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.
USD
Solaris Katana interoperability part 1/2 /
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 /
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
USD in depth, part 06 /
Hello everyone,
USD in depth part 06 is dropping today.
This time is all about lighting and rendering.
We will take a look at all the lighting/lookdev/rendering tools available in Solaris.
We will focus mainly on Karma, as it is the propietary Houdini rendering engine and hopefully something that we all can use in production soon.
We will introduce concepts like sequence lighting, shot overrides, interactive render filters, etc.
Some of the topics covered.
- Main takeaways.
- Scene preparation.
- Lighting workflow.
- Sequence lighting.
- Karma settings.
- Motion blur.
- DOF.
- AOVs.
- LPEs.
- Volume rendering.
- MaterialX.
This is a 6 hours long video, so brace yourselves.
All the info on my Patreon site.
Thanks!
Xuan.
USD in depth, part 05 /
Hello patrons,
Part 05 of the USD series is here.
This is a 3 hours video about working with FX layers in USD.
We will explore different situations where we will deal with roundtrips from LOPs to SOPs to LOPs. We will have a look at different types of FX that require different approaches when working with USD.
From vellum simulations, to rigid bodies or pyro simulations. Nothing very fancy but hopefully, it will give you the information that you need when dealing with FX layers of any kind.
We'll also look into the new USD features available in Houdini 19.5
All the info on my Patreon.
Thanks!
Xuan.
USD in depth, part 04 /
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 /
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.
USD in depth, part 02 /
Hello patrons,
USD in depth part 02 is here.
This is another dense video, about 3 hours long talking about USD.
In the first video we talked about data and structuring, in this second video we will be talking about composition in USD.
USD layers can be written and read in different ways, it is very important to know how to use the different composition arcs, specifiers, and everything else that composes a USD file. This will dictate the way you structure your assets and your whole USD pipeline.
Another heavy video, so be patient and drink coffe, you will need both.
All the info on my Patreon.
Thanks!
Xuan.
USD in depth, part 01 /
Hello Patrons,
I'm starting a new series called "USD in depth", where I will be exploring everything USD related. As you probably know USD is a new standard pipeline system/file format based on layers that contain scene descriptions. It is supported by the VFX platform and is or will be the core of many visual effects studios and animation companies around the globe.
In this first video (more than 3 hours) we will be talking about what defines USD. Type of data, USD structure, terminology, attributes and layers. This is a very dense video, so grab a pot of coffee and enjoy.
All the info on my Patreon.
Thanks,
Xuan.
Intro to LOPs and USD /
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.