resources

Houdini's window box /  by Xuan Prada

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.

Dummy crowds in Houdini Solaris /  by Xuan Prada

Quick video showing how to use one of my oldest tricks to create “dummy crowds“, but this time in Solaris, which makes this even easier and faster than using SOPs or MOPs.

I’ve used a flavour of this dummy crowds technique in many shots for a bunch of movies. It is very limited in so many ways, but when it works it works. You can populate your environments in minutes!

Please consider subscribing to my Patreon so I can keep making professional VFX training. Thanks. www.patreon.com/elephantvfx

Houdini Solaris and Katana. Custom attributes /  by Xuan Prada

This is a quick video showcasing how to use custom attributes in Houdini Solaris for USD scattering systems. The USD layer will be exported to Katana to do procedural look-dev using the exported custom parameters.

This technique will be explored in depth in my upcoming video about Houdini Solaris and Katana interoperability.

Subscribe to my Patreon to have full access to my entire library of visual effects training.
www.patreon.com/elephantvfx

Mix 04 /  by Xuan Prada

Hello patrons,

First video of 2022 will be a mix of topics.

The first part of the video will be dedicated to talk about face building and face tracking in Nuke. Using these tools and techniques will allow us to generate 3D heads and faces using only a few photos with the help of AI. Once we have the 3D model, we should be able to track and matchmove a shot to do a full head replacement or to extend/enhance some facial features.

In the second part of the video I will show you a technique that I used while working on Happt Feet to generate foot prints and foot trails. A pretty neat technique that relies on transferring information between surfaces instead of going full on with complex simulations.

This is a 3.30 hours video, so grab yourself a cup of coffee and enjoy!
All the information on my Patreon channel.

As always, thanks for your support!

Xuan.

Detailing digi doubles using generic humans /  by Xuan Prada

This is probably the last video of the year, let's see about that.

This time is all about getting your concept sculpts into the pipeline. To do this, we are going to use a generic humanoid, usually provided by your visual effects studio. This generic humanoid would have perfect topology, great uv mapping, some standard skin shaders, isolation maps to control different areas, grooming templates, etc.

This workflow will speed drastically the way you approach digital doubles or any other humanoid character, like this zombie here.

In this video we will focus mainly on wrapping a generic character around any concep sculpt to get a model that can be used for rigging, animation, lookdev, cfx, etc. And once we have that, we will re-project back all the details from the sculpt and we will apply high resolution displacement maps to get all the fine details like skin pores, wrinkles, skin imperfections, etc.

The video is about 2 hours long and we can use this character in the future to do some other videos about character/creature work.

All the info on my Patreon site.

Thanks!

Xuan.

Lookdev rig for Houdini /  by Xuan Prada

Hello patrons,

In this video I show you how to create a production ready lookdev rig for Houdini, or what I like to call, a single click render solution for your lookdevs.

It is in a way similar to the one we did for Katana a while ago, but using all the power and flexibility of Houdini's HDA system.

Talking about HDA's, I will be introducing the new features for HDA's that come with Houdini 18.5.633 that I think are really nice, specially for smaller studios that don't have enough resources to build a pipeline around HDA's.

By the end of this video you should be able to build your own lookdev tool and adapt it to the needs of your projects.

We'll be working with the latest versions of Houdini, Arnold and ACES.

As usually, the video starts with some slides where I try to explain why building a lookdev rig is a must before you do any work on your project, don't skip it, I know it is boring but very much needed. Downloadable material will be attached in the next post.

Thank you very much for your support!

Head over to my Patreon feed.

Xuan.

Houdini scatterers, part 1/2 /  by Xuan Prada

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.

Real time rendering for vfx, episode 01 /  by Xuan Prada

Episode 01 for "real time rendering for vfx" is dropping later today. I called this video "your first day in Unreal engine". We will do from scratch a very simple environment that we can scout in virtual reality.

These are some of the topics covered in this (almost) 4 hours video.

- Assets considerations for real time.
- Exporting/importing assets in Maya/Unreal.
- Using templates in Unreal.
- Collisions.
- Materials basics.
- Lighting/atmospherics basics.
- Exporting projects.
- VR scouting.

Please head over my Patreon site and check this out.
Thanks for your support,
Xuan.

Intro to LOPs and USD /  by Xuan Prada

My introduction to Houdini Solaris LOPs and USD is already available on my Patreon feed.
These are the topics that we are going to be covering.

- Introduction to USD and LOPs
- Asset creation worflow
- Simple assets
- Complex assets
- Manual layout and set dressing
- Using instances in LOPs
- Set dressing using information from Maya
- Using departments inputs/outputs
- Publishing system
- Setup for sequence lighting
- Random bits

This introduction is around 4.30 hours long.
Check it out here.

Mari 4.6 new features and production template /  by Xuan Prada

Hello patrons,

I recorded a new video about the new features in Mari 4.6 released just a few weeks ago. I will also talk about some of the new features in the extension pack 5 and finally I will show you my production template that I've been using lately to do all the texturing and pre-lookDev on many assets for film and tv projects.

This is a big picture of the topics covered in this video. The video will be about 2.5 hours long, and it will be published on my Patreon site.

- Mari 4.6 new features
- New material system explained in depth
- Material ingestion tool
- Optimization settings
- How and where to use geo channels
- New camera projection tools
- Extension pack 5 new features (or my most used tools)
- Production template for texturing and pre-lookDev

All the information on my Patreon feed.

Thanks for your support!
Xuan.

