Revisiting a concept from a few years back for todays doodle, “Stay Lost”.
Houdini Doodle: Water and wax part two
Just riffing on this concept. It’s actually pretty easy to load in a new model at the start of this chain and have it work.
Portugal. The Man's John Gourley Gretsch Guitar
Just posted a new piece I did on a lovely Gretsch guitar. The request was, “Alaska / Northern Lights” and this is what I came up with. Used Houdini and Redshift for the cloudscape. Fun stuff!
Doodles!
Just some rando Houdini doodles messing with different systems. Nothing thought out or anything, just trying to mess around more with it.
Some R&D that died
Was working up some stuff with the ripple solver that missed the mark, but it’s kinda interesting. The tricky bit with water and glass is that it is defined by it’s reflections. Anyways, onward…
New Portfolio Posted: Nike Kobe VIII Protro
Just posted some new work we did for Nike, Kobe VIII launch. Shot by Ryan Unruh. We did all the retouching, set builds and renders and then compositing it all together with CG shadows as well. Fun stuff.
Make Your Renders Unnecessarily Complicated
This is some funny stuff if you know anything about CG or render engines.
I did a lens in Octane once following a tut and it was an interesting experiment. This person goes way next level though.
The results are pretty interesting as well.
Houdini Doodle- 6-12-23
Might try a new take on doing Houdini Doodles so I can get some daily practice in. The thought is to go to my “Clean Sets” moodboard on Behance and just try to recreate something from there. Today’s is based off Jania Brand Identity. Tea pot artwork provided by Jason Leisge. Hopefully, I stop overthinking and just bang something out in 20 minutes as practice.
Update time
Sometimes the little updates make it all better ;)
Jiri Miratsky Houdini files on Gumroad
Great collection of Houdini files here to pick apart and play with. Have at it y’all.
Not MIA, just a busy start to the year
Been abnormally busy so any free time I have has been spent away from screens and in meatspace doing things with my actual hands, lol! Here are some Houdini tests I did a month or so ago though. Hoping to carve out more time for blogging and getting new portfolio pieces up before the end of the month? Maybe?
Houdini Doodle
I saw this piece in Portland Monthly shot by Mike Novak and wanted to take a swing at something similar in Houdini. First image is the inspiration, second is my interpretation.
New Work in the Wild!
Some renders we did went live on the Specialized site not too long ago. The lighting on these was pretty complicated and really happy with the results. I’ll post a screenshot of the set when I get some free time to dive back into it.
Unreal 5 still life doodle
Been doodling in Unreal 5 a bit and here is a quick little thing. I really need to get a better understanding of the cameras, post processing and sequencer….
Houdini - Redshift - Spiderweb - Project walkthrough
This is good to have handy in case anyone needs some creepy-pasta added to their renders. Cool solution as well.
Recreating The Lord Of The Rings Doors of Durin in Unreal Engine 5
As you probably know, I have been learning more in Unreal 5 and find it pretty amazing. This article goes into to some interesting lighting techniques I wanna make a note of.
“For this project, I used Lumen for GI, screen space reflections (Lumen reflections didn’t support translucent materials in early access 2), and Virtual Shadow Maps to be able to get nice soft shadows in the Nanite meshes and also increase the shadow resolution overall. For the post process, I kept the exposure locked at 1 for minimum/maximum brightness. I also used a LUT with a subtle color correction that I did in Photoshop.
I added a lighting function in the directional light to create pockets of lights and shadow that gave a more interesting look to the scene: as if the clouds were moving and creating those light openings. To achieve this, I used a material with panning noise for the light function. Since this was a small scene with not so many elements, I wanted to introduce as much dynamism as possible to give some life to it, so the moving clouds, the wind in the trees, the moving particles used for the fog, etc., really helped the scene come together. “
New Work in the Wild
Some product renders I did for Specialized went live at some point, check them out. Pretty happy with the lighting and tone. Models were provided, had nothing to do with that. I had dabbled in photogrammetry but never really got to this level with it. They were quite nice I will add. Great art direction from the folks at Hovercraft here in PDX.
Unreal 5 Test Render
Been starting to work in Unreal 5 since it’s release and have been finding it pretty interesting. The idea of being able to animate easily in it has a lot of appeal to me for loops and music videos. With this still life I was just kinda blindly messing with the camera and post settings to see what kind of realism I could get out of it. Pretty happy with this result.
Outgrowth Podcast Soundtrack Artwork
Just finished the cover art for the soundtrack to the podcast Outgrowth. It’s a horror story set here in the PNW. You can check out the soundtrack by We Are Parasols on Bandcamp now.
Houdini Macro Fluid Sims Using Vellum Fluids.
Was doing a bunch of R&D into close up fluid sims and discovered some pretty cool stuff. I Started with FLIP sims but could not get the detail I wanted, so I started trying out Vellum Fluids. Started getting some interesting results that let me punch in pretty close and they hold up. I went down to 0.007 on the particle size but with some Vellum Post Process it cleans up pretty well.
