Steffen Dünner
Steffen Dünner
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Recent Forum Posts
Camera tracking in Houdini July 22, 2025, 3:32 a.m.
Blender's Motion Tracker is indeed very powerful, I've been using it successfully for many years.
In the end I got the best and most reliable results with a few (8 to 30ish) manually placed and supervised tracks per frame, not using any of the "automatic" options with hundreds of tracks where you end up searching for not-so-good trackers and cleaning them up takes longer than doing a proper manual track in the first place.
The only thing that Blender can't handle is animated focal lengths (zooms). The solver can't deal with them.
A few years ago I invested some € in SynthEyes though because I had to track dozens of anamorphic shots with extremely weird lens distortion and animated zoom which Blender couldn't handle. I didn't regret doing so and it works beautifully in combination with Houdini (and Blender and Fusion).
In the end I got the best and most reliable results with a few (8 to 30ish) manually placed and supervised tracks per frame, not using any of the "automatic" options with hundreds of tracks where you end up searching for not-so-good trackers and cleaning them up takes longer than doing a proper manual track in the first place.
The only thing that Blender can't handle is animated focal lengths (zooms). The solver can't deal with them.
A few years ago I invested some € in SynthEyes though because I had to track dozens of anamorphic shots with extremely weird lens distortion and animated zoom which Blender couldn't handle. I didn't regret doing so and it works beautifully in combination with Houdini (and Blender and Fusion).
MPM Solver and small scale sims Oct. 24, 2024, 12:19 p.m.
Just started watching this brand new MPM fundamentals video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDmJo3zpb1g [www.youtube.com]
And right at the start it says "...capable of simulating small scale fluids...".
Now I'm excited and will watch this.
And right at the start it says "...capable of simulating small scale fluids...".
Now I'm excited and will watch this.
MPM Solver and small scale sims Oct. 18, 2024, 7:35 a.m.
Hi there,
I'm currently simulating a piece of chocolate with a caramel filling. The chocolate breaks open and the caramel filling should ooze out while sticking to the chocolate pieces. The MPM solver sounds like a reasonable simulation method.
At first I tried building the scene at real life scale, the piece of chocolate is ~2cm wide. I built a fractured piece of chocolate, MPM colliders, a filling with a "honey" preset etc. The filling itself consists of around 500.000 particles, nothing to write home about.
The problem is that the sim is running extremely slow. Like 1 frame per minute (!!!) max.
I tried a few things but the only thing that helped was to scale up the scene by a factor of 100 so that the piece of chocolate now is more like 2m tall. The amount of particles is still at 500.000 but now the sim runs at 2-3 frames per second. What a difference!
Now the question: Is the MPM solver intended for large scale sims only or did I miss an advanced / hidden setting? I mean I can live with manually scaling up and exporting the downscaled results afterwards, but I would prefer working at the intended scale all the time.
I'm currently simulating a piece of chocolate with a caramel filling. The chocolate breaks open and the caramel filling should ooze out while sticking to the chocolate pieces. The MPM solver sounds like a reasonable simulation method.
At first I tried building the scene at real life scale, the piece of chocolate is ~2cm wide. I built a fractured piece of chocolate, MPM colliders, a filling with a "honey" preset etc. The filling itself consists of around 500.000 particles, nothing to write home about.
The problem is that the sim is running extremely slow. Like 1 frame per minute (!!!) max.
I tried a few things but the only thing that helped was to scale up the scene by a factor of 100 so that the piece of chocolate now is more like 2m tall. The amount of particles is still at 500.000 but now the sim runs at 2-3 frames per second. What a difference!
Now the question: Is the MPM solver intended for large scale sims only or did I miss an advanced / hidden setting? I mean I can live with manually scaling up and exporting the downscaled results afterwards, but I would prefer working at the intended scale all the time.