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Still some things I don't fully get about how to make the fire look like fire, nor do I understand why it's more pixelated in the render than in the viewport. It's also in an awkward position where I put more work into this than I needed to for a proof-of-concept, but not enough for a good render.
Isn't fire one of those things that are supposedly extremely difficult to get right? Like clouds and perfect circles, and.... uh, cows according to my Dad who was a painter. I think the two upwards streams of flame, and the "tail end" after he throws it, look great.
Houdini is definitely capable of producing better flames than I've made here, I'm just not used to the tools yet. I could get the flame to look much more like I'd like it to in C4D using X-Particles, but I'm on a Houdini journey right now. As I've said before, Houdini kind of requires you to rewire your brain to use it effectively, so my failure here is not fully grasping the Houdini way to approach this.
Perfect circles are trivial to make in 3D, because it's just math. Mesh clouds are relatively easy, volumetric clouds somewhat more complex but becoming easier by the day, and we've got a number of good cow models available to us. Neither 3D nor drawing/painting is easier than the other: they just have different challenges. On the last note, horses are notoriously difficult to draw, and while three of the four members of the Drawfee crew struggle with horses, Jacob has turned his struggle into the triumph that is the Jacob Horse.
The Jacob Horse looks like it would fit in just right in the Moonin Valley tales.
Added her tattoo, face/body paint and gave her some dynamic hair. I'm also using Karma to render instead of Mantra, which puts me in kind of a Catch 22 situation where I don't know how much I want to invest in learning how to render in Karma (or Mantra, for that matter) since as soon as I buy a license for Houdini I'm going to render in Arnold. Still need to work out the settings to get rid of the pixelation on the fire.
Finding my footing in Karma, now I just need to watch every tutorial I can find to figure out how to improve my renders without exploding my render times.
Made some minor adjustments:
I've solved all the major problems, now I just need to make little changes like fixing the jacket clipping through her inner elbow and top, tweaking the animation, etc.
I was hired to rig a model, and here is a quick animation I threw together to demo it for the customer.
Aww!
Should I be conserned by the fact that all the recommended videos that follow are of natural disasters?
I can't account for your algorithm.
About to record a new DS tutorial. It's been a while. I've also been planning to make some tutorials about working with Daz assets in Houdini, so maybe those will come soon.
I've been going through and texturing an entire crowd of people in Houdini, and it made me realize just how many of the outfits I chose for my cyberpunk crowd were by @Sade, so thanks not just for the selection of clothes you make, but the ease of texturing things. Solaris, by contrast, was a nightmare, but I love the outfit so much and felt like it fit the character so well that I put in the work.
me thank you, cant wait the outcome!
Let's see how much of your handiwork you recognize:
cool!!
A lot of progress, but then I added a bunch of Vellum. Definitely need to prevent intersections between neighboring figures and any cloth, because some wild stuff is happening.
What do you do when you're having trouble with dynamic clothing? Obviously, the answer is to double the amount of dynamic clothing in the scene. You don't see a lot of it in this video, but I've made a huge amount of progress on mixed simulations, where parts are dynamic and other parts are rigid. The problem here is just that the figures aren't doing a good enough job of avoiding collisions with each other.
I've resolved most of the collisions, but a couple jackets are still sliding off. There are a few more tweaks to make, along with resolving the pathfinding, and then I'm ready to build out the rest of the scene.
Added some actual light and am very nearly done with all the dynamics, now I just need to tweak some materials, fix a couple animations and resolve the pathfinding, figure out what's going on with transparency in Karma, and finish texturing the scene.
Hooooo boy. Spent the better part of a week retexturing Urban Future 4 in Houdini, but the GLTF I exported from C4D somehow screwed up the UV mapping on some parts, so I had to familiarize myself with Houdini's UV tools. I was basically done, having fixed enough of the UV maps that nothing was glaringly wrong in the slice of the scene that I was planning to use, but I was having trouble getting geometry lights to work.
Then I thought "hell with it" and started over with a USD I exported from C4D that DIDN'T foul up the UV maps, and since I already had the textures set up and knew which textures went to which parts of geometry, I put it together much more quickly, and even found a way to get the geometry lights working. It looked fantastic in the preview render window, so I merged it into the scene with the crowd simulation and did a test render.....and the environment didn't render at all.
Back to the drawing board. What about the method that I used didn't work? How do I get all the geometry to render? I finally stumbled on a solution (probably more complex than it needed to be, but that's how I usually roll), and now I can start rendering. The only remaining issue is that I'm not very good at rendering with Karma yet. I thought maybe I could make that my full-time renderer when I bought a license for Houdini, but I may stick with Arnold after all.
