Renee Marsland - Brain Catalogue

Hello again, long time no post. I recently decided to get back into posting on this blog again after I have been documenting my learning over on my wiki found HERE . It has been fun writing about new (mostly Python related) knowledge I have been accumulating but I decided I wanted to write about other things that may be considered more personal and not really belonging on a wiki about programming and VFX development. So while this blog started out at something that I would use for writing about my progress in the VFX field, I think I will also use this space for more personal writings. Starting with this one in early 2019 about books I want to read this year. I have set myself a goal on goodreads  to read 20 books this year. To be honest I would like to read more than that but I figure a good start, especially since I only read 6 books last year. So here is a list of the books I want to read this year in no particular order: 1. The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss (T...

These are some notes I have taken while watching some beginner Houdini videos, primarily discussing the language of Houdini. NOTE: Keep in mind that this is pretty messy and information is a bit all over the place. I am basically treating this post as a way of taking notes while learning new things on Houdini basics from the SideFX site. Nodes/Operators Surface Operators (SOPS) :    Deals with geometry.   Geometry , volumes, attributes, VFX.     e.g. Procedural Soccer Ball - Network Model created from network to the right. Channel Operators (CHOPS):   Deals with motion.   Procedural motion FX (this can be used in place of keyframes for a more realistic motion), e.g. Add motion FX to the Y axis alter the way that the motion behaves kinematic solvers, timing, sound, constraints Dynamic Operators (DOPS):   Deals with simulation.   Solvers, forces and collisions.   e.g. Fl...

Today I took a look into 'Object Packing', which is where you birth geometry onto surfaces without any geo overlapping eachother. Going by this cool mini-tutorial HERE , this effect could be used to create Ferrofluids . Now this concept is a little advanced for me at this stage but after seeing the term 'object packing' get brought up in various places, I wanted to take a quick look into it to see what it actually implies and the sort of things you can create. Here was my finished product: Kinda looks like a spreading virus, a pretty cool effect that can be achieved farely quickly. There was a lot of nodes used in this process that I am not overly familiar with yet so I'm not going to try and go over them here. This tutorial was obviously intended for people that already had a good idea about what a lot of these things did. I will however be going into some of the other videos on this channel ( FX Hive ) as I think they have some longer, and more indepth...

Today I built a little destruction test using rigid bodies! Here are the different tools I used while following along with THIS SideFX tutorial. Shatter (shelf tool) & Exploded View (geo node) First I used one of the test geometry objects  and applied the Shatter shelf tool to it. This cuts the geometry up into seperate pieces. To see all these different pieces/chunks you put down a geometry node called Exploded View , forcing the chunks to break apart. To up the number of chunks created just go into the chunkcenters scatter node and up the Force Total Count. RBD Objects (shelf tool) Making sure the object is above the ground so we can drop and smash it, then we need to actually turn this into a rigid body. To do this you have to go to the Rigid Bodies tab, then use RBD objects to turn a selected object (our test geo) into a rigid body object. This will create the AutoDopNetwork that contains our Rigid Body Solver , turning our geo into a rigid body. The solver ...

So after 3 weeks of Uni and not getting back into my 3D study, I am finally forcing myself to learn some things. It's a friday night and I have forced myself to, instead of playing games or generally lounge around, actually start doing some Houdini stuff. I have decided to dive into the basics of SOPs. SOPs networks are responsible for creating and modifying Houdini geometry. Some interesting nodes I found Some of the operators you can use on geometry are polybevel, normal, polyreduce, polywire. I found the polywire node particularly cool, as it lets you create a wireframe of your object: A lot of these were very familiar looking operations to me since I have seen a lot of these things when using Maya, however seeing it used as a node network is very interesting. Especially the speed in which complex shapes can be created. The delete node is something I hadn't seen before. Being able to delete stuff based on rules, such as deleteing any face that is facing a certa...

Since my workplace often ran their 3D tools on Linux machines, I decided to set-up a "linux box" and install Houdini (among other things) at home. Obviously installing software onto a linux computer is different to the quick and easy installation process on a Windows PC. So here are the steps I took to get it up and running on Ubuntu: 1. Download the installation file from the SideFX website . 2. Run the following on the .tar file you just downloaded      (the version I had downlaoded was houdini 16.5) : tar xvzf houdini-16.5.378-linux_x86_64_gcc4.8.tar.gz 3. Then run: sudo ./houdini-16.5.378-linux_x86_64_gcc4.8/houdini.installer 4. Once you have run through the installation, in order to get the 'houdini' command to work in                terminal you need to setup the houdini environment variables, such as the path to the Houdini              binaries (as stated in the houdin...