Solaris

Solaris Katana interoperability part 1/2 /  by Xuan Prada

Hello patrons,

This is small trailer for the video Houdini Solaris / Katana interoperability part 1/2.
The full video is published only for Patrons.
The whole thing is divided in two videos, the first one is around 2.5 hours and hopefully next month I can publish the second video covering the rest of the topics.

In this first video we are covering.

- Working template in Solaris.
- Working template in Katana.
- Full assets from Solaris to Katana.
- Modifying/overriding looks in Katana.
- Geometry assets from Solaris to Katana.
- Publishing looks as KLF.
- Publishing looks as USD files.
- Full assembly USD files.

All the information on my Patreon.

Thanks!
Xuan.

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

USD in depth, part 04 /  by Xuan Prada

Hello patrons,

USD in depth part 04 is here.
In the last episode we talked about asset authoring in USD and Solaris. I spent many hours after that publishing all the assets from Aninmal Logic's lab scene using my asset creation HDA, in the way that I like to publish assets. Now that everything is ready we will move on to the next stages of the pipeline.

In this video we will talk about assembly, the process where we create a set using all the available assets created before. Solaris has multiple tools for assembling scenes, including references, the stage manager, the layout tool, the drop tool, instances, scatterers, etc. We will look into all of those.

Once the assembly is done, we will look into shot setups, where we will establish the structure of a shot, including all the elements that will be needed later on. Part of this process is also layout and set dressing, where we will be creating cameras a shot specific overrides.

We will publish a few USD layers that will be referenced by the animation department. In this step of the pipeline we will look into how to author animation directly in Solaris and also how to import USD animated caches coming from different DCCs to be used in a shot.

Another 3 plus hours of professional USD training plus a big data set ready to be used in Houdini Solaris.

All the info on my Patreon website.

Thanks!
Xuan.

USD in depth, part 03 /  by Xuan Prada

Hello patrons!

USD in depth part 03 is here. This is where the action starts to happen.
We will spend around 3 hours in Houdini Solaris talking about asset creation.

I have a bunch of different scenarios that you will face while working with USD and assets. From very simple assets to more complicated ones with multiple variations for geometry and lookdev.

While exploring all the different options, we will create a re-usable template that you can use to standardize all your assets very quickly. We will also take a look at the component builder provided with the latest versions of Solaris that can also help you to prototype assets quickly.

As I said, about 3 hours of professional USD content that I'm hoping it can be useful for you when dealing with USD in the future.

This is the third video in a row about USD. Still a bunch of videos left to cover everything that I want to cover about USD at this point. But I'm thinking that we should take a break from USD in the next video. I know not everyone is super keen to learn USD (but you should!). I was planning to do one or two videos about professional photogrammetry, covering cross polarization and multiple cameras setup, surface scanning for PBR materials, drone photogrammetry and photometric capturing. Let me know what you think.

All the info on my Patreon site.

Thanks!

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.