Hey, I've got a dual booting machine that can run Houdini just fine in Ubuntu but even so much as dropping a points from volume node on a sphere will crash the session in Windows 7. I can't copy the error in its entirety because it locks up to console but I have a screen shot.

i7-3930K @ 3.20
16GB 2400 visible because.. not windows professional.
Quadro K4000 - 320.50 Drivers <-Do I maybe need to downgrade this?
Houdini 13.343 & 13.314 both result in the same crash.

Also I can disable to scene view, create the nodes and wire them.. but as soon as I middle mouse it to cook, it will crash. The image below is the only bit of the error I can capture. If anyone knows what that means I'd really appreciate it.

An update for the lighting and texturing. Turns out some normals were funky causing that nasty silhouette effect on my leaves and main stem.

http://vimeo.com/20216697 [vimeo.com]

Vimeo finished uploading last night, Here it is. A friend of mine made a good point. The current rays dull the object a bit so maybe over saturating the image where the rays hit before laying them over top would look a bit better.

I picked up an older project of mine that just had previously run into so many problems that I needed a break. The Houdini scene was just so inefficient and the FBX files I was producing were absurdly large.

So work flow is basically Maya model -> Houdini wire deforming rigs -> Back to Maya via FBX for lighting -> Out to Nuke for compositing.

So far I've cleaned it up a good bit, now I can render out as many branches as I like rather than crash trying to render a single branch. I've finished up the texture painting and managed to get the plant assembled. For now all I can upload is a still frame while the Vimeo link is processing.



Looking for critique on just about anything lighting and texturing wise, I have 3 weeks to keep tweaking things so anything is welcome.

More information on the project can be found on my website under the “Current” tab.

Also my demo reel is up there and you should check it out because I want a job.

www.JohnKentFX.Com

I am revisiting a previous project. The idea being that this wheel of road follows a car where ever it goes somewhat like a hamster ball. Currently I was using a similar popnet to the example provided to drive my voronoi fracture. I cache one half then reverse it and play it in front of the half playing forwards.

What I was trying to figure out is how instead of going over the car, the road could split and go around the sides of the car. The file uploaded was a simplified version just to figure out the movement. I would then apply this to the fractured version.

Perhaps there's a better way to achieve this effect, the pop not just made sense to me at the time. I'm open to any suggestions on how to approach this project differently though I still want to aim for the splitting around the car instead of going over.

Video attached is a Flipbook of the first version.

Hello,

I am having some trouble getting particles to move along a curve. Currently I am using groups to define the normal force, Force radius & drag for different sections of the curve. I am hoping there is easier way of moving particles along a curve with sharp turns more accurately. So far trying to manipulate these forces only results in the particles either shooting off the curve (Exiting the effect radius) or simply getting stuck along the curve. At best there's some delicate balance here but I'm hoping I don't have to spend a week trying to find it.

Hip file included with plenty of notes. Any suggestions?

Thanks,
John

I am looking to put together a laptop from which houdini will run nicely.

Toshiba P500's are customizable for a reasonable price and I can pick up 8 gigs of ram and a nice nvidia chipset for around 1300$

My only concern is that the 6MB cache of the i7 may make a considerable difference over the 3MB cache of the i5 but i really have no idea.

To my knowledge Houdini does not use hyperthreading when baking geometry or doing cloth sims. So is paying the extra 200 bucks for the i7 over the i5 430 really worth it?

Perhaps forking out the cash for a solid state drive would be better for houdini?

I duno, What do you think would be best?

Thanks,
John-

I can't thank you guys enough!

I finally have a working FBX with proper UV's. Nothings holding me back now. I will post the composite final later this week.

Thanks again,
John

I have saved out the final node of my network as an obj.
Took the mesh into Maya.
Uv mapped it.
Read the file back into Houdini.
Made sure it never moved in the process.
Because the uv's from maya came in as vertex attributes I promoted them to point attr's so I can transfer them to the original mesh

And this is what I get-

Any suggestions?

A former student here at SCAD, Hosuk Chang, explored a technique called slice rendering. This uses the distance from the camera to define groups of particles. Renders out the separate slices of the particle system and then they can be composited back together.

