will I ever make a subnet with more than 10 inputs I wondered. This apparently wasn't an issue as a digital asset can have an infinite amount of inputs. Which is absolutely great.</div>
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The working system! I cleaned it a little bit and this is how it worked out. All the nodes in the white box are necessary inputs and the ones in the red box are -as mentioned before- "a necessary evil". I also added a little read me node with important information about curve direction, input hierarchy information as having 11 inputs can be fairly confusing and some information concerning build times on my machine.</div>
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The result of a build time of 3 minutes and 15 seconds. I've tried various different curve setups and they all manage to work so far. Cooking the geometry takes a long time in my opinion but I'm not sure how to optimize this. In total I think the entire network is close to 4000 nodes of which some extremely heavy subdivide and polyReduce nodes.</div>
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I think this is a pretty acceptable memory usage. I hope my teach has a similar rig to what I have... or better.<br />
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I think tomorrow I'll add some images with different trench shapes. Right now I haven't changed it up much as cooking the geometry every time takes so much time.<br />
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Thanks for reading,<br />
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ps. delivery is complete. I managed to get all the parameters in and fixed some other small issues related to radius matching and the likes. If I get a major passing grade I'll think about releasing it to the public. Otherwise nope.Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-75774070691087045142014-09-01T15:14:00.000-07:002014-09-01T15:15:15.828-07:00Houdini Great War Frontline v0.5<div style="text-align: justify;">
A little update again as the pressure is now getting to me. The deadline went from unclear to next Friday so I'm working hard to finish this tool. Oorah. In the past few days I managed to pull off the following things; each of which I will precede with an image. I also figured out I could tear off panels in Houdini and work on a dual monitor setup. Silly me.</div>
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In this instance I was in the process of duplicating the existing trench network and rotating it at it's core. Changing up group names wasn't an issue, though some weird exceptions appeared in a few of the operators. I have also yet to figure out how to make the funk-hole trenches procedural as an exception appears somewhere at the creation of the name spaces.</div>
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Here I have sweeped a short line across the trenches and combined the result with the funk-hole circles. The best result presents itself when I extrude the whole shape upward and combine the shapes with a boolean operation called 'cookie'. At this point the downside is, I have to apply this operation to each curve individually -so many different operations- as this cookie node doesn't operate on self-intersecting geometry. </div>
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The non-procedural way of ray casting the trench into the terrain. It works fairly well, though somewhere along the line the smooth node's color selection tends to be too small and I get the same effect as a bad filter for when contrast is being added to an image. Both values on each end get pushed; just on the edge of each side a thin line of opposing values gets pushed into the wrong direction, exactly countering what you're trying to achieve.</div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;">The procedural way of ray casting the trench into the terrain, though you can see it brings it's own issues. The ray cast is very accurate and on it's own doesn't bring a whole lot of problems with it but when a facet-node is added to recompute the normals I get shading errors. Most likely these are caused by mesh errors. In the image below the shading errors are more apparent.</span><br />
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Clearly very ugly meshing errors. Not sure how I am going to fix this yet.</div>
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That was it again. Thanks for reading.</div>
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Pim</div>
Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-8286598612000936102014-08-25T14:55:00.000-07:002014-08-27T11:25:22.487-07:00Houdini Great War Frontline v0.4<div style="text-align: justify;">
The title is only slightly referring to the number of times I've blogged about this subject, but since I find it so fascinating here's another one. I figured a monthly blog update is pretty sweet especially since this project is running into its final week (hopefully) and next week I'm going to start a whole new one win a completely different area.</div>
