Recreating my pyro logic, starting simple. Not everything implemented just yet. Trying to hit a higher quality bar to prove to myself, I can do it! And apply it to my personal project once have a simple RnD with all elements composed. Computer having issues simming at this res unfortunately, perhaps 64 gb not enough to go after my target quality.
Image on right side, learned a cool trick, taking your field and blurring / sharpening based on values, and remapping into a vector emission color, multiplied by a remapped scalar value.
OCEAN TILING/ CRYSTAL STUDIES
Testing Ocean tiling fixing, a problem I previously thought was only solvable in post or comp.
Testing some random crystal shading ideas on Complex vs Simple geometry.
ABSTRACT ROCK STRUCTURES
Ended up being too evil looking for car commercial (blame my fantasy bias!) — we ended up going toward a more honeycomb / basalt column look, to feel more modern and friendly. Which Peter Claes, gave some really cool different approaches to that! And had a cool way to smooth and blend concave areas, without smoothing convex areas with volume operations. This gave power curves where geo would of intersected creating hard lines.
Just a sample of “Obsidian Structures” that we were going to scatter around in a shot (These are the super simple shapes). Unfortunately not my entire workflow shown. These shapes originally would be based off a terrain “spike” mountain, I fractured into a subset of 15 different shapes, emulating a metropolitan area, taller in middle. And ran terrain operations on a pre transformed version of those objects, and then post transformed, to work around heights field 2d restriction, and feel organic and eroded. After which they would of went through this shaping technique demonstrated here : with volume deformation/sculpting, and geo displacement and with clean procedural UV’s. This would of gave layout a great library to start with to continue creating a city of rocks that emulated common sky scraper skylines.
Was cool art direction, abstract forms of rock to imitate a city in naturalistic form.
Wish we ended up going toward our abstract structure, and then start creating, secondary, and tertiary reads at the bottoms of the primary forms, to create a blended cascading effect. Epic! Oh well, great learning experience! One of my personal projects maybe!
The other abstract form, that was more honeycombey / basalt. Art direction ended up going more literal, and we scrapped the abstract shapes idea completely.
FOG DEV
Opengl fog assets. Created an HDA for other artists, to draw a curve that sourced these vdb instances - with control to adjust randomized yaw and pitch separately, with amount to scatter around curve, and how far, and scale with control ramp and powers. Also determine packing / point replication to create more interesting structures. Ended up being fairly expensive pass, as going inside of volumes, would likely want to cluster and combine packs of volumes for ray marching, after scattering, per shot.
ROCK VOLUME SCULPTING
VDB Rock Sculpting. All the same object rotated and scaled. I found that a lot of people try to completely procedural-ise, the entire process of rock creation in houdini. I found so far sculpting or blocking out the initial shapes with rough geometry before doing volume operations, resulted in something more visually appealing, than for example, trying to fracture and randomly keep pieces to create interesting shapes.
Python Object Merger
1st python script to quickly create object merges! (The most tedious repetitive node for me!). Learned a lot, hope to ease into incorporating Python more and more, without feeling overwhelmed now.