The compositing can be done in the renderer-
1. Render farthest slice
2. Render the next farthest slice using the previous render as a background image.
3. Repeat.

He used this as a means of Data Expansion but I'm curious as to whether implementing such a technique could also lower render times for smaller particle counts?


Hosuk's Website-

http://s204357084.onlinehome.us/project/dataExpansion_1/dataExpansion_1.html [s204357084.onlinehome.us]

I have fixed the current problem with getting the entire mesh over the desired frame range(One extrude node had gotten altered on accident changing my polycount over time) but have run into another issue.

Oleg,

I saw your reply to the post about static vs animated UV's. It was said that someone found a way actually do it but with several limitations. Though this post was in 2008. Has the FBX team taken a stab at animated UV's within the FBX format or am I still stuck with using a .bgeo sequence?

I would sketch out just exactly what you want to have happening. A good sketch helps you see your project in a different light.

Just reading it, kind of sounds like you want a bunch of splines floating around in space based on the particle locations, like noodles in water?

What are you planning on using this for?

The nut shell workflow-

Model base mesh -> create rest curves inside -> use bone chains to deform the rest curves -> Use wireDeform to blend between the two curves.

This project really got out of control with respect to how complicated the network became for such a simple looking effect.

The base mesh for the tendrils was created in maya.

A master Rest spline was created for the longest tendril. A bone chain was built along this curve and Chops & Expressions monitor the rotations of each joint. Once a certain rotation value is reached the next bone is triggered giving the curling effect. This newly curled spline was set as the deform curve for a WireDeform SOP. Blending between the two curves gave us control of the blooming effect.

Each tendril then was given its own curve. These curves reference the master curves animation but maintain their respective scales and orientations(That took a while).

Once I figured out how to reorder the primitive numbers of the secondary curves I skinned the surface for the leaf.

Side note… The wireCapture SOP has a very unusual means of changing capture radius values. Setting key frames for the radius adjusts the radius ALONG the U value of a Curve. To my knowledge you can not directly paint or gradate this value in any other way.

–TO THE DEVELOPERS –

Don't get me wrong I like it and its convenient once you figure it out.. but it took a long time to figure out. Could you explain the reasoning behind using key frames to adjust this value?

Is there a way to access the U value of a curve directly?

Thanks,
John

I am unfamiliar with importing FBX's into Houdini. I have tried but nothing shows up in the view port. I do get a subnet, inside of which are caution barred SOPs with invalid input paths, for the imported file.

If the same file is imported into Maya I see the triangulation errors. (There seems to be holes in the geometry but I think that has to do with mantras clay shader not importing correctly. applying a default lambert fixes that issue)

I have included the HIP file but it is sourcing an OBJ. If you don't mind I could email you the OBJ.

I am currently trying to export a 240 frame FBX animation.

When exported and imported into maya, if I limit the FBX to the first 10 frames, I get perfect quads and all my animation data. Anything beyond frame 30 and the file corrupts. I get the animation data but the mesh only displays half the primitives in that I get nothing but tris.

During the animation the geometry is deformed but the point and primitive numbers do not change.

Any ideas on whats happening?

Thanks,
John

Finally got the UV's for this thing in order. Took it into mudbox to get a displacement going.

This is awesome, very cool asthetic-

You may be able to refrence the copy number of each flower and use it to drive a random seed number for a shift value in your chops network.

How are these flowers being animated?

-John

Black one on the left looks good, Not so fond of the Red. Red is just way to saturated. Look at the Red/Green/blue channels independently, the car will pop like crazy

-Img Below
At the top is your current red channel,
Compared to the Blue and green channels below it.

The image below the color corrected audi is the Red channel of the new image. notice how it resembles the blue and green channels of the first image-

Was the car modeled in Houdini or imported from maya, 3d Studio ect?

Also I'm curious as to how you're compositing this into the background image. Are you using Houdini's built in comping or something external such as nuke/Shake?

Nice work,
-John

This piece is intended to be integrated into a time lapse plate. For now the animations are driven with wiredeformers and animated using chops.


A quick flipbook of the animations and the timelapse plate can be found on my website under the houdini Tab.

studentpages.scad.edu/~Jokent20

All critiques welcome on both my reel and the current project.

Thanks