New Homepage Online!! November 29, 2008
Posted by Daniel in : General , add a commentIt was time for a redesign! I switched to Wordpress which is more a blogging system than the cms I was using. The big advantage is that you can subscribe a rss-feed to get a message as soon as I add some content (just click on the orange feed icon on the ride side of the adress bar). And the commenting is much easier now. I hope you enjoy it!
Here’s a last screenshot of the old homepage:
Eureko November 22, 2008
Posted by Daniel in : Projects , add a commentWe were asked to create two crowd shots for this commercial. We had three weeks to deliver them so I build up a crowd system from scratch.I used a model library with around 100 meshes and textures and got animation cycles for the crowd. This was my first Houdini only project. I was really impressed how easy it was setting this up in Houdini. The rendering was done in Mantra. Using delayed read archives it was possible to render 10.000 people with three 2 k texture maps per character, raytraced shadows, ambient occlusion and motion blur in around 10 minutes.
Here are the two shots we did:
Mattoni November 17, 2008
Posted by Daniel in : Projects , add a commentWe were asked to create a water dress for a Mattoni commercial directed by Matthias Zentner.
After trying out several approaches (and no one worked) we finally decided to do the simulation in Maya using a custom fluid force field (an partly implemented version of this paper).
The dress was split up in several layers :
* the base layer covering her body with a thin surface (~750k particles)
* particles which were shot against her upper body and got visible with their first collision, to get some streams pouring down her body (~300k)
* particles emitted from dynamic curves which were attached to her body. The particles again just became visible after their first collision (~150k)
* and the skirt layer which should stay as a closed surface as long as possible (~300k). After breaking up some of the particles were replaced and some got killed to get lighter drops at the border (~100k)
Here my part ended…
The particle caches were then imported into houdini with a custom Phyton SOP, meshed and rendered with mantra’s PBR renderer.
Realflow was used to create additional feature splashes which were rendered in Mental Ray.
With this system running we then had to create 22 shots in three weeks.
Clip 1: First you see one of the particle simulation layers done in Maya, second is a meshed version of that and the last part is a demonstration of the implemented liquid force field.
Clip 2: Here you can see several versions of the skirt element.
Gran Centenario November 16, 2008
Posted by Daniel in : Projects , add a commentWe had to create dust effects and angel wings for a clip by Matthias Zentner. It’s about two people becoming angels.
So for the dust I created a particle system with sprites and instance geometry for the debris. The wings were a bit more complicated. We split it up into the covering top feathers - which were created using particles with instanced feathers:
and the long main feathers which were attached to curves. To get rid of interpenetrations I wrote a plugin deformer for Maya which traced a ray for each vertex of each feather against a nurbsplane which was lofted between the curves (representing the overall shape of the wing). Each feather was lifted from the rayhit-point according to the luminance of a queried ramp-texture - so we were able to get nicely shaped volume into the wings.
Here are a few shots:
