Soooo... that's the end...
What can I say, except it was a great event and I was honoured to compete against such talented people.
Time flies like crazy. It feels like March has just started but it's already over. I feel this weird void now without any more daily challenges

I wanted to thank all participants and SideFX staff for such amazing experience.
After this month I am even more convinced that Houdini is a great tool. I can also feel that I got much experience in using it, which I am verry happy about. Thanks again!

And here's my monthly summary:

Day 31 - Material Variation

As today's is the very last day of the competition, I decided to go nuts with amount of work that needed to be done and do something different than the projects I've done so far. Many of my recent works were very moody, sometimes even creepy. So it was time for something cute and nice.

I decided to go with a seal. The very first obstacle was modeeling. It might be not that difficult to sculpt one, but unfortunately Houdini does not have sculpting tools. So as a first step I blocked out the main shapes of a muzzle and a jaw using spheres and edit node with proportional editing. Then, I added the eyeballs and used these rather crude shapes as my reference geometry for retopology. Once retopo was done I had a basic shape of the seal's head. Low number of polygons allowed me to reshape it closer to my liking and also extract a scalp I used for grooming.
The fur was rather simple to make thanks to great grooming tools. I used guide advect tool to quickly create flow of the guides. Then with help of a few manually painted attributes I managed to generate the fur.
Whole process step by step can be seen at the very bottom of this post.

It was time for rendering. I imported everything to Karma and applied Karma Hair shader to my fur, whiskers and a few smaller hairs in the eyebrow area. To break the uniformity of the white fur I used the Material Variation node. While Karma Hair shader allows for randomization of some parameters Material Variation gives much more flexibility. I used it to modify locally melanin for some of the hair to break the color. I also modified the the thickness scale shader parameter which changes the appearance of the hair without changing the actual width of the hair. These parameter cannot be randomized by default, so Material Variation was very handy here. These two changes made the fur much more believable.

I've had a blast working on this project and was surprised how much more fluent in using Houdini I got during this month. I would never thought I could achieve it really.

These are the results of my today's endevaours:

Screenshot presenting use of Material Variation:

Seal modelling steps:

Day 30 - Light Mixer

Light mixer is a node that I have used in most of my submissions as it is super useful.
Again, got some problems today. This time it was XPU bugging on me when I had more than 2-3 volumes in the scene, and they were not even heavy volumes. Wasted quite a bit of time on trying to solve the issue. Finally, I switched to Karma CPU.
So that's the final piece for my 'space tetraptych'. It did not turned out exactly as I wanted, but solving XPU issues took quite substential amount of time, so I didn't manage to do everything I planned.

Submission:

Screenshot:

Day 29 - Background Plate

I've got quite a few problems today.
First of all I had to figure out how the tool works. Next, I had a lot of troubles with converting a jpg image to ACES CG so it actually looks good after comping. So yeah, it has been time of learning new stuff. While I am still not sure how to convert jpgs corectly I managed to get 'acceptebale' look.
Then, I decided to create a proxy of the scene so all the spheres cast shadows correctly and more importatnly the big glass sphere has approximately proper refractions. Here are the final results:


Screenshot:

Day 29 - Layout

It took me quite a while to get it how to export preped geometry to USD. Once it was done I could start layouting the scene.
I have used the node to construct the ruins and populate the ground with grass clumps.
This node is great, but once you try to instatiate large number of meshes performance drops quite significantly.

Submission:

Screenshot:

Can we use detailed backplates in our submissions?

Day 27 - Match Pose

It was quite tricky to find an idea for this node that uses only the content from within Houdini.
At the end I decided to pick 2 animations from mocapbiped3 node, merge them together and transfer them to my rig that I have used during this week. Then I added some quick vellum fluid and that's it.
I wish I could use a few more render samples to get rid of the noise, but well... I needed to limit number of samples to make it on time.

Submission:

Screenshot:

Day 25 IK Chains

The One That Carries Burdens of The Earth

IK Chians is a really cool tool which makes posing much easier. I am quite happy about the right I have created which allowed to plant hands and feet in place and then adjust the rest of the body (without changing hands and feet positions), so the person actually looks like he's carrying something heavy.
It's been a lot of fun. I am definitely going to look more into rigginf with KineFX.

Submission:

Screenshot:

Day 26 - Secondary Motion

I decided to go for some nested secondary motion, so I have used it for 2 purposes: head lag of the character and lag of the antena.
The head lag was not as trivial as I thought and required additional joints and orientation correction with rigvop. The antena case was even more tricky as rotation of its joints had to occur along the head axis not antena axis itself (when the head rotates). A compund of a few secondary motion nodes together with some rigvop for correction of the joint orientation solved the issue. It was fun to make.
The robot was inspired by 3 witty characters from movies and animations. Can you guess which movies are those?
As a hint I can say: 'Luke, I am your... ...personal healthcare companion'

Submission:

Screenshot:

Day 24 - Full Body IK

The forum was in maintenence yesterday again which made it impossible to submit the work on time, hence I post it today.

Title: The Pointless Effort

Submission:

Screenshot:

Day 23 - Skeleton Blend

Diversity

Submission:

I used skeleton blend to mirror the poses of the hands, but even more importantly, thank to this node, I managed to create a hand controller which allowed me to quickly pose all the hands without a need of tweaking all joints manually.
Screenshots:

Day 22 - Rig Pose

The God Killer

Submission:

Screenshot:

Day 21 - Skeleton

Submission:

Screenshot:

Day 20 - Mesh Tiler

Submission:

I used tiler to create the Asteroid rings.
Screenshot:

Day 19 - SciFi Panels
Deimos

Submission:

Screenshots:

Day 18 - Cables
Rite of Passage

Submission:

Screenshot:

Day 17 - Lightning
Pig Disintegrator

Submission:

Screenshot:

Day 16 - Tree
Sacred Tree, grant us your power!

Submission:

Screenshot:

Day 15 - Lot Subdivision
The Arc
(Yup, the planet is also rendered)

Submission:

Screenshot:

Day 14 - Box Cutter

Submission:

Screenshot: