Day 58 : Grand Finale

Today is our final presentation, however there were major hiccups with the embedded gif images and videos on the powerpoint presentation. Received both compliments and critics on our work from the lecturers, but we are still gratified to attain those results within three months in houdini


These three months have been a good learning experience for me, the end result looks nice as well.


I would like to thank all of them who were involved and Mr Douglas and also


Jia bao
For guiding us along with the basics


Ziyaad
Nice working with a good leader


And especially to Mr Ron
For devoting his time to help us out with our work especially when it gets too technically complicated

Day 57 : Preparation in progress

Spent the whole day compiling all the resources i need, to prepare for the presentation

Anyway did a gif image to explain the workflow of lava shader

Volumetric lights

Sea of glass

This is done by Mr Pang in photoshop, getting the visually aesthetic with the balance and contrast. The red and blue contrast. 

Day 56 : Lights rendered

The animated lights was rendered over the weekends, and i bring the sequence into nuke to append the radial glow effect onto it. Was tampering with the rotoscope tool as well

Here's the final animated sequence

There were major problems encountered with the flying characters i processed. Either i neglected to object merge the weapons from the master_rig to the character itself, position in the wrong hand or the mocap data i chosen is too shabby for looping. I am trying to rectify those that can still be salvage, if not i have to reselect a decent mocap data and redo them from scratch, reprocessed a couple now. Painting weights to relieve the deformation as i go along as well

Day 55 : New optimized glass shader

In the morning was binding a few characters skin, equipping them with weapons and painting weights on their horns, just like yesterday

Mr Ron came in the afternoon and pass me the cool shader he built, the first thing to go through is,
He created a attribcreate node with a complicated fit() expression on the X position

He then did a $TY*($DIST*5) expression on the Y position of the point node. The value (5) can be change for the height of the centre. Essentially it was used for the peak to fade gradually from the centre to the verge, so that the edge won't be that blunt, so that the audience won't realize where is the ending point of the waves

$CEY to shift back the geometry to the original pivot position. But remember to delete the channel afterwards else it will conjure jerky animation.

Here's the displacement shader Mr Ron built. The displacement pattern was driven by a cellular noise node. Or alternatively, you can assign a image for the displacement map.  

This super material has many parameters to fiddle around with, which also enables user to assign image map for varying purposes (diff/amb/spec/refl). Particularly the alpha para and alpha perp which i like the most, are meant to control the inner and outer opacity of the geometry, but the geometry requires thickness for it to work

The colour map used.

 

The best thing was this shader renders at superb speed, incredibly fast.

I learnt some lighting techniques, by using spotlight and distantlight with solely a diffuse contribution and a specular contribution for the other to bring out the highlight. I would also have to render the specular pass to create the sparkles effect in comp, hopefully we still have time to finish.

The rendered sequence

Day 54 : Processing character data

Processed five characters meant for the flying battle today and tried to paint weight with the parts the dropfall couldn't fix.

and also attach the weapons to the characters. At certain moments the weapon would penerate through the figures, but since it is a pretty far shot with motion blur applied afterwards, we can conceal this.

Screenshots:

<><><> 



Radial glow with tint of blue

Shown Mr Pang my volumetric lights in nuke. He then suggest to apply a radial gradient at the origins where the light starts and screen it over the background layer, he demostrates that in PS.

Test renders of animating lights & terrain:

Day 53 : Volumetric lights V

Mr Ron said that my lights get blown out during compositing in after effects, which means the lights streak get thinned out. Need to render an alpha channel

I tried compositing in both AE and nuke. I had to play around and conform to the new software. Thankfully ziyaad taught me how to roto out the top part, the intention was to blast up the glow and do some colour correction, indicating the direction of the origins of the lights.

Mr Douglas said that my lights are more or less done, i would try to do an animated sequence of it tomorrow, and consult Mr Ron for the solution of the glass shader.
Mr Douglas also share with us many great insights about how to present in our final week, just fully exhibit all your efforts done in these three months.
Leaving the comp to render the sea of glass sequence for comp tomorrow

Day 52 : Volumetric lights IV

How time files, the next week is our presentation.

Today i duplicate the spotlights and position them according to Mr Douglas's illustration.



Here is what i got, trying to do some test render in sequence and see how it goes.

• Increase the cone delta for the diffuse feel
•  Amplified the noise in litfog
• Increased the noise frequency



 



Day 51 : Volumetric lights III

Trying to tweak and intervene with the attributes of the frequency/size of the holes, and the cone angle/delta of the spotlight.

Mr Ron advises me to try and composite them together to see how it looks, and try to make it glow even more.

Two more lights to go.

Various renders tryout:

Test out in after effects, screen it over the background layer and added glow

Day 50 : Volumetric lights II



I left the computer for test rendering yesterday, it took 16 hours to render around 160 frames together with the sea of glass. The lights are not divided to many lightstreaks yet. Here is some reference pictures for visualisation



Reference pictures:

I learnt from odforce forums that the steps to generate a volumetric light is not that fanciful. And to render fast, i could actually increase the step size on the volume object and to get higher quality, just decrease the step size.

This is a scene file posted by one of the user, using the technique of iso offset (fog volume) with the lights piercing through the trees done by L-system. Simple but yet fascinating







Mr Ron taught me to hide the object from rendering out by ticking the phantom in the geometry tab

Hid the grid

Mr Ron then came by and taught me a conventional method with copy/stamping of emulating many holes in a circle to segregate the one whole light into several light streaks. There frequency/size of the holes is manipulable

Done in photoshop
Another method is to use the light projection, by assigning a grayscale image to it. The light will be casted on the light parts, occluding the dark portion. However it does not work for fog light for unknown reason

Some render test:

Mr douglas told me to be mindful of the position of the light is pointing. And minimum 3 lights will be need

Day 49 : Volumetric lights I

The full hd renders of the lava terrain is suppose to be done by today, but alas the mplay crashes when i tried to save the sequence. Back to square one and re-rendering. Then Mr douglas clarified that actually we don't need full hd, that's only for joyces's clouds

Today, i was told to suppress the sea of glass displacement animation to a very slow and gentle movement, the height of the peak will be very low. So that ziyaad won't face much issues while placing his crowd simulation over it, because if the height of the peak were too high it might cause problems such as characters will be hard to creep on and may slide off.

 

Some flipbook renders test:

This is the one Mr Douglas compromise on

Notice the artefacts near the verge of the glass. It was caused by the extrudevolume, the faces/vertices over there will start flickering when playing. And Mr Douglas came up with a  good solution, by using z-depth map to conceal it, by screening over and blurring it in compositing



The ramp used to manuever the colours, it gets tricky to control because the UV projection is not appropriately set yet



The colour scheme done by Mr Douglas, but not finalized yet



This was the ice cube shader Mr Ron was trying out yesterday, the relief looks nice. I was told to work on the shader after the volumetric lights is done as that was my primary priority for now.



Volumetric lights

My basic setup was there, and Mr Ron reminded me to untick the matte shading for the geometry while rendering in case anything happens  

Suppressed the noise frequency and increase the noise amplitude
Now trying to render it overnight and see how it respond

Reference pictures of LOTR (God Rays)

Anyway i found a very spectacular image which is beautiful and is quite similar to the mood we are trying to achieve, just thought of posting