Dear Houdini Community,


After procrastinating learning Houdini as an aspiring FX-TD for so long, I finally, thanks heavens, just have to learn it for my next job

So, the task at hand, as a voluntarily participation in a project for the school I just graduated from, is the following:
A flash flood hitting the town of Remagen in Germany after the eruption of a supervolcano in the Eifel region (quite a likely scenario btw - if there will ever be an eruption like this
I have the complete shot supervision and already handed compositing and integration over to completely focus on the actual wave.

Since this is my style of work, I prototyped what I want to come up with in Houdini already in Maya, which I'm much more familiar with.
This is the result with the most satisfying wave so far:

see prototypeWave01.mov

And this is a previs of the actual shot breakdown:

see previsWave01.mov

This was heavily influenced by Tom Kluyskens technique for flooding Isengard in LOTR he talks on the Maya Tutorial DVD “Flow Workflows”, which I adapted to the following:
- Shove a wave geometry through the countryside
- attach to/ emit particles from it
- instance patches to particles with a water sequence mapped onto them
- cleverly give birth to/accelerate/scale/kill the instances and, above all, cycle and offset the sequences accordingly
additionally:
- Instance debris into the mess

Apart from the debris, which I haven't terribly much worked on yet since its possibilties were quite limited in Maya, this proved to be working, so now there are two things to achieve:
- Transfer the whole setup to Houdini
- Improve it

For Improvement, the following things came to my mind:
- More clearly separate the front from the remaining wave -> I'm planning to record new footage showing both white and calmer water in the same sequence, so I hope to get that effect with just the frame offset
- do some interaction as soon as the wave hits the frontmost buildings towards the end -> do some automated collision detection with some proxy geo I have, and emit either lots of spray particles,more sprites or some flip fluids
- use Houdini Ocean Toolkit somehow for nicer animation of water patches and/or give debris more floating feeling

So far I did some tests in Houdini and I'm delighted by particle controllability and animated texture preview performance, which I identified as crucial.
Also, HOT seemed to be quite useful in that context.
I don't know yet about the cycling possibilities and handing particle attributes over to the shader, but I'm really positive that this is much nicer in Houdini than Maya, which was a complete turnoff there, since you basically needed a new shader for each offset sequence (hence the relative conformity so far)


So, I would really like to know from you, dear Houdini community:

1. Does that seem like a sensible approach?

and

2. Do you think this is possible for a complete Houdini noob like me to achieve in 3 weeks, or am I insane?


I decided now the very in the last minute to tap into the knowledge vault around here, although it scares me, since I can only achieve so much in the given time and don't consider myself as a fast learner.
But on the other hand, I thought why not trying this out?
Hopefully, you guys won't be mad at me, if I can't implement or understand everyone's suggestion.
But maybe that might be helpful to someone else sometime, if I document my learning process, and, eventually, to myself, too


cheers
hendrik

the 2nd attachment

Hi all,


Unfortunately I wasnt able to update this WIP thread as I would have liked to, but at least I wanted to share the result with you:

http://vimeo.com/29774292 [vimeo.com]
pwd: flood


I'm generally happy with it, although some things, as always, bother me.
I think with a better knowledge of Houdini I could have pushed it a bit further.
Most of the time I spent on finding out how to cycle textures properly, tweaking the complete coverage of the wave geometry with sprite-planes, preprocessing and animating the different textures in conjunction with the point movement, while at the same time keeping rendertime low for previews.
No shading is used whatsoever, only diffuse and semi-transparency, so rendertime actually stayed quite low. Hoewever, converting the textures to .rats introduced some pink artifacts on the sprite-planes once a certain number was exceeded, no idea why, so I sticked with leaving them .pngs, which obviously cranked up the rendertime quite a bit for converting a few thousand planes each time.
The destruction for both the top and the long shot were completely done in post. I ended up doing the comp myself, so it could have been much better, since I'm not a compositor.

Drop me a line if you are interested in more details.


cheers
hendrik


ps: the cloud was animated in post, too.