Quick and dirty free IBLs /  by Xuan Prada

Some of my spare IBLs that I shot while ago using a Ricoh Theta. They contain around 12EV dynamic range. Resolution is not pretty good but it stills holds up for look-dev and lighting tasks.

Feel free to download the equirectangular .exrs here.
Please do not use in commercial projects.

Cafe in Barcelona.

Cafe in Barcelona render test.

Hobo hotel.

Hobo hotel render test.

Campus i12 green room.

Campus i12 green room render test.

Campus i12 class.

Campus i12 class render test.

Chiswick Gardens.

Chiswick Gardens render test.

Split EXR in Fusion /  by Xuan Prada

I recently started to use Blackmagic's Fusion at home (budget reasons) and I'm liking it so far but, one of the most important features coming from Nuke, is obviously the ability to shuffle between all the AOVs of your multi channel EXRs. Unfortunately Fusion doesn't support this. It has something called booleans to separate RGB channels but not AOVs.

Chad Ashley pointed me to this third party script that splits a multi channel EXR in many different loaders with each one of your AOVs. Not as good as Nuke's shuffle but good enough!

UV to Mesh /  by Xuan Prada

Mi friend David Munoz Velazquez just pointed me to this great script to flatten geometries based on UV Mapping, pretty useful for re-topology tasks. In this demo I use it to create nice topology for 3D garments in Marvelous Designer. Then I can apply any new simulation changes to the final mesh using morphs. Check it out.

UDIM workflow in Nuke /  by Xuan Prada

Texture artists, matte painters and environment artists often have to deal with UDIMs in Nuke. This is a very basic template that hopefully can illustrate how we usually handle this situation.

Cons

  • Slower than using Mari. Each UDIM is treated individually.
  • No virtual texturing, slower workflow. Yes, you can use Nuke's proxies but they are not as good as virtual texturing.

Pros

  • No paint buffer dependant. Always the best resolution available.
  • Non destructive workflow, nodes!
  • Save around £1,233 on Mari's license.

Workflow

  • I'll be using this simple footage as base for my matte.
  • We need to project this in Nuke and bake it on to different UDIMs to use it later in a 3D package.
  • As geometry support I'm using this plane with 5 UDIMs.
  • In Nuke, import the geometry support and the footage.
  • Create a camera.
  • Connect the camera and footage using a Project 3D node.
  • Disable the crop option of the Project 3D node. If not the proejctions wouldn't go any further than UV range 0-1.
  • Use a UV Tile node to point to the UDIM that you need to work on.
  • Connect the img input of the UV Tile node to the geometry support.
  • Use  a UV Project node to connect the camera and the geometry support.
  • Set projection to off.
  • Import the camera of the shot.
  • Look through the camera in the 3D view and the matte should be projected on to the geometry support.
  • Connect a Scanline Render to the UV Project.
  • Set the projection model to UV.
  • In the 2D view you should see the UDIM projection that we set previously.
  • If you need to work with a different UDIM just change the UV Tile.
  • So this is the basic setup. Do whatever you need in between like projections, painting and so on to finish your matte.
  • Then export all your UDIMs individually as texture maps to be used in the 3D software.
  • Here I just rendered the UDIMs extracted from Nuke in Maya/Arnold.

RGB masks /  by Xuan Prada

We use RGB masks all the time in VFX, don't we?
They are very handy and we can save a lot of extra texture maps combining 4 channels in one single texture map RGB+A.

We use them to mix shaders in look-dev stage, or as IDs for compositing, or maybe as utility passes for things like motion blur o depth.

Let's see how I use RGB masks in my common software: Maya, Clarisse, Mari and Nuke.

Maya

  • I use a surface shader with a layered texture connected.
  • I connect all the shaders that I need to mix to the layered texture.
  • Then I use a remapColor node with the RGB mask connected as mask for each one of the shaders.

This is the RGB mask that I'm using.

  • We need to indicate which RGB channel we want to use in each remapColor node.
  • Then just use the output as mask for the shaders.

Clarisse

  • In Clarisse I use a reorder node connected to my RGB mask.
  • Just indicate the desired channel in the channel order parameter.
  • To convert the RGB channel to alpha just type it in the channel order field.

Mari

  • You will only need a shuffle adjustment layer and select the required channel.

Nuke

  • You can use a shuffle node and select the channel.
  • Or maybe a keyer node and select the channel in the operation parameter. (this will place the channel only in the alpha).

byWord /  by Xuan Prada

At the beginning of the days I used my iPad just for fun but now I use it in a professional way for a lot of different tasks.

This time I’d like to talk to you about one of the applications that I most use on my iPad every single day.

I’m talking about byWord.
It’s a simple text editing software for Mac, iPad and iPhone. Nothing fancy here you might think, and you’re probably true, but the good thing about byWord is that you don’t need to think about anything but writing.
byWord is simple, clear, tidy and will keep you focus on writing, that’s it.

I use it for all writing related stuff, from blogging to outline courses. From planning shootings to write emails. You won’t be distracted by things like type fonts, colors or menu tools.

byWord has nice features like syncing with Dropbox or iCloud, so you can keep all your content in different devices or in the cloud.

Another nice feature is the dark theme which turns your screen to black and your text to white.
This is very useful for dailies sessions, you can write down feedback easily from your vfx supe under dark light conditions in the daily room.
I usually write a few words and then on my desk I just expand all this key words to complete a text with the whole feedback given and a small strategy to address it.

If you are involved in writing related tasks go to http://www.bywordapp.com and give it a try.