Day 36

The 3rd render was a slightly differently network from the 1st & 2nd. The mold operator was taken away & 2 stonewall operators mixed together. Personally like the 2nd and 3rd one better, one had the canyon-look and the other forest rock.

Still don't really get how i can control where i want shading to happen. Like having a dark/dirty shading along seams or cracks?

The whole shader still look like a randomized pattern to me by layering operators...







AttributeCreate & VOPSOP (Diffuse intensity)
Had trouble understanding a file where a person created an attribute (height) with $BBY and imported height attribute into a VOPSOP. Thought it does nothing as i didn't see any change in the viewport after bypassing them. Something was happening but it was happening in the shader level & not the SOP level.

The whole setup was to have a ramp control the diffuse_intensity of the shader in the Y-direction. Mr Ron spent time troubleshooting it by creating another attribute to see whether it works when scaling the mold. Here's a picture, hotspots = high diffuse (near 1.0) and darkspots = low diffuse (near 0).















Output Variable & Parms Problem
One more thing that puzzled me was why i couldn't switch to Displacement inside of "Output Variables & Parms". It was all because the network was built inside of a "Surface Material Shader" instead of "Material Shader Builder" as explained by Mr Ron. Totally makes sense, will have to bring my network over to material shader.



















Felt i was at a roadblock, i wasn't sure what more could add on or improve on the rock shader.
Asked Mr Ron if he could help me out & he demonstrated what he would do. He wasn't using any texture operators, mainly patterns/noises (turbnoise, aanoise, splatter, etc). Nodes like Filterstep and Filterwidth were used, don't know what they do yet... recall seeing these back in Miss Tan's shading module...

In the process, Mr Ron shared about Houdini's colour picker, always want to pick colours from image files like what i do in photoshop but imagined Houdini being able to do it. Just MMB on the colour parm and drag mouse over to the image to pick it's colours.
























Rework on lighting
Made changes to the lighting bolt pattern in _v004 and rendered the same set of rocks.
They definitely look much better than _v004_01 which looked as though the white flash was happening in the entire frame. _v004_02 was only the lighting bolt and it was too subtle, in _v004_03 i masked out the pattern of _v004_01 and used it as a sort of glow to make the flashes brighter and less uniform as it had patterns on it.

SL_v004_02


SL_v004_03




Intro to Houdini Takes
Going through an introduction of takes in Houdini, pretty sure it will come in handy sooner or later.