Visits to my blog.

After receiving some emails about this, I noticed that most of the visitors coming to my blog come from od[force] community. od[force] is a great place to hang out if your interested in real high end VFX, as a lot of people there are active in the industry and working in places like Dream Works, Sony Imageworks, Disney, SideFX and others.

Although I've been mentioning Blender a lot on my post I still use (and love) Houdini when ever I can, and have the free time of course :-)  

I used to have a personal web page where I would post a lot of my tests done in Houdini, so I should start to post them here as well.

Below is a quick reel I was asked to come up with, related to TD :-|  I make that "weird" face there because there is a relatively small amount of pretty images you actually produce when you're spending long hours trying to  figure out how to optimize/create workflow than actually pressing the "render" button :-) And if you have the chance to press it, it usually is only a proof of concept without any decent texture or lighting.

Here it is anyways, the year was 2006 and the shots description follows below the video. 

Scene 1 – Procedural City: 

Procedural  city  builder  done  using  basic  stamp functions on Copy SOP.  I kept the scene small (only 42 nodes). 

Scene 2 – Particles: 

Subdivided in two shots, the first was just a test with  POPs  but  it  still  came  out  with  a  beautiful flow  and  structure  besides  its  simplicity.    The second  scene  is  a  small  portion  of  a  larger animation showing the flow of material inside an cement  grinding  mill.  The  final  output  was  an interactive presentation for e-learning. 

Scene 3 – Non Photorealistic Rendering Shader : 

NPR  has  been  one  of  my  interests  for  ages because of my background in Painting. This was one  of  the  tests  to  mimic  comic  book  style rendering. Animations were all simple moves, but the  intention  was  seeing  its  behavior  to  moving light and camera. 

Scene 4 – Day to Night and 2D to 3D: 

Two different projects with the same theme. The first challenge was to convert a simple day picture found on the net to a night shot. Later I decided to push this challenge a bit further by modeling the entire scene in 3D to make a camera movement. 

Scene 5 – Unigraphics NX custom tool: 

For the last few years I’ve been working with High End CAD systems for the industry as an instructor and solution provider. This is one example of a customization done for a client using GRIP, a macro language for NX.

Software used:
Houdini, UG-NX, Photoshop and Notepad.