crowd

Crowds part 02 /  by Xuan Prada

Hello Patrons,

As promised, this is the second part of the crowds series.
In this very long video, almost 3.30 hours, I will cover creating agents from scratch. We will start by building the rigs bone by bone. Then retargetting mocap from different sources, creating collision layers, etc, and finally creating the crowd simulations.

We will be adding cloth and hair layers for simulation.
This is a more advanced crowd setup, so I encourage you to take a look at the first video.

I will conclude this series with Crowds part 03 - ragdolls, hopefully next month.

Thanks!
Xuan.

Crowds part 01 /  by Xuan Prada

Hello Patrons,

This is the first of two parts of my Houdini crowds training.
The first video is an introduction to the system. I will cover everything from agent creation, motion capture clips, props attachment, configuring contraints for feet contact, transition clips, and rendering in Solaris with Karma.

I will also explain in the video what are the plans for the second video, which will be a bit more advanced and it will touch on some important topics not covered in the first video.

I hope you like it.
Head to my Patreon to get all of this.

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

Clarisse shading layers: Crowd in 5 minutes /  by Xuan Prada

One feature that I really like in Clarisse are the shading layers. With them you can drive shaders based on naming convention or location of assets in the scene. With this method you can assign shaders to a very complex scene structure in no time. In this particular case I'll be showing you how to shade an entire army and create shading/texturing variations in just a few minutes.

I'll be using an alembic cache simulation exported from Maya using Golaem. Usually you will get thousand of objects with different naming convention, which makes the shading assignment task a bit laborious. With shading layer rules in Clarisse we can speed up a lot this tedious process

  • Import an alembic cache with the crowd simulation through file -> import -> scene
  • In this scene I have 1518 different objects.
  • I'm going to create an IBL rig with one of my HDRIs to get some decent lighting in the scene.
  • I created a new context called geometry where I placed the army and also created a ground plane.
  • I also created another context called shaders where I'm going to place all my shaders for the soldiers.
  • In the shaders context I created a new material called dummy, just a lambertian grey shader.
  • We are going to be using shading layers, to apply shaders globally based on context and naming convention. I created a shading layers called army (new -> shading layer).
  • With the pass (image) selected, select the 3D layer and apply the shading layer.
  • Using the shading layer editor, add a new rule to apply the dummy shader to everything in the scene.
  • I'm going to add a rule for everything called heavyArmor.
  • Then just configure the shader for the heavyArmour with metal properties and it's correspondent textures.
  • Create a new rule for the helmets and apply the shader that contains the proper textures for the helmets.
  • I keep adding rules and shaders for different parts of the sodliers.
  • If I want to create random variation, I can create shading layers for specific names of parts or even easier and faster, I can put a few items in a new context and create a new shading rule for them. For the bodies I want to use caucasian and black skin soldiers. I grabbed a few bodies and place them inside a new context called black. Then create a new shading rules where I apply a shader with different skin textures to all the bodies in that context.
  • I repeated the same process for the shields and other elements.
  • At the end of the process I can have a very populated army with a lot of random texture variations in just a few minutes.
  • This is how my shading layers look like at the end of the process.