Week 08 Day 54, 3rd August '11 (Wed)

This morning Ziggy was saying he wants to give us a lesson on sprite because Bryan was using sprite for his missile trails & also asking whether we had any experience with rendering our work in passes and compositing skills.

We had some in shake but he said a Nuke lesson will be arrange for us as it is now the industrial standard, everybody is using Nuke for post-production - a new intern, Dan will be guiding us next week while they are away for SIGGRAPH.

Oh yeah, spoke to Dan & everybody is so polite here and so is he - he was actually schooling with Evans and Corrine in the past and now he's here in SESI too. He was one of the guys who did that Houdini project (Franz) with Corrine which had lots of views on vimeo!


Houdini Project - Franz (Do watch it!)
http://vimeo.com/8169442
I think it was Mr TK who showed us this video back in school.



Smoke Sprite Example
Found this smoke sprite example hip file, looked what was done & how others are able to make the sprites look better.

Here we have a low resolution smoke simulation. With the density data from that, scatter it into a point cloud and we advect particles onto the point cloud using "Advect by Volume POP" inside of POP_Network.

That way we will have the sprite particles have very smooth and fluid-like animation just like how smoke volume would behave in simulation.
 













This was a render to see if the texture offset settings in "Sprite POP". It actually grabs/offsets the noise pattern from the material and assign to each sprite particle to make them less repetitive.

I maybe doing it wrong or missing something since they look identical, haha.

Sprite_smoke_texoffset_comparison
Vimeo - http://vimeo.com/27676690

WIP: Molten Shader
Back to this troublesome shader, time to clock in some time here.
It was sugguested that i paint a mask to control the cool and hot patches on the molten metal surface instead of trying to get the look you want procedurally.

Got this test mask to see how exactly the black & white affects the color mix and pattern in the procedural shader. I gotten Charles to explain to me a bit about importing an image mask into SHOP, i am using "Texture VOP" to file in the image mask but he said we require the S and T coordinates for it to project it correctly.

Some of the stray renders as i continued to develop the look.

With a base pattern save out from the molten shader i was working on, i'm painting over with reference images next to it.

Base pattern from SHOP.


















Paint over, lessen the crack lines.

Roughly defining where the cool (white) and hot (black) areas are, also have the text as guidelines.

Quick render to see how well the molten shader fair from sh030_camera point of view, this shader is still the procedural version not the one which i'm painting a mask for yet. 

sh030_ms_ss_comparison

Vimeo - http://vimeo.com/27677916

 

Quick render of sh030 to see how the displaced text look, using built-in stone material as molten shader wasn't ready.

sh030_sesi_la_ss_test

Amazon order arrived!
They are a few behind-the-scene DVD of Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft! :D

Sites i visited:

Nuke - Compositing Resources (Good info)
http://www.deepimg.com/in-depth/

Particle Motion Blur Related (Good info, hip files provided)
http://ihoudini.blogspot.com/2009/08/particle-motion-blur-again-and-some.html



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