primary research!!!!!!!!!

ok so today was an early start. I went to a WIP Session at Framestore, in which they went over some of the latest films they have worked on such as harry potter, jonny english 2, captin america and.....the smurfs!

now ive never been a fan of the idea of a 3d/live action  smurf movie. I have seen it to be a kitch, rehash of an idea, but I must confess, the visuals sure look nice!

Also it was watching this wip that I saw a spell! The spell itself was of two pieces, the mussle flash effect at the point of emmision, and the jet/trail. the two were so different from each other, that this has prompted me to think differently about my approach.

in ANALYSIS of my previous attempt (the animated scene embeding a fluid spell within) has led me to the conclusion that I'm doing it soo wrong.

Even the analysis i previously did of my concept work should have given me this idea. Let me explain the rest visualy.

so, incase I havnt been clear enough in my drawings, I will be looking at using different fluid containers for different parts of the spells. This may have been obvious to someone else, but I'm glad the idea has finally made its way around to me!

a maya test in-scene!

ok so this is 4 hours work compared to the houdini 12 hour fail. This is not really what I was going for, so much more development needed with this, but its a start in my further learning and understanding!

Back to the loverly familiar world of Maya Fluids

Ok, so basically, I have analysed how I am going to forefill the role of Effects TD for our film, and I have come to an unfortunate conclusion. It seems that learning houdini in just a few weeks is an unrealistic task, and i think I would do better returning to maya and spending the rest of this term developing the skills I possess in Maya's fluid systems.

That is not to say that I wont be using Houdini anymore. I have learned a VAST ammount about the rigid body networks available in the software, aswell as how adaptable the particle effects are. I will also probably use Houdini for any water effects that appear in our film, as it seems houdini is more or less sut up for this kind of thing from the word go. Its just voxel fluids are soooooooooooooooo in depth that I just cant get my head around how houdini has set them up, which attributes to effect, and which nodes and forces I can use to effect them in the same exact ways That i already know in maya. So this is for now on houdini, I will have a maya test up on here soon! :)

believe it or not, this is 12 hours of work

Ok so I spent practically the whole day on this, and its soo not what I wanted. I have done tons of tutorials in housini, from the side effects website, but there is soo much to take in. Im really thinking of switching back to maya for this project.

anyways heres the non-results

Soooooo Houdini is HARD

wow where to begin... so I have been learning houdini for the last couple of weeks. Ive picked a lot up but it is soooooooooo in depth. I have done many many tests, Apologys that I dont have renders, or screen grabs from most of them, but let me explain why. I have been so focused on getting my head around this program, i havnt thought about anything else for days. And when your working ur constantly CACHEing your files, then deleting the cache once your done. I didnt think to screenshot until after I deleted the cache, so its either wait 3 hours to get a picture to put up on here, or i'll just try my best to explain what Ive been up to. I have a couple of rendered Items which Ill put up at some point

to help prove my point though, here is the node tree for the default fluid emmiter in houdini (its massivly soomed out)

So what am I doing with this test?

I have set up an animation curve, which will carry a sphere along the path of the wand, then jet off in the direction of the spell. This will drive a fluid which will be the essence of our spell. Im very new to this so it will just be an expreriment really!

Houdinis interface

i thoought it would be good to talk a little about houdinis interface. The interface is made up of 7 main areas.
1.) Dual Tool Shelves: Houdini has 2 tool shelves that you can customise with diffeent menu sets, or make your own. this abillity to have two open at once can be useful when you are starting to lay out your main nodes, and can help quickly set up your scene

2.) Network Pannel: This area is where your nodes sit. Every new item you create in houdini has or rather, IS a node. These nodes exist in different levels: Scene Level, Geometry Level, Dynamics Level, Shop Level and Output Level. There are a few more but I havent fully explored them yet.

3.) Peramaters pannel: This is like the attribute editor in Maya. It updates as you select different nodes, however you can PIN it to one node when ever you like to enable you to keep the focus on it whilst editing other nodes in other windows.

4.) Selection Tools: Similar to Maya's tools pallet, the Houdini tools are slightly more context sensitive. For instance when you are in Dynamics Level, the move, scale and rotate tools are greyed out as they cannot be used in this context.

5.) Time Line and Playback Features: These are very much similar to Mayas Playback interface, just some diferent options in different places y'know!

6.) Simulation Options: Here you can select how you would like your simulations to be solved, and how they play back. Basic stuff really. This dosnt effect how your effects actually are simulated, just how you view them as a user.

7.) View Pane: The customary 3D scene view. What can I say, operates more or less the same motion as Maya, however there are far more options for viewport display, featuring the option to turn all nodes to bounding boxes for low-cpu display, or hidden line which can be really useful when needing to select fine detailed objects

Volume Fluids

In houdini, there are 3 different types of volume fluids you can work with. These are:

Pyro, Flame, Smoke and Liquid. To help me understand the kinds of things these could be used for, I decided to simply set up a scene with one of each container, then source from 4 identical spheres and analyse the results. Here is a screen grab of this:



as you can see, they all give very different effects, considering that they are all set to default values. It seems that:

Pyro: gives a combusterbal smoke cloud, with the abillity to easily add fuel in areas to increase the reaction.

Flame: will actually burn and deform an object it is applied to. The reaction given off is a mixture of heat and density, driven by the rate of decay from the geometry.

Smoke: this seems to simply emit a density from the selected geometry, with options to effect bouency ect. Fuel and temperature are possible, but this is better for cloudy, low reaction fluids

Liquid: this is by far the most different from the group. It seems to use the voxels to generate a surface based on the density. Obviously impracticle for any smoke or gassy fluids, but very useful in simulating the flow of water.