NATE SHAW LIGHTING & LOOKDEV VFX REEL 2014 from NATE on Vimeo.
Showing posts with label effects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label effects. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Monday, October 20, 2014
Divergent: CG Dog & Houdini Feather System
While I was organizing my latest reel I thought it would be fun to make some gifs of my work in the past few years. The first one and my favorite project so far at Method is Divergent. For the film I lookdev'd a cg dog and some cg ravens. Conveniently someone already made a gif of the dog that I did for the mirror room sequence.
The Dog
The dog was a pretty straight forward fur groom. Of course I used Houdini's fur grooming tools, not quite out of the box but customized for better control. The challenging part of this groom was the length of the fur and the fact that I had to match a live dog exactly. Long fur tends to have S shaped bends where the fur bends back on itself a couple times. To get this effect I combo'd direction, curl, and frizz attributes. It wasn't always a perfect S curve but it got close enough. The on set crew filmed a live dog but due to the complexity of the sequence and the infinite mirror reflection the environment, we had to supplement the further back reflections with a cg dog. This combined with the fact that I also had to do a jaw replacement for the dog in a few shots, half his face real half cg, and a few full cg hero dogs, the dog had to match perfectly. This just meant a lot of time with a line up camera going back and forth between the live dog and the cg one. I learned a couple of things on this groom. First was that its sometimes easier to to get precise coloring with painting color attributes in Houdini rather than relying on a texture artist. Since most texture artists don't have much experience with fur, they tend to just paint color patches where they see them. This is problematic with long fur though. Since the fur gets it's color from the root point attribute in Houdini, you have to paint the patches a little offset from where it's supposed to go. I found the feedback loop was much faster to handle this in Houdini rather than back and forth with a texture painter. When I say that I painted color attributes, I mean I painted masks on the geo and drove all of the color in the shader. I believe I had about 15 different mask attributes to drive patterning in this groom, from root and tip color to fades and solids. In addition to handling the shot lighting, the lighters also had to run the fur sims for the dog. Once I dialed in the sim settings, I created a system for the lighters to paint in areas of fur floppiness and a dial to easily control how much floppiness the fur needed in what area. In the end, I'm proud of how the dog turned out, I even got a full cg dog shot, the one in the gif above.
The Ravens
The ravens were a bit more technically challenging than the dog. I ended up using two fur systems and a feather instancing system for various areas of the bird. The easiest feathers were the ones on the head. Those are the finer feathers that look almost like fur. For that I used a straight ahead Houdini fur procedural. The body feathers were slightly trickier. They needed to look like actual feathers and the VFX Supe wanted them to be ruffled up as well. This meant that a displacement map wouldn't work as well as actual geometry. I ended up modeling about six feathers of varying sizes from curves in Houdini. I then made my own grooming system for instancing these feathers. I could paint direction and size and even had the control to animate the feathers raising and lowering on the back of the bird. From these attributes I used Houdini's fast point instancing to put these feathers on the birds at render time. It was a pretty efficient way of getting a really nice textural feel for the body of the ravens. For the wing feathers I modified the fur system to generate fur to look like flat wing feathers. This was a little tricky to do and I built off the work of some of my coworkers earlier feather jobs. In the past at Method, our earlier birds were modeled with curves and I was the first to use the fur procedural for them. Part of the system required grooming every feather to the right shape. Since then, I've modified my feather system on later jobs to use modeled outlines of feathers to derive the shape. The system worked pretty well and the render times were fairly reasonable, though when we got up to 15-40 birds in the frame at a time, some of them full frame, renders started taking a little longer.
The Dog
The dog was a pretty straight forward fur groom. Of course I used Houdini's fur grooming tools, not quite out of the box but customized for better control. The challenging part of this groom was the length of the fur and the fact that I had to match a live dog exactly. Long fur tends to have S shaped bends where the fur bends back on itself a couple times. To get this effect I combo'd direction, curl, and frizz attributes. It wasn't always a perfect S curve but it got close enough. The on set crew filmed a live dog but due to the complexity of the sequence and the infinite mirror reflection the environment, we had to supplement the further back reflections with a cg dog. This combined with the fact that I also had to do a jaw replacement for the dog in a few shots, half his face real half cg, and a few full cg hero dogs, the dog had to match perfectly. This just meant a lot of time with a line up camera going back and forth between the live dog and the cg one. I learned a couple of things on this groom. First was that its sometimes easier to to get precise coloring with painting color attributes in Houdini rather than relying on a texture artist. Since most texture artists don't have much experience with fur, they tend to just paint color patches where they see them. This is problematic with long fur though. Since the fur gets it's color from the root point attribute in Houdini, you have to paint the patches a little offset from where it's supposed to go. I found the feedback loop was much faster to handle this in Houdini rather than back and forth with a texture painter. When I say that I painted color attributes, I mean I painted masks on the geo and drove all of the color in the shader. I believe I had about 15 different mask attributes to drive patterning in this groom, from root and tip color to fades and solids. In addition to handling the shot lighting, the lighters also had to run the fur sims for the dog. Once I dialed in the sim settings, I created a system for the lighters to paint in areas of fur floppiness and a dial to easily control how much floppiness the fur needed in what area. In the end, I'm proud of how the dog turned out, I even got a full cg dog shot, the one in the gif above.
