Yikes, be safe peoples....

Daily Doodle on some current news here. CoronaVirus is no joke it seems.

1,000 confirmed cases of infection.
8,420 people are reported to be under observation.
Lockdown acrossthe province of Hubei, 35 million people.
Buses in cities of Chibi, Xiantao, Zhijiang, Qianjiang, Xianning, Huangshi and Enshi have suspended services.
Ezhou city has shut its train stations.
70,000 of the country's cinemas will remain closed this weekend.
Shanghai's Disneyland also announced that it would not open its gates.

Pretty seriously scary stuff.

Technically speaking, this piece was pretty interesting to me because I incorporated Volumes for the cloths and Vellum for the cloth. Using the FBX loader from Calvin Atorr to load the mask as well.

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. ;)

Some Houdini OBJ stuff

Had a chance to start that RedShift Lesson from LFO Design last night and I am super happy with that purchase already. Lots of good general tidbits in there. In the meantime, the MoGraph Slack has been posting a bunch of great ways to bring in OBJs into Houdini I can’t wait to test out. Here is a free method for simpler models:

And here is a method that will do more complex models and match all the materials but it’s a shelf tool you have to buy. But at $50 it’s kinda a no brainer. OD Shelf Tools.

Can’t wait to dig into both of these at some point. But for now it’s all about RedShift, Redshift and a touch of Redshift…. maybe?

Tut example

Was just working my way through a tutorial by Arvid Schneider and I got it kinda working in RedShift so I just wanted to through the results up here. Want to redo it all with a different object and styling but I was happy with this result. I need to figure out how to solve the Highlight flickering in Redshift I keep getting. Was a problem in the raven skull smoke animation as well. Really distracting…..

Smoke interacting with objects

Yesterday I wanted to get some smoke to roll down a sweep, interact with a object and then have some wind come in to clear the set. This is where I ended up and I’d chalk it up as a success. I did not get into lighting or textures too much because I wanted to focus on the sim mostly. There is also some annoying flicker in the textures I need to look into fixing. Then I brought it into Resolve 16 and dove into some of the nodes for the first time. The Fusion part of Resolve I think I can sink my teeth into. Interesting stuff in there.

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.

WAP logo study

Was tinkering around with vellum and the detangle node in Houdini yesterday and came up with this little logo study for the band, “We are Parasols”. Liking Redshift in Houdini quite a bit as well. Volumetrics are pretty easy to do. Though I say that after failing terribly at a fire sim this weekend……