Renee Marsland - Brain Catalogue

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...

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...

So as mentioned in my prior post, this blog exists primarily as a place to help catalogue and talk through all things I am attempting to teach myself. And the major thing I am trying to teach myself is VFX technical stuff, as I am trying to work my way up into a TD job at the visual effects company I work at on my university holidays. I am currently a render wrangler/frontline support worker at Rising Sun Pictures, and as much as I love my job I would love to move up in to a position where I get to create things and solve problems. I am a computer science student at university, so I will undoubtedly post about the things I learn there but my primary goal is to teach myself the technical side of Houdini. Which means I will need to buff up on my python and hscript knowledge. As well as learn the inner and outer workings of Houdini. There is other software I will need/want to learn for the role but I have decided to start here, since it plays such a big role in the place I work. I ...