The Ravens
The ravens were a bit more technically challenging than the dog. I ended up using two fur systems and a feather instancing system for various areas of the bird. The easiest feathers were the ones on the head. Those are the finer feathers that look almost like fur. For that I used a straight ahead Houdini fur procedural. The body feathers were slightly trickier. They needed to look like actual feathers and the VFX Supe wanted them to be ruffled up as well. This meant that a displacement map wouldn't work as well as actual geometry. I ended up modeling about six feathers of varying sizes from curves in Houdini. I then made my own grooming system for instancing these feathers. I could paint direction and size and even had the control to animate the feathers raising and lowering on the back of the bird. From these attributes I used Houdini's fast point instancing to put these feathers on the birds at render time. It was a pretty efficient way of getting a really nice textural feel for the body of the ravens. For the wing feathers I modified the fur system to generate fur to look like flat wing feathers. This was a little tricky to do and I built off the work of some of my coworkers earlier feather jobs. In the past at Method, our earlier birds were modeled with curves and I was the first to use the fur procedural for them. Part of the system required grooming every feather to the right shape. Since then, I've modified my feather system on later jobs to use modeled outlines of feathers to derive the shape. The system worked pretty well and the render times were fairly reasonable, though when we got up to 15-40 birds in the frame at a time, some of them full frame, renders started taking a little longer.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Snow Blind
About a year ago I started this project as a way to improve my reel, specifically in cloth simulation. Along the way I realized that cloth sim is very difficult and, at times, very tedious. However, I also found that I loved painting backgrounds for animations. Its so fun! My bro, Nick Avallone, did the character animation for the first two shots (its so good, thanks Nick!) and I did all the rest. I probably won't be starting on any more 3D animations anytime soon, I don't really have the hardware to handle it. I imagined this piece as the first 30 seconds of a longer piece. (though I haven't written anything longer... yet!)
Monday, February 20, 2012
Houdini Snow Tool WIP
Houdini's greatest selling point as a 3D app is its procedural workflow. I wanted to create a tool that could place snow geo on environments without having to model the snow. You could just build out your environment without snow and then use this tool to generate the snow on top of everything. I spent a morning with it and came up with a rough beginning. The basics are in there but it could be refined a bit:
You'll notice that which ever way the torus is rotated the snow stays on top. As is, the snow isn't shaded yet. I know that I could do all of the snow in displacement and I may yet play with that a little more as I work with it.
You'll notice that which ever way the torus is rotated the snow stays on top. As is, the snow isn't shaded yet. I know that I could do all of the snow in displacement and I may yet play with that a little more as I work with it.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Smoke Column Viewport Render
A viewport render from my smoke sim. The shot opens with Fisher opening up the box (he hasn't been animated yet) and the smoke columns shoot out and land. The Shadow monsters haven't been simmed out for this shot yet and they won't be visible until the smoke hits the ground.
Massive is going fairly well. I am pretty comfortable with my opening town sim when the townspeople are just milling about. Other than the one agent that decided to stop, turn directly towards the camera, and wave for about 30 seconds, the agents behave as expected. The "panic" mode part of the sim isn't perfect yet. They tend to ignore the painted boundaries and run right into the water or through buildings.
URL for the video if it doesn't work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MRqjYoY3SY
Massive is going fairly well. I am pretty comfortable with my opening town sim when the townspeople are just milling about. Other than the one agent that decided to stop, turn directly towards the camera, and wave for about 30 seconds, the agents behave as expected. The "panic" mode part of the sim isn't perfect yet. They tend to ignore the painted boundaries and run right into the water or through buildings.
