Hello,
I just published on my Patreon a video about Houdini’s window box.
This video is about how to use the new window box system in Houdini. One of those tools that I've been using for many years at different VFX studios, but now it works out of the box with Houdini and Karma. I hope you find it useful and you can start using it soon in your projects!
All the info on my Patreon site.
environments
Solaris Katana interoperability part 2/2 /
Hello patrons,
In this video we will finish this mini series about Solaris and Katana interoperability.
I'll be covering the topics that I didn't have time to cover in the first video, including.
- Manual set dressing from Solaris to Katana.
- Hero instancing from Solaris to Katana.
- background instancing and custom attributes from Solaris to Katana.
- Dummy crowds from Solaris to Katana.
- Everything using USD of course.
There are many more things that could be covered when it comes to Solaris and Katana interoperability, I'm pretty sure that I'll be covering some of them in future USD videos.
All the info on my Patreon.
Small dynamic clouds /
Hello,
I don't think I will be able to publish a video this month, let's see, but in the meantime here you can download five caches of small dynamic clouds that I simulated in Houdini.
They are a 1000 frames simulation and should work pretty good to create vast cloudscapes.
They are .bgeo caches, feel free to convert them to .vdb if you want to use them in any other software.
The videos below are flipbooks of the animated clouds, not renders.
The downloadable link will be published in the next post.
This is free of charge for all tiers with downloadable resources.
Thanks,
Xuan.
Houdini scatterers 2/2 /
Hello patrons,
This is the second (and last) part of Houdini scatterers. We are going to take the tools that we made in the first video and see how we can use them to create complex and efficient scattering systems for your VFX shots, specially useful when dealing with huge environments.
I will show you some of my favourite worflows and share some techniques that I've used in the past in combination with the HDAs that we created in this series.
For those of you in tiers with downloadable material, you will have access to another post with some links to get the files.
As usual feel free to contact me with questions, suggestions, ideas, etc.
And if you like my content, please help me out and recommend it to you work mates.
All the info on my Patreon feed.
Thanks a lot for your suppor!
Xuan.
Houdini scatterers, part 1/2 /
Hello patrons,
This new video is part of the "little project" I made in Houdini and Redshift a while ago. In this part 1 of 2 video I show you how to create efficient tools in Houdini to deal with scattering, specifically focusing on environments. We are going to create a setup that takes care of randomization while using scattering techniques. Random rotation, random scale, random assets, etc.
Once the setups are done we are going to create tools or "digital assets" so you can re-use these tools as many times as you need in future porjects without re-doing the setups. We will create an interactive user interface to manipulate the tools.
In part 2 of this video I will show you different scattering techniques using these tools that we are going to build today.
The video is available on my Patreon site.
Thanks for your support!
Xuan.
Camera projection masterclass, episode 01 /
The very first episode for "Camera projection masterclass" has dropped. For more than two and a half hours I will be introducing you to the fascinating work of camera projection for visual effects. This is a long format series where I will be covering many concepts, ideas and practical exercises. Let's see what today's episode is all about.
- Introduction to the course
- Matte painting evolution
- Matte painting in the visual effects pipeline
- Matte painting workflows and tools
- Camera projection fundamentals
- Types of camera projections
- Common issues
- Camera projection elements in Nuke and Maya
- Recipes for all type of camera projections in Nuke
- A few words about Photoshop
Downloadable material will be available for certain tiers.
As always, thanks a lot for your support, you make this channel.
Check out my Patreon for more information.
Xuan.
Introduction to Redshift - little project /
My Patreon series “Introduction to Redshift for VFX” is coming to an end. We have already discussed in depth the most basics features like global illumination and sampling. I shared with you my own “cheat sheets” to deal with GI and sampling. We also talked about Redshift lighting tools, built-in atmospheric effects, and cameras. In the third episode we talked about camera mapping, surface shaders, texturing, displacement maps from Mari and Zbrush, how to ingest Substance Painter textures and did a few surfacing exercises.
This should give you a pretty good base to start your projects in Houdini and Redshift, or whatever 3D app you want to use with Redshift.
The next couple of videos about this series are going to be dedicated to doing from scratch to finish a little project using Redshift. We are going to be able to cover more features of the render engine and also discover more broad techniques that hopefully you will find interesting. Let me explain to you what is all of this about.
