Day 30

Adding more complexity to the rocks, understanding the network and use of new SOPs.
Some of the methods i used were ideas and techniques shared on forum, credits to jwoelper, jeff, macha and dennis (odforce). Sorry if i missed anyone.

Wanted to control where some of the bumps/humps appear, rather than using only procedural modeling and noise... Felt there was a need to really art-direct some of the rocks to get better looks, hence I used a "GroupPaint SOP" to paint the areas and "Peak SOP" to pull them out.


















Here i am layering 2 types of procedural noise namely anti-aliased and anti-aliased flow noise via VOPSOP. Will test layering more later. They were not given extreme values, merely wanted to add some subtle randomness.









Was slowly getting more familiarized with the stamp() function, feel that i am gradually able to make variables and copy stuff around on my own, I am still mainly using rand() in the variables. Can't say i've understood and could control copied objects fully, there are times where they overlap each other but i watched Peter Quint avoid overlapping using an "Edit SOP"... I tried, couldn't control the copies still and not so sure what was happening. (Writing it down)

Viewport & Network View, merged both sides








It seem promising until i rendered. The copies kind of punched blackholes (see image below) all over the Base Rock, at first i thought it could be caused by UVs or colourmap. They share the same shader and i had "UVUnwrap SOP" after "Copy SOP", yet to figure out what happened.

Blackholes









Calling it on the rocks, working on lighting now.

Jumped back into After Effects and create 2 more variations of stylized mood (v003 & v004).
I wanted see how it looks with a very distinctive pattern (Picked lighting pattern) animated, this was done to v003 and the colours used for the background animation was slightly changed, pick out colours used for the final scene in Disney's Enchanted.

Below is v003 and reference.













Seeing the lighting flashes gave me the idea of simulating these flashes using the animation sequence i am creating in After Effects, thereby v004 was born.

v004


They went from being .EXR to .RAT again, brought them into Houdini and rendered.
Rerendered v001 and v002 (fixed displacement) & together with v003 & v004 now.

_v001


_v002


_v003


_v004


Imported in the scale reference and placed rocks to have a sense of the scale. Hopefully we'll be able to see the entire terrain with all the assets inside, that way we can start placing more lights and tweak till we get the desired mood & do a fly-through of the place.

The main ground geometry is still pretty heavy, over here i had deleted a huge portion via "Delete SOP" for smoother navigation in viewport and quicker renders.












Forum threads

Displacement Bound Problem:
I forgotten to document this back when i started looking into textures and PBR.













This was done using a "surfaceModel VOP" parms to get the colour and specular & combined with "dent_fractal" displacement shader. Lots of artifacts were appearing which i found out was caused by displacement shader, it's resolved now thanks to the assistance rendered in forum & more details can be found below.

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=21974

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/12998-dent-fractal-render-artifacts-mpr-pbr/


Question: icp and iconvert
Asking about icp and iconvert for multiple images or entire folder, got answers and .OTL which does the conversion. You can click below if you like to download the .OTL provided by alejandro.

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=21990&highlight=



Thoughts:

Frankly, I had a rough start with a sudden change of 3D package/environment. Being tasked with final year project where a client is involved was pretty pressurizing to me plus I had doubts when doing work in Houdini, often asking myself "Is this the right way, Why isn't it working and What's missing?". Got to admit I was very frustrated, whoever is going through the same time... Stay patient and optimistic! Thinking back, Maya gave me an equally hard time 5 years ago.

Had read seek for answers in the webs, reading help documentations and testing stuff one at a time. Feel more sure of myself and seldom feel lost while doing work after grinding through lots of fundamental/introductory materials from Peter Quint together with forum replies. Still a long way to go but much much better than day 1 filled with uncertainties!

30 days had passed excluding weekends, the last time I used Maya was for rendering my personal project which was 2 weeks ago.