![]() FX Artists typically garner a tonne of knowledge about the natural world in order to convincingly create things we've never seen while also re-creating digital versions of things for financial or practical reasons. ![]() With a strong alchemy of art and science, the world of natural (and unnatural) phenomena is the FX Artist's playground. Technology is advancing exponentially every year and there are more tools and resources at our disposal than ever before. You might be simulating a monolithic tidal wave one day and then digitally casting spells for Harry Potter the next. No two projects are the same and quite often, no two days are either. It will be fun to start making my own shaders in the future.Working in the FX Department is an exciting place to be these days. I really enjoyed the materials/shader section of the tutorial and feel like a have a bit of a knack for this part of the Houdini 15 workflow. Simple matter of adding a transform node and then making the adjustment. And finally, I brought the race-car up a bit so that its wheels were placed correctly on the new city model street. I also adjusted the lighting to give the background a better look. I had no trouble bringing the model in and placing it correctly. The model is provided as part of the Introduction to Houdini 15 course. The last piece in my project is to bring in the city geometry using the merge command from the File>Merge menu. But we'll see how this idea holds up in several months when I've rendered a lot more projects. ![]() Still, it seems (at this point in my learning curve) that the Houdini rendering is not quite as robust as other renderers I've used. Rendering in Houdini is fast, but that's also because I have a high-end GPU in my workstation (NVIDIA Titan X), I would think Sidefx would probably have spent a lot of time making the rendering as quick as they can. The Render View even allows you to adjust the size of the render view and perhaps select a specific area on the object you are render in order to render it first. You have to see the parameter changes to the new shader in real time or else the process could be hours long. If you are making a new shader, like I was with the new Principled Chrome Shader. The advantage of this method is that it adjusts in real time. A better option is to use the Render View tab and create a render using your main scene pane. Once you've got the render node done, you can choose to use the Render Viewer (called the MPlay Viewer) to render a scene at whatever resolution you like. Rendering in Houdini is relatively simple, you lay down a render node, which requires a light and a camera (both are simple to create and place). Pretty neat! Now I know that it's possible to simply make your own shaders for whatever materials you need for your scene. ![]() Starting with a generic oxidized steel shader, I was able, by following instructions, to create a bright, brushed metal look by adjusting only three elements of the shader: color, reflection and roughness. Now I know why: it's so easy to create your own shader from scratch, which is what I did for the chrome shader. In my last journal, I had wondered why Houdini 15 came with so few materials compared to other 3D applications. John Moncrief, the tutor in the course I'm following, is especially good an explaining the shader system. The Principled shaders are new to Houdini 15 and were designed specifically for artists: they are easy to use and yet there are enough controls to create excellent shaders for practically every kind of material. Houdini provides 4 generic shaders in the application: Displacement, Mantra surface, Principled and Surface Mode shaders.
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