Week 05 Day 33, 13th July '11 (Wed)

Funky Construction Plane and Origin
As you can see, the construction plane had strayed away from the origin gizmo (red color XYZ icon in the viewport).

Was kind of lost on what to do, worried if i continued working on my scene with this issue unsolved might cause problems in the future. Went to Zack and hope he knew what was going on.

Solution:
After exploring the preferences and display options, there wasn't any settings which could fix it. It wasn't Houdini that was bugged as he tried launching a new session, the plane and origin gizmo were placed correctly. Then I thought we could just copy/paste the all the nodes from the buggy session to a brand new one which worked! Now the both of us know... Hahaa, thanks Zack.



Setting your project's frame range & FPS
I thought had it at 25FPS (PAL) but apparently i didn't set it as default so when exit Houdini, my hip file reverts back to 24FPS. Don't make my mistake!

Please read if you don't know PAL,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL

Molten Surface Progress
Was back to working the procedural noise in VOPSOP (CellNoise and Crackle).
Appears there's a difference adding before "Displace along normal" and after, doing it after scales up the model slightly. Don't know why but i'll try to find out.

Assistance from Charles on Molten Shader
Charles saw me working on my shot and i was really surprised he came over and lent me a hand. It was very kind of Charles to spend close 2 hours sharing his approach of building a lava/molten shader. This is the second time he sat down with me working on a shader. He said he had previously done similar shader in V-Ray (A renderer commonly used on 3Dsmax & Maya)

V-Ray link:
http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/vray.html

I showed him my reference image, he starting building it and explaining why each piece of network is doing - at the end, he had an incredible network will fulfilled 70% of what i wanted! Was able to learn a lot quickly listening to him explain and he answered any questions along the way, thanks!

Ref image (WOW - Cataclysm Cinematics)

Molten shader in VOPs (Both Surface and Displacement Shading)

Now all that's left is to understand the network then improve & tweak it further and i'll start by documenting it with sticky notes. Will post up the details of the shader when I have free time.



RBD Explained Classroom, conducted by Ziggy

"may be" coming soon...



CG Articles and Sites visited:

Transformers WIP Thread - by ConceptStingray & Sova
One of my favourite thread ever, these guys are working on a fan-made Transformers movie and the robots they are producing are INCREDIBLE!
Read it or regret it!
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=43&t=628313&page=18&pp=15

Toy Story 3 - Point Based Rendering
This was an older articles which i read last year, apparently it's so good - cgsociety decided to put it up on the homepage again!
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5615


Portal 2 - Value Software Game Production Focus
Value's upcoming game, put your mind to the test.
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=6359



end.