Day 33

Mr Ron showed me an example on how to get the surface normal in Y, here the "Colormix VOP" was used. The surface normal was converted from VectorToFloat with only the component 2 fed into "Colormix VOP"'s bias input. There were other mixing VOPs like "Mix VOP" (no pri/sec colours) and "Blendregion VOP" (3 region inputs), i was playing with blendregion as it offered parms to controls the threshold and blur amount between the 3 regions.

Yet to achieve the rocky texture and pattern.

Ref image:

I felt i don't have enough understanding of shading in Houdini, went to forum hoping to find some useful materials. Another person was making procedural shaders for stones and i started examining his hip file, credits to jwoelper on odforce.net.

He is using couple of built-in nodes like "Stone", "Stonewall", "Skin" and "Mold" all mixed together to produce his rock shader. I played around with the values and colours to visualize where they are on the model. Modifying the inputs of the nodes to get different results.

Dived into "Stonewall VOP" and it was made up of a huge network base off "Stone VOP", following jwoelper's approach of using these pre-made nodes is what I should do.

Next is to try build my own version.

I was also introduced to some new VOPs besides the ones mentioned above, like "Shading Layer" where i could extract the 's' & 't' to feed them into "Stonewall VOP".

A few of them i've used via VOPSOP like "Rest Position", "Mix" and "Displace along Normal".

Did not understand why "Displace along Normal" is used here, are we trying to displace the mold? I disconnected it from the network and tried rendering, the rock turned completely white.

Final Interview (IAP)

Today is the final interview with Mr John, Mr Daniel & Mr Albert. They spoke to everyone as a group and told us to be cautious of the surrounding and also our behavior during our stint as we represent not only ourselves but the institution too. We were also told to learn about facts of Singapore and Nanyang Polytechnic, don't want anybody to feel like a fool i guess...

End of the day, setup a render of the scene with rocks copied all around with stylized_lighting_v003.