We’ll be doing this simple shot below from start to finish, it is quite simple and graphic I know, but to get there I’m going to explain to you many things that you are going to be using quite a lot in visual effects shots, more than we actually end up using in the shot.
We are going to start by having a quick introduction to SpeedTree Cinema 8 to see how to create procedural trees. We will create from scratch a few trees that later will be used in Houdini. Once we have all the models ready, we will see how to deal with SpeedTree textures to use them in Redshift in an ACES pipeline.
These trees will be used in Houdini to create re-usable assets llibraries and later converted to Redshift proxies for memory efficiency and scattering, also to be easily picked up by lighting artists when working on shots.
With all these trees we will take a look at how to create procedural scattering systems in Houdini using Redshift proxies. We will create multiple configurations depending on our needs. We are also going to learn how to ingest Quixel Megascans assets, again preparing them to work with ACES and creating an additional asset for our library. We will also re-use the scatterers made for trees to scatter rocks and pebbles.
To scatter all of that will be used as a base Houdini’s height fields. For this particular shot, we are going a very simple ground made with height fields and Megascans, but I’m going to give you a pretty comprehensive introduction to height fields, way more than what you see in the final shot.
Once all the natural assets are created, we’ll be looking at the textures and look-dev of the character. Yes, there is a character in the shot, you don’t see much but hey, this is what happens in VFX all the time. You spend months working on something barely noticeable. We will look into speed texturing and how to use Substance Painter with Redshift.
Now that we are dealing with characters, what if I show you how to “guerrilla” deal with motion capture? So you can grab some random motion capture from any source and apply it to your characters. Look at the clip below, nothing better than a character moving to see if the look actually works.
It looks better when moving, doesn’t it? There is no cloth simulation btw, it is a Redshift course, we are not going that far! Not yet.
Any environment work, of course, needs some kind of volumetrics. They create nice lighting effects, give a sense of scale, look good and make terrible render times. We need to know how to deal with different types of volumetrics in Redshift, so I’m going to show you how to create a couple of different atmospherics using Houdini’s volumes. Quite simple but effective.
Finally, we will combine everything together in a shot. I will show you how to organize everything properly using bundles and smart bundles to configure your render passes. We will take a look at how Redshift deals with AOVs, render settings, etc. Finally, we will put everything together in Nuke to output a nice render.
Just to summarize, this is what I’m planning to show you while working on this little project. My guess is that it will take me a couple of sessions to deliver all this video training.
Speed Tree introduction and tree creation
ACES texture conversion
ACES introduction in Houdini and Redshift
Creation of tree assets library in Houdini
Megascans ingestion
Character texturing and look-dev
Guerrilla techniques to apply mocap
Introduction to Houdini’s height fields
Redshift proxies
Scattering systems in Houdini
Volume creation in Houdini for atmospherics
Scene assembly
Redshift render settings
Compositing
Something that I probably forgot
All of this and much more training will be published on my Patreon. Please consider supporting me.
Thanks,
Xuan.
Clarisse scatterers, part 01 /
Hello patrons,
I just posted the first part of Clarisse scatterers, in this video I'll walk you through some of the point clouds and scatterers available in Clarisse. We will do three production exercises, very simple but hopefully you will understand the workflow to use these tools to create more complicated shots.
In the first exercise we'll be using the point array to create a simple but effective crowd of soldiers. Then we will use the point cloud particle system to generate the effect that you can see in the video attached to this post. A very common effect these days.
And finally we will use the point uv sampler to generate huge environments like forests or cities.
We will continue with more exercises in the second and last part of these scatterers series in Clarisse.
Check it out on my Patreon feed.
Thanks,
Xuan.
Meshlab polygon reduction /
Meshlab is probably the only available solution (proprietary Lidar software doesn't count) when you have to deal with very heavy poly count. I'm working with some complex terrains, some of them up to 50 million polys and Maya or Zbrush just can't handle that. I'm reducing the poly count considerably fast in Meshlab with its polygon reduction tools.
- This terrain has more than 16 million polys. Maya can't handle this very well, and Zbrush can't manage memory to even open it. Just import it in Meshlab.
- You will be using the Quadric Edge Collopse Decimation tool a lot.
- There are different strategies available, I like to use the percentage one. In this case by 0.5
- I'll be getting an 8 million poly terrain.
- I just run the tool one more time to get a 4 million terrain. I can work in Maya with this :)