I've been developing real-time engines/apps and games for a long, long time (since the old days of DirectX 9, haha), and I've finally gotten into Houdini for the shining promises of these fast procedural workflows and rapid iteration on VFX, destruction, etc. I've been at it for maybe two weeks now, and I'm thoroughly hooked! But my main challenge is learning my way around the editor/UI, the jargon and awareness of what nodes exist/do and where to find certain info and resources. I've run into one of those confusions, due to my inexperience with Houdini and the online community/ecosystem.
I'm convinced that a working example of a shader/material for Unity must exist for rendering my little pyro/explosion texture sheets ... I made one I liked with the basic GPU explosion template node, fiddled around with params/attributes and once it looked cool I set up the camera how I wanted and made a 120 frame sequence into a 8x8 frame sheet. I left most of the rendering settings (apart from the frame + inc and camera transforms/focus) alone to avoid screwing anything up on my first go. And I got it! Some very pretty sheets came out with various data encoded in the color channels.
What I'm not sure about is precisely what all that data represents, and if SideFX or anyone supplies a "default" shader + material that can utilize that in Unity ... I'm comfortable with building a shader if I have to, but it'd be nice to just drop one in and keep rollin if one exists and to see it as an example of the possibilities Houdini has.
When I rendered the sheets, it seems to have done what I wanted. I ended up with 5x png files with a common base name that each has a specific suffix. These are the suffixes it added to each file:
"ECD", "FC", "MDC1", MDC2" & "MVN"
My best guess is that this is something like:
1) "ECD" = "Emission, Color, Density" ?
2) "FC" = "Fuel Combustion" ? I heard that somewhere, not sure if it's wrong or how that data is meant to be interpreted ...
3 & 4) "MDC1" & "MDC2" = "Motion, Density, Color" ? A guess, based on deduction ...
(If correct: Is it "Motion", as in the motion vectors? Why two images, what's the difference? What to do with this? lol)
5) "MVN" = "Motion Vectors Normalized"? or ... ? I even considered it could be something unexpected like "Model View Normal" LOL
No idea what I'm right or wrong about in these guesses, if the abbreviation/suffix corresponds to RGBA channels in respective order or what the intended use/consumption of all this data would be ... that's why it'd be great to see a solid example ready-made for this data output by the Labs Flipbook in my ROP so I can understand what was intended. I keep finding the same old documentation page about Unity 2017 that says newer Unity versions don't apply, go look in such and such place that I cannot find (it provides no link). The Github for HE has some shaders/materials in it but doesn't say anywhere if any of them will read this data correctly.
Can someone demystify this color data for me and either point me in the right direction to find the working sample shader made to consume it or at least some thorough technical documentation I can use to implement one myself? Again, I didn't change any of the color/channel mapping options and left it "as-is".
Sorry for the long-winded question and if I sound like a silly newbie haha, but I think non-specific questions are unlikely to get specifically helpful answers!
Regards,
Aaron
(Arkaen Solutions)