URL for the video if it doesn't work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MRqjYoY3SY
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Shadow Monster R&D and Test Renders
In Massive class last Wednesday, Chris mentioned that exporting deforming geometry in fbxs was going to be a problem. I needed it because I was going to be rendering the shadow monster crowd sim in Houdini after doing the volume simulation on it. As a fix he recommended breaking apart every limb and section on the shadow monsters and then parenting each individual to the rig. After doing this, animating a stand up sequence, and then running a volume sim on it I decided that the smoke covers up most of the noticeable seams on the joints and this will be a workable solution. I went ahead and animated a run and a walk with the broken limb rig.
The animation isn't perfect on the characters but it should be sufficient for the shots that I need. There are a total of four shots with shadow monsters in it. The first is the shot where they materialize out of the smoke columns, the second is where they assemble, cheer and then begin their run, the next is the birds eye view of the monsters causing mayhem in the town and the final shot is where one shadow monster chases a townsperson across the scene. Only two of the shots are crowd sims. I decided that it would be easier to hand animate the shadow monsters materializing from the columns. Since the frames will have to be reversed, trying to fit Massive into the effect will be far more trouble than it is worth. I'll be able to place the massive agents to match up with the hand animated characters using Chris's Houdini script. I've got points in Houdini with the normals facing in the right direction in preparation for placing them in Massive.
I am getting pretty happy with the smoke effects. The shader needs to be tweaked a bit. Right now there is a tiny bit too much fine noise. Maybe animating the offset of it will help to make it look a little more believable.
Higher quality versions of those are here and here.
I've modeled three more skull variations bring me to a total of 10 and probably the number of shadow monsters in my crowd. The two curved horned human variation will be the Hero shadow monster.
Dirtied up Fisher's vest a little.
Rendered a sequence from the first camera to test the water's wave speed. The water looks like it is moving a bit slow with the amplitude as high as it is. I'll need to refine this a bit more. Additionally there is some flickering in the water on the right side of the clip that I'll have to look into.
A note about the farm. I rendered this sequence on the farm and I was getting 1 to 3 minute renders. However, when one of the render machines got to a certain point (frame 40 or so) it just gave up. It didn't stop rendering but my render times shot up to 10 to 20 minutes and eventually 4 to 5 hours for no reason at all. The those frames are no different than any of the other ones. I suspect if I was to kill the job and then restart it the remaining 2 frames would take two minutes to render instead of six hours.
The animation isn't perfect on the characters but it should be sufficient for the shots that I need. There are a total of four shots with shadow monsters in it. The first is the shot where they materialize out of the smoke columns, the second is where they assemble, cheer and then begin their run, the next is the birds eye view of the monsters causing mayhem in the town and the final shot is where one shadow monster chases a townsperson across the scene. Only two of the shots are crowd sims. I decided that it would be easier to hand animate the shadow monsters materializing from the columns. Since the frames will have to be reversed, trying to fit Massive into the effect will be far more trouble than it is worth. I'll be able to place the massive agents to match up with the hand animated characters using Chris's Houdini script. I've got points in Houdini with the normals facing in the right direction in preparation for placing them in Massive.
I am getting pretty happy with the smoke effects. The shader needs to be tweaked a bit. Right now there is a tiny bit too much fine noise. Maybe animating the offset of it will help to make it look a little more believable.
Higher quality versions of those are here and here.
I've modeled three more skull variations bring me to a total of 10 and probably the number of shadow monsters in my crowd. The two curved horned human variation will be the Hero shadow monster.
Dirtied up Fisher's vest a little.
Rendered a sequence from the first camera to test the water's wave speed. The water looks like it is moving a bit slow with the amplitude as high as it is. I'll need to refine this a bit more. Additionally there is some flickering in the water on the right side of the clip that I'll have to look into.
A note about the farm. I rendered this sequence on the farm and I was getting 1 to 3 minute renders. However, when one of the render machines got to a certain point (frame 40 or so) it just gave up. It didn't stop rendering but my render times shot up to 10 to 20 minutes and eventually 4 to 5 hours for no reason at all. The those frames are no different than any of the other ones. I suspect if I was to kill the job and then restart it the remaining 2 frames would take two minutes to render instead of six hours.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Smoke Trail Test
Houdini viewport render of the smoke trail effect for when the shadow monsters come out of the box. In terms of shape and look this is getting fairly close to what I am looking for. I'm thinking I'll need to enlarge the end of the smoke column as it reaches the ground to accommodate the shadow monsters rising from the ground. Depending on the renders it may need to be denser as well. I still need to Up Res it and shade it properly.
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