Here’s another update on the ‘exhaust wall’ part of the ‘derezzing’ sequence. As I was getting the exhaust wall network up to a level I was satisfied with, I figured, why not make it a tool and apply it to the red bike easily. That seemed like a jolly good idea, so I quickly got to work.

First, however, let me show the results coming out of a test render of my new tool (8 times, slow motion). Note that this render focusses completely on the exhaust walls. The background is still a placeholder, so is the grid (too low res texture), and the red cycle animation definitely needs quite some animation love, especially when it hits the ground. It’s also the ‘raw’ render output, with only sRGB applied. But…. with all those disclaimers:

View in high resolution: H264.

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I just found a nice first few frames dropping out of a first test render for my new exhaust wall shader:

Note that this is straight out of the render, no comp work done it at all, not even applying the fresnel pass to tone down reflections a bit, no blurs, etc. It does nicely show of the new turbulence, reflect and refract parts of my new wall shader..

Anyway, I thought I’d share this quickly before I push a full animation through my basic comp setup in the coming days, while I finish animating and dynamics on the crash.

Cheers,

Erik

To place the cycle crash in context, I’ve started animating a short sequence (roughly based on my ‘previz‘). This is basically what leads to the cycle crashing. My son was adamant that the blue cycle be the one that snuffs it, so that’s what happens. I’ve rendered the second camera angle with the frame rate cranked up by a factor of eight. This will allow for moving in and out of slow motion during this part of the animation.

Here’s a quick flat render of the animation:

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As I’m wrapping up another fun project, it is time for some long overdue updates on my blog.

I still haven’t found the time/energy to make that ‘build a wave animation’ screen capture. This is still very much in the planning but I’m going to stop promising it on a concrete schedule as more work is coming up shortly and there is only so much time in a day.

In the mean time, I’ve got some really cool tool development just about to get started, extending my efforts in water/object interactions and bubble advection so far, into a toolset that is able to create some really nice looking splashes and foam effects (both above, on and below the water surface). I’ll be adding the same spray and foam functionality to the breaking wave and ocean displacement tools as well, which should be really cool!

So, plenty to cool stuff on its way!

With a bit of luck I’ll find more time to keep updating the blog in the coming weeks than I have the last month and a half.

Cheers,

Erik

Hi,

It’s been too long since my last blog, but I guess that’s what you can expect of ‘internal’ projects, they get pushed around endlessly. Anyway, FMX was great and it was cool to see my wave tools shown as part of the Houdini Master Classes.

In the coming days I hope to post a short video walkthrough on using the wave tools to create a breaking wave animation live .

In the mean time I’ve done a test I’d been planning to do for a while now. It’s all fun to have ocean wave displacements that look ok, but without interactions with objects in the water its quite limited. So I had some idea’s on adding some stuff to create wave-object interaction without having to run a full fluid sim. In the end the goal is still to create water tools that are as much as possible interactive.

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Here’s another sneak preview on a big update coming up soon. The surfacing part of the DEFBreakingWave HDA is all but at version 1.0 (at least at beta level). I’m doing the ‘final’ touches on the UI to make it more streamlined and logical.

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Hi,

Phew! It has been a LOOOOOONG time coming, but I’m finally ready to update on the new Gerstner displacement, as implemented within the breaking wave tool. Most of the time it took between the previous update (the sneak preview) had to do with a completely new addition to the displacement of the lip of the wave, which required some dynamic simulation stuff using a Sop Solver in DOP’s.

I’ve now fully integrated the Gerstner logic into the wave system. The main thing I’ve got more work on is the UI. The Gerstner calcs can get you really nice results but the parameters are very sensitive and have strong relationships with each other. This means that sometimes changing a value by a small amount can have really big impact on the final result. By experience I’m starting to get a feel on what relationships between parameters will lead to most natural results so I can build in those relationships into the UI, which will greatly help in setting up nice looking wave displacements quickly.

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