And after all that nonsense, I found that trying to render the scene with the crowd simulation rendered only the environment, the exact opposite problem I was having before. I worked that out, and even though the HDRI isn't behaving the way I expect (the scene should be darker), here's a rough render. I thought I'd made sure everyone was on the same plane, but there are still clearly some adjustments to make there. There's also some haircap opacity issues, and then just a couple strange things happening because I don't know how to make the most of Karma yet. Need to figure out how I can get the lights to resolve more cleanly without also ballooning my render times. This took about 16 minutes, which I could live with if I had to, but obviously would prefer to find a better way.
Put a little more work into lighting. It's been rendering for a couple days, and will take at least a few more before it's finished, but here's the first frame as a preview.
I've potentially cracked the code on dynamic dreadlocks, now I just need to dial in the actual hair settings and work on the shader. I also need to work on grooming the hair, which is one of the things I hate most in 3D. Opacity in Karma is weird; if you see those little black spots by her lacrimals, that's the eyelashes intersecting with her face.
Got dynamic dreadlocks figured out. There's some wonkiness in her animation, I don't fully have a handle on the hair shader, and I need to dial in her skin, but it's basically on to the next steps.
150-ish hours is probably too long to spend rendering something that is basically just a test. I thought I fixed all the foot sliding, but I guess switching from "locomotive" to "in-place" animation to stop them from walking through each other destroyed that work. Solaris outputs EXR, so I guess I also need to finally learn how to color correct well.
Hooooooooooo boy. This took me way too long to crack, so at least now I know a whole bunch of ways NOT to do it. I tried all kinds of way to prevent the hood from sliding off her head, from morphing it down and pulling it forward, to adding wind behind her, to giving the hood entirely separate and much looser simulation settings. Finally, I just pinned some polygons on the hood to the top of her head. All the while, I had a full head of hair that I needed to stuff under the hood, which involved sculpting, scaling and using what is effectively a dFormer, but after all the work of stuffing the hair under the hood was done, I still had problems. Including the hair along with the figure and the already-simulated pants as colliders for the jacket, the collision went all weird, sometimes falling through the hood, sometimes falling through everything, and sometimes simply exploding. I then had the idea to cheat the hair by restricting it to the front of her scalp, but that didn't solve the collision problem. Finally I had the idea to fill the gaps in the hood to create a volume, then using a boolean operation to dynamically delete the hair points that fall outside of that volume. AFTER ALL OF THAT, I discovered that parts of the jacket were just wobbling around for no reason I could figure out, so I spent way too much time adjusting simulation settings until finally deciding that it was good enough. Hey, remember that picture I posted above, where the mesh eyebrows were causing weird opacity issues on her face? I gave her some new lashes using Houdini's hair system that involved painting attribute weights and doing some math to set normals for semi-realistic hair growth, and you can't even see them in this shot.
Long story short, here's a thing I made:
Still some wonkiness, but I don't think there's anything wrong with the underlying animation, so maybe I just didn't reset all the solvers before re-caching the simulations. Now I need to give her some proper animation so that I can fit her into the crowd scene, and then months of work for what will probably be a 3-second shot will be complete.
Fixed all the foot sliding, although there are some small tweaks I could still make to certain animations. I also tried a different color grade, and am on the way to figuring out how to keep my render times more reasonable without sacrificing quality.
I broke down the MKS Sniper Rifle, because the dwarf with the cyber eye is a sniper and the scene I'm working on involves her transporting and assembling her rifle for a mission.
Then I started molding a case for her to carry it. I wasn't originally planning to show the case in the shot, but after all this work, I have to at least show it briefly. I'm nearly done.
Getting there. The foam in the top lid was modeled with a very quick script, which is a fun thing I know how to do now.
I'm really eating these words. I can't believe how much trouble I'm having with the foam that I molded. Somehow I just can't get the normals to properly compute, so I can't get it to take textures that look like anything. I've even tried a couple different methods to accomplish the same thing, and nothing has worked better than the trick of manipulating points with a script, which is merely acceptable rather than a good solution. I also probably invested a little too much into making sure the case had properly working hinges. Now to make latches, and then figure out some sort of backpack-style straps or other method for the character to wear this on her back.
Generally, although I'm learning how to deal with them, I find Karma/MaterialX's procedural texturing tools very inadequate.