Day 31

Made another version of rock before moving on to combining all of them into a digital asset or network which could be copied all over the base terrain.

This one had a flat base unlike rest I made in the past. "Peak SOP" was again used to achieve the deep cuts.

The lighting here looked pretty neat, but i don't understand how it had that orange look, my guess was diffuse bounce the "ground colour" (which was brown) from Sky Light was illuminating it.



Doing a test with simple primitives before i start rearranging stuff to setup the copystamping of rocks.

Didn't want the network to get messy and confusing when i start connecting and disconnecting nodes. Plus i wasn't even sure i can type in stamp function with no error.

Mr Ron said a switch would be one thing i'll be using, i only added 3 variables here... "type", "scale" and "rotate". Used fit to set the range i want the values to be. I actually don't get why we're giving nodes & until recently, haha.

The test turned out good, geometries' scale and rotation were all being randomized and the 5 types of primitive being plugged in were all being copied randomly.

I wondering if i should have variables to control the frequency or amplitude of noise though, there's so many.. a long list of variables.



Had Mr Ron explain a forum reply which i couldn't understand. Was related to the "Rest Position SOP" & how a "Point SOP" was used to test it.

See red sticky note in the image for details.







Overlapping that occurs when copying
In this scene, Peter Quint used an "Edit SOP" to fix the problem. Had Mr Ron explain as i wasn't sure how one node fixed multiple overlapping. It may not be procedural but it got rid of the problem, the "Edit SOP" allows you to select one point and transform it & overwrites the value when u select a second point and perform another transformation.


Multiple "Edit SOP" could help save all the transform information if required.

He said we could calculate the distance between 2 points and made sure they were x-distance away from each other at all times to avoid overlaps, the down side was we won't be able to control which direction they move when trying to stay apart from one another.

Before & after image























Back in day 23, i was trying out light-instancing. The render was incredibly slow which shouldn't be the case, the mystery was solved by Mr Ron.

It had to do with the amount of points birthing from the scene, the "Sphere" which was fed into "copy SOP" was set to "Poly Mesh" (a lot of points) instead of "Primitive" (1 point) making the total number of point hit >600 as the animation played. In addition, i was using ray-trace shadow... that explains everything.


It takes 55 seconds after using Primitive Sphere, when i was using Poly Mesh Sphere... the render did not even take off.


POP/Metaballs (Hydra Breath)
Mr Ron later shared how he would attempt to achieve the hydra's breath/spray using POP. Grouping the outer particles in the main stream and using metaballs to send only them into a spiral motion. It really interest me as I want to become better at using POPs creatively and technically, will fetch the file from Tanner later. The particles' motion after his demonstration was great, just need to spend more time tweaking.



Thoughts:
Today wasn't a very productive day as time was spent on filling up and printing forms for the industrial attachment program. After lunch was more like Q&A with Mr Ron > understanding and documenting the problems/solutions in my blog.