Houdini dailies
Recent Houdini learning dailies:
playlist
lastest video:
demoreel – animation
work in progress
need rerender stuff, replace with better clips
demoreel – fx|script
More of my recent work. It’s missing ~2 recent items, but I’ll append it in time.
demoreel
The fx|script demoreel is updated. As previous reels had apparent errors, I believe this is my first presentable reel.
It’s on http://www.gophercg.com.
inkLogo r01
I should probably reverse playback so smoke grows into the logo text.
Learning more about afterEffects, glad my comping skill is improving a bit.
Water Drip r01
Tutorial: Wacom tablet fix
Wacom + Vista
The problem is common across Graphires and pro series recently. I’m not sure about Cintiq’s since I’m away from our animation lab and just what is a Bamboo.
Actually I experienced a pile of issues with the tablet and Vista. Perhaps getting back the old Graphire and xp would be the improvement.
Fix 1:
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Pen and input/
Enable right click and eraser. Clear everything else on all tabs/parameters.
This removed weird conflicts between Vista’s tablet driver and wacom’s own driver. But Photoshop x64 had no pressure sensitivity, while my other x86, x64 apps are fine. So I installed the latest (5.1.1) wacom driver. PS is fixed, but now I joined everyone with right click/hold causes pausing or staggering issue. It’s reported in max and maya. I must hold right click and move it far enough to see maya menus, so productivity became a serious issue. Colleagues with Intuos also has this issue.
Fix 2 (from online):
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device manager/
Disable wacom virtual HID device
Features/
Remove the Tablet PC Optional Components
This should remove some hogging processes and fix the stagger after restart. My Vista refuses to remove the “components” (mostly handwriting recognition + Journal etc), so I did the optional fix.
Fix 3:
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services/
Disable tablet pc input service
(KEEP TabletServicePen, which is the wacom driver)
This removes the 5 processes from wistip & tapTip. 3 pen_tablet processes remain for wacom. Caution: some CG artists found stopping the Vista service stops tablet use completely (no detection?). However, except for the usual nondetection between hibernation/sleep/boot requiring another reboot, I used the three fixes and Graphire runs slick.
abstract designs
particle concepts & fun with ink. MOV files below.
waving cloth structure
- First time using HDRI. Don’t laugh. Was reading HDRI tutorials before 2003, but when needed, I usually found IBL from normal images (like “LDRI”) sufficient and easy to design my own. For realistic soft environment lighting and GI-like shadows IBL has been great. But HDRI gives more definition to highlights and smoothness.
UPDATE: 2nd revision. I removed the odd flickering (due to mentalray sampling), but left some extra “sparkle” at one point for a starry sky feel. The DOF by floating point control was hard to use, but there’s still some rack focus I hope it’s effective. The “DESIGN” text is clearer now, with new frame compositions for the primary marks.
morphing sphere
- You’ll find a 2 petal and 3 petal pattern. weird?
lots of pastelly balls
- I tried the renderers to find a speedup, since we couldn’t use the shot because of the render times.
hw 45″, mr 3:45″, sw 4″
Yes 4 seconds for Maya software, sw wins again! And for 10k balls, raytraced shadows made more sense since each ball could receive shadows.
Chinese ink
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first try at an ink shot.
I’m gathering some references, and there’s a wide variety, some with apparent methods (like that must be from so and so software + plugin…). Also it’s important not to overthink the movements. Some truly good ink splashes in 3Dare photographed and comped well.
demoreels
I’ve made two demoreels so far, both work in progress. There’s some clips to fix and rerender.
You’ll see it on my site: http://www.gophercg.com
Or here:
demoreel – fx|script on blip.tv
demoreel – animation on blip.tv
JW player embedded update
Originally for a company reel presentation. I’ve made a local version sample portfolio SWF.
Select any from the side menu to play. Notice I tweaked the original JW fullscreen function so it expands from the embedded SWF onto the parent SWF. Fullscreen pretty much acts like youtube.
It’s not my real reel (you won’t find it…yet), just a random sample.
And the updated tutorial’s here:JW player embedded tutorial