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Next week I'm entering the "specialization" phase of my education<span style="font-family: inherit;">. The <span style="line-height: 18px;">penultimate course of my education which allows me to fully surround myself with software I've hardly or never had the chance of working with before.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">But for now, screenshots below of my progress and small notes in which I explain what's going on. You'll notice much has been cleaned and many more subnet's have been placed in a 'for each' kind of node setup using stamp functions in Delete and Copy nodes. I've had help from a friend and colleague at Grid-VFX. </span></span></div>
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The Original Curve. Dictates the placement of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_man%27s_land" target="_blank">No Man's Land</a>. The piece of land between two opposing forces, usually surrounded by a trench. The term i<span style="font-family: inherit;">s mostly <span style="line-height: 22.3999996185303px;">commonly associated with the First World War.</span></span></div>
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Application of the Original Curve. The flattened land is almost unnoticeable in the top left corner of this image but work wonders for the trench curves that are projected onto the surface later. Especially the SAP's (forward listening posts) are prospering in flatter area's as they're short in length and don't feature a stepped pattern.</div>
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The Front-line, Support Trench and Reserve Trench are now three separate curves combined in a merge node. After the merge a delete with a stamp expression and a copy node repeat the operations located between the two to mimic the operations of a 'for each' node. A trench digital asset does the rest.</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;">After this, a friend helped me out with creating a selection set that I would be able to use indefinitely for each collection of trench curves, given that I precede it with a digital trench asset. Between the selected curved I spawn a number of curves using the parameter in the top right part of the image. The random seed changes the direction and strength of its control points but.. the real trick is being able to adjust the end points of each individual curve to adjust it's direction. The curvature is preserved and the curves never intersect, unless you spawn thirty of them.</span></div>
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Both the placement of SAP's and additional reserve trenches have been applied in this image. The SAP's are created by duplicating the front-line trench in order to maintain their direction; which is pointing at the opposing trench. The same concept is applied to the additional reserve trenches but I used a group selection to cut off the parts of the trench I don't need as it falls out of the 'combat zone'; as dictated by the bounding box of the terrain.</div>
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Today I've been bug fixing mostly. Some of which didn't make much sense and others that seemed to be so incredibly persistent on just, for example, the second primitive in a sequence that the easiest solution would have simply been to adjust just the second primitive and leave the rest as is... Coincidentally this is what I did and I've tried a least a dozen completely different input expression to try to break it but it won't anymore. I can't get over how weird Houdini is sometimes, though I guess somewhere it has to make sense.</div>
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For next time I want:</div>
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<li>Funk holes and dugouts between communication trenches the same way as the communication trenches are currently located between the regular trenches. However, they must not connect to the other side and cannot end in a linear fashion.</li>
<li>Sweep across each individual curve with a previously created shape.
Invert all three curves and calculate their curve points against the Original Curve's curve point positions to create an opposing trench network with the same customization as the original one.</li>
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That's it again. Not much time left on this project. Hopefully I can finish these things before I hand it in!</div>
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Thanks for reading,</div>
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Pim
Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-5089460493486996702014-08-01T12:18:00.002-07:002014-08-01T12:21:10.232-07:00Astérix Le Domaine Des Dieux, Houdini Great War Frontline and SolidAngle Arnold<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Some time has passed and since I didn't write anything last month I figured I'd give it another go. During these past few weeks it has become clear that the production I have been working on is on schedule and will air in French cinema's around November 27th. So as far as I know I am totally allowed to tell you what it is! Yay!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So I've been working on "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3759416/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Astérix: Le Domaine Des Dieux</a>"; in English "Asterix: The Mansion of the Gods". Unfortunately the IMDB page is empty but there's an unofficial <a href="https://www.facebook.com/AsterixDDD" target="_blank">Facebook page</a> which you can go ahead and like. At least I think it's unofficial... I'm not sure... Oh well. Here are some promotional posters.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">So in my last blog update I wrote about duplicated curve projections on a procedural landscape and some problems that arose with the technique I used. Firstly it wasn't entirely procedural and secondly it featured a gigantic node system; one that could be easily fit into multiple Digital Assets. Below a duplication of what my comments were on the progress I had made and how I addressed them with the help of a colleague and friend.</span></div>
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<li style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><b><span style="color: #666666; font-family: inherit;">Create non-stretched UV's for the additional 3 sweeped curves using the length of the line used for the sweep and the measured length of the curve.</span></b></li>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C2frsqHD7RY/U9vXIc_8-lI/AAAAAAAAAoE/N4xIuJpp-JI/s1600/houdini1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C2frsqHD7RY/U9vXIc_8-lI/AAAAAAAAAoE/N4xIuJpp-JI/s1600/houdini1.png" height="189" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>In the copy node above I output 7 curves which I blend between a blendshape node like you would in Maya, however each curve of my output will be added to it's own separate group. Using a blast node I can now select the copyGroup I need and delete the rest (non-selected). This will then allow me to measure the curve along it's length and apply accurate UV's onto a sweeped mesh. This happens later.</i></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H7NSXHDKE4s/U9vX-N2bO0I/AAAAAAAAAoM/rfc5Jeg7oWs/s1600/houdini2.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H7NSXHDKE4s/U9vX-N2bO0I/AAAAAAAAAoM/rfc5Jeg7oWs/s1600/houdini2.PNG" height="128" width="320" /></a></div>
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<li style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b><span style="color: #666666; font-family: inherit;">Ability to adjust the sweep distance for each individual curve so I can determine the amount of land they smooth out.</span></b></li>
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<i style="font-family: inherit;">This turned out to be a different issue than I had first anticipated as it didn't just incorporate the sweeping distance; it would also incorporate the size and shape of the trench. In the first image of the previous paragraph a solution is already present in the shape of a trenchnet digital asset.</i></div>
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<i><span style="line-height: 18.479999542236328px;">I used an L-system to create a curve that would allow me to duplicate it along a resampled curved but with the premise that the L-system curve's size would be the same as the distance between two adjacent points on a resampled curve. I achieve this by adding a transform node that uses the following expression in the Uniform Scale attribute:</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px;">(1/bbox("../lsystem#",D_YSIZE))*ch("../resample#/length")</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18.479999542236328px;"><i>The first part normalizes the bounding box volume of the L system and the second part multiplies it with the edge length determined by the resample node. Then I add normals, copy the l-system along the curve and clean up until I have something I desire.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.479999542236328px;"><i>Below are some examples of the shapes it can take on in it's current state of development. I'm contemplating whether I should add a few more functions like degradation and additional offset, but for now I'm satisfied.</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JqfToWdwFlY/U9veU6Zxw9I/AAAAAAAAAok/pINhgZsOLnA/s1600/houdini3.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JqfToWdwFlY/U9veU6Zxw9I/AAAAAAAAAok/pINhgZsOLnA/s1600/houdini3.PNG" height="320" width="241" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3PBiUGMw4mI/U9veVEzQNjI/AAAAAAAAAoo/c1gnwghzDxc/s1600/houdini4.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3PBiUGMw4mI/U9veVEzQNjI/AAAAAAAAAoo/c1gnwghzDxc/s1600/houdini4.PNG" height="320" width="244" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MI72dDnF0aU/U9veVNfGjnI/AAAAAAAAAos/yjgJlQRr_A4/s1600/houdini5.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MI72dDnF0aU/U9veVNfGjnI/AAAAAAAAAos/yjgJlQRr_A4/s1600/houdini5.PNG" height="320" width="245" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-y8qQjod48nA/U9veV8N_RXI/AAAAAAAAAow/iLlCCVQZtN4/s1600/houdini6.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-y8qQjod48nA/U9veV8N_RXI/AAAAAAAAAow/iLlCCVQZtN4/s1600/houdini6.PNG" height="320" width="245" /></a></span></div>
