Day 38

Review with our client, will have to make adjustment to the lightning and carry on the rock shaders. As usual, Mr Doulgas sat down sharing his R&D work and gave us a look into 3D-coat and ptex. I've surfed the 3D-coat site in the past and think it was Rap whom told me about it, and read up little bit on ptex here and there. I had some past experience with ZBrush previously but i don't think it support ptex yet. There were no way you could alter the exported colour map, specular map, etc in application like Photoshop because it doesn't make sense to artist when opened there. And when those data are brought back into Houdini, they are converted to UV instead of ptex... if I understood it correctly.

Mr Douglas was demonstrating the use of 3D-coat and both Mr Ron & him shared about ptex, basically it's painting textures on to 3D models via a 3D viewport without the need of UV unwrapping which is time consuming as you need to make sure you lay them out neatly and make sure they aren't stretched. Bryan was asking about an iguana video, checked it out it. Pretty incredible.

http://www.3d-coat.com/

Instance (Delayed Load Shader)

Move on to reading on instancing. It is recommended to save different versions of the geometry to disk to speed things up during rendering. I was reading the geo file back in and had them all in a subnet and making the subnet as the instance's reference. Together with the use of Delayed Load Shader, i was able to instance 3 basic shapes like teapot, box and sphere for a test.

The problem was all 3 of them were being instanced onto the same point stacking over one another. Next thing to do is fix this so they are instanced randomly once on each points.. And may be try out Mantra Archive to save out the materials as well so they would have different types of materials on them.

I won't be able to use the copystamp function now, how will i be able to randomize their rotation, size, etc now?

Useful information on Mantra Surface

People were talking about how displacement is being calculated even though no map or noise is being enabled, that was the reason why rendering is slow when using it. The solution would be to install this, Edit Parm > filter "displace" > install "Disable displace shader rendering".