Landscape Concept Study

I have been playing with this landscape piece in Houdini for a while now and finally got it to an interesting place. It’s my first landscape in Houdini and using Quixel Bridge has been amazing. It is integrated with Houdini in such a fluid way. They made it one click to import everything ready to go in Houdini and Redshift. I still struggle with so many little things in Houdini and take classes CONSTANTLY, so to just be able to click on a plant and have it import with scatter nodes and materials all set up is a crazy time saver.

Another little mental leap for me was being able to art direct the smoke how I wanted without bashing my head against the monitor for a day.

Did some post work in Photoshop of course. ;)

Recent progress

I have continued with more RedShift in C4d and have really been enjoying it. Went back to Houdini to mess around and ran into a bug where I can’t get the lights to look at nulls. I can load the null as a target and it will track it for the first movement and then it clears the field and drops the link.

No Idea.

Then I tried to load a fbx file and what a freaking nightmare it is. Tried the first free solution below and it worked but a simple pair of shoes that in C4d is 4 pieces of geometry became over 150. So yeah, really frustrating. That said, being back in C4d has been really nice and easy. It’s nice not to have to break my brain to build out simple sets. So many possibilities with Houdini but it’s really frustrating to do simple ass shit.

Redshift is starting to really grow on me though. Everything works like I think it should. No abstractions or messed up ways of getting something done. Wire it up and it works. Octane is really, really easy but it does some things really quirky and non-standard. Plus, light linking is a joy in Redshift.

I will say gamma correcting scaler values is pretty abstract and should not be needed. That should be added on the programming level at the start of those channels. It is also not well documented as being needed for true representations of your textures.

Anyways, here are some of the things I have been doing along with the classes. Nothing special really but it’s nice to have a log of what I was building out. Some of these are just saved from the RenderView so I can find them later. A few are a bit more thought out ;)

One of the nice things to make is a default three point lighting set with Nulls as targets for the lights and camera. Set your GI and change the default render settings and bango, saves 5-10 minutes at the start of everything. Highly recommend building out one of those.

Also, Ramps are really, really, really important. Like use them on all the things.

News and Updates!

The fun stuff first! Jeremy Wilkins of the band We Are Parasols did a lovely blog post on all the art work I have made for their band over the years. Check out the write up here, “ARTWORK BY DANIEL KOPTON (DANKLIFE) -OR- SPHERES, SKULLS, & LIGHT.”

I finally got a bit of time to start updating the portfolio as well and added a project we did for Sierra Nevada that needed landscapes and log cabins rebuilt. Pretty fun stuff.

Smoke Study: Houdini and Redshift

Been super busy with the work-a-day world but I was able to get a smoke sim built in Houdini over the past few days. Think that smoke sim is where I will be spending my time when I have the energy. Pretty happy with the shape and texture of this one. Learning how to art direct it is pretty tricky. Hoping to get into animations at some point but for now I’ll stick with still I think.

Release

Took some time to work on a animation of the Raven skull. This is the first time I have animated anything besides a simulation in Houdini and key framing is much easier than in C4d for me. Need to practice camera moves and learn more about time ramping. Would like this to be way more slow motion but not sure how to go about that yet.

Houdini PopNets and passing attributes

Trying to work more in Houdini but it is such a rabbit hole. It’s difficult for me to just make something quick in there without wanting to add more and more stuff into the scene. I have like three things I am trying to finish up between work, music and the difficulty of it I am not getting to them. I almost wanna go back to “dailies” and just set a timer for 30 minutes. Wherever I am at 30 minutes, hit render and just be done so I did something at least. Anyways, here are somethings I managed to get out today after playing with pop networks a bit more. Really fun once you get it working.

Animated Last Post

Wanted to play with animating the last project I posted. It’s my first go at actually getting into a keyframed animation in Houdini. Everything else I have done has just been a sim. Actually getting into the POP network and keyframing it to behave how I was wanted was nice. Overall, Keyframing in Houdini seems pretty easy. No need for the Dope Sheet like in C4d to move keyframes.

Attributes / POPs from Images

Little daily render based off of a Nine Between tutorial, “Houdini Tutorial - Nodes Part 1: Attribute Nodes”. Rendered in RedShift. Might try to run a animation of it later. I can not recommend delving in Attributes and VEX sooner than later. This set up is shockingly simple.

Red Shift Layered Materials in Houdini

Just wanted to work on a quick daily messing around with layered materials in RedShift Houdini.

Did a bit of scatter of smaller spheres as well which I need to look into how to UV. Not too sure on how to use Particles in Redshift yet.