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<i>A three dimensional result of the above with a sweep looks pretty sweet.</i></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GzMYZ7JL_Kc/U9vi08xTBII/AAAAAAAAApk/BXV_18P9-D0/s1600/houdini9.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GzMYZ7JL_Kc/U9vi08xTBII/AAAAAAAAApk/BXV_18P9-D0/s1600/houdini9.PNG" height="185" width="320" /></a></div>
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<li style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: inherit;"><b>Find a way to get rid of the holes that are currently created in the landscape mesh. I know these are created by a group selection a tiny bit back up the selection creation grouping but I can't seem to figure out how to make that selection smaller.</b></span></li>
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<i>This is one where I had to do the exact opposite and increase the reference instead of decreasing the size of the selection to avoid it taking point positions from a location that was not correct yet.</i></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.479999542236328px;"><i>The solution was to take the curve that creates the height of the reference mesh and increase it along it's own normals by creating a vector between the last and second-to-last point. This is high school math where using an if </i><i>statement </i>(</span><span style="line-height: 18.479999542236328px;">compare node) </span><i><span style="line-height: 18.479999542236328px;">calls both the top result as the one below as an output. The normalize node at the end makes sure that we're extending the normal of the curve at the same rate.</span></i></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EFle13mmirg/U9vf6dmlW2I/AAAAAAAAApI/DZ3O9oB_KRw/s1600/houdini7.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EFle13mmirg/U9vf6dmlW2I/AAAAAAAAApI/DZ3O9oB_KRw/s1600/houdini7.PNG" height="79" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fj4g2vTz6Nk/U9vhAOBTdHI/AAAAAAAAApQ/wDGCciORnoE/s1600/houdini75.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fj4g2vTz6Nk/U9vhAOBTdHI/AAAAAAAAApQ/wDGCciORnoE/s1600/houdini75.PNG" height="320" style="cursor: move;" width="142" /></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eNatngOfAhQ/U9vhAAgycdI/AAAAAAAAApU/8r8s4KmzxbY/s1600/houdini8.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eNatngOfAhQ/U9vhAAgycdI/AAAAAAAAApU/8r8s4KmzxbY/s1600/houdini8.PNG" height="320" width="143" /></a></span></div>
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<li style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.479999542236328px; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: inherit;"><b>Create a polygonal bridge between the existing sweeps so I can create a selection for the area's between the trenches. This may become handy for the distribution of details later.</b></span></li>
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<i>This one... I didn't think this through as it's not something I would like to have. I think it would be much better to use the bounding shape of the trench to sweep across the curve and act as a smoother for the landscape than to have a whole general area that flattens everything. Not a fan of this idea anymore. Going to do it differently.</i></div>
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For now the most difficult step will be to find a way to have all the different trenches connect to one another. I will definitely update this blog as soon as I have a solution for that... And that was it for Houdini. But I did do some other stuff also!</div>
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I can't keep my hands off of Arnold. Such a great rendering tool. Even crappy light setups can turn out to be great physically correct calculations. I also discovered <a href="http://www.3drender.com/challenges/" target="_blank">this</a> amazing website with free high quality models ready for everyone to render.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ve8aQ4K8iZA/U9vjtGX0mpI/AAAAAAAAApw/-KNr_0Q8wbw/s1600/arnold_beauty_tx1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ve8aQ4K8iZA/U9vjtGX0mpI/AAAAAAAAApw/-KNr_0Q8wbw/s1600/arnold_beauty_tx1.png" height="320" width="180" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tOPh0WMN2M8/U9vjtPJP5bI/AAAAAAAAAps/T2SbOLVQJGQ/s1600/arnold_beauty_tx2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tOPh0WMN2M8/U9vjtPJP5bI/AAAAAAAAAps/T2SbOLVQJGQ/s1600/arnold_beauty_tx2.png" height="320" width="180" /></a></div>
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I specifically want to add that the two renders above are not an exercise in my lighting capabilities but more of a test whether I want to use Arnold for my graduation phase. I'll be starting my specialization soon and I'd like to know some render engine specific things before I even start researching software and hardware packages.</div>
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Anyways, that was it. Thanks a lot for reading!</div>
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Pim</div>
