Modeling & texturing rocks.
Getting started with textures. There were 2 options i wanted to try, painting a colour map (UV) and making procedural shaders (no UV). I was more comfortable with the first options after spending a huge amount of time doing it during Advanced Lighting Module.
Step one was to do research and collecting some reference images, i don't the thread that said to search for the keyword "erosion" (If i find it again, will make sure i credit that person). So wikipedia was my first stop, reading about how some of the cliff and rock formations are formed.
Wiki - Erosions, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erosion
There are various types of erosion and it can be caused by different natural elements.
Erosion references:
More informations i found on forum which felt useful and inspiring,
Rock Hard by Macha
Rock WIP by zasid
I was examining hip files provided by Macha where he modeled & shaded a glacier.
Some renders while i was messing with them.
In his file, he had SSS enabled. Tested the render time while i was at it, it was huge.
I studied the method he used to model the glacier. Started making some rocks with the knowledge i got from making the stone arc, and applied texture maps which was downloaded from CGTextures.com.
UV Unwrap SOP did not produce any stretched texture which happened in UV Project SOP but there are seams as they were not stitched back because it was an initial test.
These could work if they were used in the background or midground where inaccurate UV can still fool the viewers.
For the other alternative, i might need variations of procedural shaders. Using dot-product or group by normals to assign them, this way any changes made to procedural models will not require rework for their UVs. I was thinking we could use this for large portion of the scene and use colour maps for foreground rocks for art-direction. We'll see...
Here are the sequences (or turntable) i rendered to see the look when animated.
Strange stuff happened to the displacement, it totally looked like the bump texture problem i faced back in Maya during studio project. Displacement noise appears to be either static or animated over time. The lighting method is promising to me though, wasn't able to test render more colour palette until i fixed this displacing issue.
Troubleshooting the problem, searched the forums for older posts hoping to get an instant solution rather than opening new topic. There were tons related to displacement but none helped me, i turned to Mr Michael for his perception on it & was provided some points to look at.
- Appending "Rest Position SOP" at the bottom of my geometry's network.
- Remove camera keyframes, animate the rock with static camera.
- Assigning a new default Mantra Surface Shader.
- Toggle to displacement space to "Object Space" (Top: World Space, Bottom: Object Space)
Unfortunately, none was able to get it to work correctly. Guess a new forum topic was imminent...
Had to get this solved by tomorrow, which meant having a post sitting in forums by tonight would be ideal, good thing i had some videos to help people visualize what i am facing.
Here's the link,
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=21998
Stylized lighting R&D
I tried google for "stylized lighting", but there were little useful result. (Maybe i was searching the wrong words) There were people sharing about it on CGTalk, will paste the url soon.
Recalled Hosuk's bird animation where he had a breakdown of how he coloured his particles using an animation sequence imported/made in COPs which could work for my case.
Made one simple one in After Effects (used exaggerated colours) and quickly fed it to Environment Light in Houdini.
The result was actually above, video #01.
Stylized_Lighting_v001 (AE)
Had colours which were more gloomy and ominous for night condition.
Stylized_Lighting_v002 (AE)
Didn't see a point in rendering an entire sequence due to the displacement, i did render of alternate frames. Felt the lighting looks pretty eerie and dramatic, the light contribution came from animation above.
Stylized_Lighting_v002
End of the day, i brought the shaded rocks and stylized envLight together into an updated terrain i got from Bryan.
The image sequence i rendered via AE were either .EXR or .PNG and they were converted to .RAT using mPlay. Did use icp and iconvert a couple of times when i needed to convert a
few image files, started a topic on it as i had doubts regarding the conversion process.
Wondered if i was able to do such a thing to an entire folder or > 100 image files without the use of Shell/Python. Somebody was kind to upload his HDA does it one file at a time, pity it couldn't do mass conversion.
Check it out, http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=21990
Thoughts: Today was productive.
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