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HOUDINI | MAYA | VRAY | SUBSTANCE | NUKE
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Straight out of Vray, not yet composited. I've been spending (too much) time on the vegetation. Mostly finding the sweetspot of how much grass, trees, etc to spawn while maintaining acceptable render times. The scenes are heavy and car models hi-poly. Anything less than 3 minutes a frame is fine by me for now, but I will be looking out for any improvements as I progress. Main areas of interest is the Vray grass and the vehicle polycount. I could do with using a lower level version I have for the corvette but I'm not sure spending the time to redo the car from scratch is worth it. We'll see. Anyhow, vray passes are beauty, diffuse, normal, GI, depth, AO. Everything is looking a bit cleaner. ToDo: Camera animation, FX, texturing, MORE VEGETATION!!
It's so close to the finish line!! I would basically call this done except there's a few things I would like to tweak before kicking off render passes. To start with, this is only a basic beauty and lighting pass with motion blur burned in the render. The motion blur is a bit heavy on some elements so of course I will tweak that with a separate velocity pass in nuke. Secondly, there are two layers to the lightning simulations. First layer is from the chunks of debris to the ground and the second is from chunks to chunks. I am only seeing one or two lightning bolts going from chunk to chunk so I would like to tweak that simulation to spawn more lightning and more often.
Aside from that, the render times are a killer and this is not even HD. I will eventually get around to seeing what elements I can cache out and export back to maya for GPU accelerated rendering using V-ray and Phoenix volume grid. I'm positive I can get most of my particle simulations into phoenix but the tricky part will be the shading of the particles and trying to match the lighting.
Now that the turret FX are nearly done, I decided to spend a day mashing up a quick substance material and test out the substance plugin for houdini. It was a bit tricky to get setup and it's still in beta. But I got it working and built a simple tool to procedurally generate the road by simply drawing out a NURBS curve. From there the curve is either forced to @P.y=0, or mapped to a displaced surface such as converted heightfield, heightmap, etc. Then for safe measure, ensure that the road will always be facing up by setting @N.y=1. The sweep node has a tendency to reverse the normal, sometimes I have to enable/disable "Swap Rows and Columns" to get the road facing up. The width scale of my road is in decimeters, 85.344 to be exact. I am working in a to-real-world scale because 853.44cm = 28ft, just above the average width of a real road. You must take scene scale and conversion into account if you want this to work properly. Due to the nature that I'm working with a square texture from substance designer, the resample length of the NURBS curve must be equal to the width of the road, otherwise the texture will stretch along the length. The UV's are projected along the arc length which allows the substance material to seamlessly blend together as the road curves. Sweet!
Aaaaaaand now the tesla sim is almost done :))) Here's a very low res render, you can see I scrapped the red effect as I felt it was too much cheese. I'm still not married to the look yet, to be honest I will probably make it a typical warm/cool color. For now the yellow/purple is appeasing enough. Thoughts on it now? Well, there's still a bit to be done. I am sick of the particle trails lingering unrealistically and I'm not sure why. I've simmed it many different ways to procedurally control the particle's lifespan but it's just not turning out the way I want. I don't have the time to waste on it so I shall get rid of it and add a proper volume trail effect. It will be worth the time to add a proper volume effect, I think. I would also like to add a subtle pyro explosion on the blast hits to complement the light blast effect already in place. That might be overkill but I think it could be a nice addition to some close up shots or slow motion renderings. Also I will likely change the projectile itself to be a mini lightning bolt blast... Pretty much changing this entire weapon concept into a Tesla turret... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Aside from that, I have been also making great progress on the rigid body dynamics stuff I have been doing on my linux station (i'll post that later). A few months ago I put together a fairly powerful centOS machine specifically tuned up for houdini simulations. This has proven to be a critical improvement in overall workflow and for my own education. Linux has overall better performance and memory management than windows or mac. In houdini, my simulations and mantra renderings on the linux are roughly the same or faster than my windows10 machine. It's apples and oranges because the linux is an older haswell-e i7 16 thread CPU at 3.7GHz, whereas the windows is dual xeons 40 threads at 2.5GHz. Therefore one can imagine that with an identical system, linux is far more efficient (and many benchmarks have shown it to be approx. 30% faster in many 3D applications). Aside from that, linux rarely crashes for me whereas houdini18 in windows crashes nearly every time I use it. Having the two machines is also a blessing as I can switch back and forth working on different shots while one machine is busy rendering or simulating.
Making lots of great progress on the blast effects for the armored car rig. It's only the first simulation I have rendered for this effect, lots of obvious issues and further improvements I will address but overall I think it's a great start! If you're familiar, you will see quite a bit of applied houdini in my animations as I am learning houdini 18 for the first time. I am developing a lot of my own effects based off of Steven Knipping's work. I am in the works of adding 3 separate lighting sims on the debris. If you have seen any of my Tesla stuff, then you know I have to throw some arcs in there ;)