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ps. Arnold coming to Houdini? The best of both worlds? GWAAAAAAaaaaaaa</div>
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Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1553941354172825551.post-63484281915843713762014-06-17T13:53:00.001-07:002014-06-17T13:53:42.504-07:00Houdini - Duplicating curves<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
Since the last update on the procedural terrain I have been trying to duplicate my original curve into several others religiously but without much success. The internet overall had been of little help with this as in most solutions the premise was to simply create another curve. So instead of creating a curve I decided to UV all my surfaces and combine the result into the final mesh.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cQelAdH6dj8/U6Ck4fxhvRI/AAAAAAAAAmg/0ysJ6sBs72Q/s1600/houdini-8.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cQelAdH6dj8/U6Ck4fxhvRI/AAAAAAAAAmg/0ysJ6sBs72Q/s1600/houdini-8.png" height="177" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Simple projection</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YCAjqGnm-rE/U6Ck5KKBotI/AAAAAAAAAmk/bG_uPmiYec0/s1600/houdini-9.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YCAjqGnm-rE/U6Ck5KKBotI/AAAAAAAAAmk/bG_uPmiYec0/s1600/houdini-9.png" height="177" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Projection with a measure and curve length calculation for non-stretched UV's.</td></tr>
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<span style="text-align: left;">For the duplication of the curve I tried various different methods of which nodes like the ForEach, wireBlend and copy gave me the best results. However, they didn't allow me the bend the curve farther away with each instance and so they weren't what I was going to use. Then -magically- a colleague approached me after reading this blog and sent me a file in which he had made a small example scene with a curve, a VOPSOP with several point to point calculations and a blendShape node that would blend the copies between the two -in this case- '</span><i style="text-align: left;">blend to'</i><span style="text-align: left;"> nodes. This was a fantastic solution which I was able to incorporate immediately.</span></div>
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Turns out the sweep node has a 'group output' check box which I am going to use for unique UV sets for the amount of sweeped curves I'm projecting, though I still have an issue using the measure node to calculate the exact length of each individual curve. Somewhere along the way my copyGroups from the copy node are going missing and I can't refer to them anymore.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bBYaN_ZOdgk/U6Ckwg5hqaI/AAAAAAAAAl4/YybQFMREhVo/s1600/houdini-11.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bBYaN_ZOdgk/U6Ckwg5hqaI/AAAAAAAAAl4/YybQFMREhVo/s1600/houdini-11.png" height="177" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The interpolation of the duplicates from the copy node is calculated using the in- and output of the VOPSOP.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Cei74yWWkJc/U6Ck0td7_dI/AAAAAAAAAmI/650nb2xdjfg/s1600/houdini-12.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Cei74yWWkJc/U6Ck0td7_dI/AAAAAAAAAmI/650nb2xdjfg/s1600/houdini-12.png" height="177" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stretched mapping as the UV calculation is using only the length of the first curve.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--QwnQm2QEng/U6Ck0kq3cqI/AAAAAAAAAmM/vU7IHfCZWkY/s1600/houdini-13.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--QwnQm2QEng/U6Ck0kq3cqI/AAAAAAAAAmM/vU7IHfCZWkY/s1600/houdini-13.png" height="177" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Holes in the surface where the group selection only calculates the height of the vertices of the lower located mesh.</td></tr>
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Another few things I definitely want to apply before I start building the trenches are:</div>
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<li>Create non-stretched UV's for the additional 3 sweeped curves using the length of the line used for the sweep and the measured length of the curve.</li>
<li>Ability to adjust the sweep distance for each individual curve so I can determine the amount of land they smooth out.</li>
<li>Find a way to get rid of the holes that are currently created in the landscape mesh. I know these are created by a group selection a tiny bit back up the selection creation grouping but I can't seem to figure out how to make that selection smaller.</li>
<li>Create a polygonal bridge between the existing sweeps so I can create a selection for the area's between the trenches. This may become handy for the distribution of details later.</li>
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That was it again. Thanks for reading.</div>
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Pim</div>
Pim Hendrikshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00571662680055472803noreply@blogger.com0