assets

Professional photogrammetry 02 /  by Xuan Prada

Here is the trailer for "Professional photogrammetry episode 02".

In this 4-ish hours video I will talk about scanning in natural environments. We will cover everything needed for scanning and processing two different types of natural assets.

The first asset is a 3D asset, the second one is a ground surface. Both scanning and processing workflows are completely different for each, but hopefully after this video, you should be able to grow your own library of natural environment assets.

We go through equipment, scanning patterns, camera settings, etc. Then we will process everything in order to create final high quality assets ready for visual effects and real time.

I hope you enjoy this video, if you like it I guess I will do more videos about scanning in the wild/city.

Thanks!
Xuan.

All the info on my Patreon.

Professional photogrammetry 01 /  by Xuan Prada

Hello patrons,

Let's take a break from the USD training, we'll come back to it in the next video.
For now, let's enjoy a 4 hours video about professional photogrammetry.
I reckon this will be a short series, maybe 3 videos about photogrammetry acquisition and processing.

In today's video we will talk about cross polarization in a controlled environment for capturing 3D assets. We will discuss how polarization works, camera gear, how to take photos properly and how to process the data to create nice looking assets for VFX and real time.

All the information on my Patreon.

I hope you like it.
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.

Creases from Maya to Houdini /  by Xuan Prada

This is a quick tip on how to take creases information from Maya to Houdini to be rendered with Arnold. If you are like me and you are using Houdini as scene assembler this is something that you will have to deal with sooner or later.

  • In Maya, I have a simple cube with creases, on the right side you can see how it looks once subdivided twice.

  • Not only you can take creases information into Houdini, you can also export subdivision information and HtoA will interpret it automatically. Make sure you add catclark subdivision type and 2 iterations, or whatever you need.

  • When exporting the alembic caches you need to include the arnold parameters that take care of subdivision and creases. Actually there is no extra parameter for creases, by including subdivision parameters you will already get the creases information.

  • Note that the arnold parameters in Maya start with ar_arnold_parameter, for example ar_subdiv_iterations. But in Houdini arnold parameters don’t use de ar prefix. Because of that make sure you are exporting the parameter without the ar prefix.

  • All this can be of course happen automatically in your pipeline while publishing assets. It actually should to make artists life easier and avoid mistakes.

  • That’s it, if you import the alembic cache in Houdini both creases and subdivisions should render as expected. This information can be overwritten in sops with arnold parameters.