VFX Blog

In case you're wondering, I explained in my previous post my struggle with textures, and the alembic exports from Houdini. So setting the issues with the UVs aside, I added some effects to this comp alongside some roto and motion blur. 

When exporting the animation from Houdini, what I would do is highlight the whole mesh, and export it as an alembic. After importing to Maya, I would add a texture to it, and realize that the UVs are messed up. So i decided to give it another try, but this time, I would fix the UVs before doing the entire process again.  So take 2, I fix the UVs, and the model looks nice with the texture. So I export the model as an OBJ (Houdini didn't seem to read ABC nor FBX files). Now however, I exported it another way, since the first one didn't work. What I did was export my rock animation as a .bgeo file. I then re-exported the .bgeo into a .abc (alembic). Importing it back to Maya however, didn't give me the result I wanted and stayed the same. The UVs are still messed up.  Since I'm only doing 1 rock animation, and attempt to include this in my senior show, I got no choice but to manually fix the UVs face by face. Yes, it's going to take a long long while, but I got ...

Update on the crash tests

Some crash tests

Started a new Houdini tutorial titled "Applied Houdini | Introduction to Rigid Body Destruction" by Steven Knipping. This image is a result of the beginning of the tutorial. 

Particles added to the outer ring in Houdini

Updated outer ring done in Houdini

Outer Ring done in Houdini

Base grid done in Houdini

Second part to doing VEX in Houdini

Work done in Houdini

Made in Houdini

Chair modeled in Houdini

Note: I had to convert my EXR renders in Maya to a PNG via Photoshop in order to be able to upload here on Blogger I'm going to overlay this image on top of a background plate to see how it looks like Now knowing how it looks like, having rendered out my EXR file, I also rendered a Zdepth pass as seen below Using a grade node, I inverted the white and blackpoints so it looks like this I merge that over to my scene (as seen above) and get this as a result You may not be able to tell the slight difference but it's there. Now applying a Zdefocus node, gives us this

Note: I had to convert my EXR renders in Maya to a PNG via Photoshop in order to be able to upload here on Blogger So having rendered out my EXR file, I also rendered a variety of passes such as Pworld and WorldNormals as seen below Having this information, I was able to generate a point cloud in Nuke Once it was put into a scene with spotlights in a Relight node, alongside a camera and a basic material, it looked like this Merging that with the original render in screen mode, creates this result Now, adding a background plate to it alongside a bit of rotoing

Spiral staircase modeled in Houdini

Table modeled in Houdini

Tracked in SynthEyes

Reference My work in Nuke My nodes