Now the exhaust wall stuff is done and made into a tool, attention has shifted back to the explosion animation and simulation. By now all the major systems for animating and hand-over to simulation are in place.

Let me start by showing you a test animation for that I’ve rendered out. I did a very quick multi-pass comp on the render to attenuate reflections a bit and add some glows. The animation is rendered at 8 times slow motion.

View in high resolution: H264.

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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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During long renders, I’ve been working on a little automation. For a long time I had wanted to make it easier to start up my little render ‘farm’ (just a few machines) and streamline the process of installing new versions of Houdini on them. I had long pushed this effort back using the excuse that one of the machines was still running windows which would require different logic than the other Ubuntu based machines. As the windows machine has since been migrated to Ubuntu as well this excuse was gone…

So while all my machines (including workstation) were very busy rendering, my workstation could just spare enough cycles to run a few terminal windows and a few text editor windows.

As is typical for my ‘internal’ projects, things grew a bit bigger than originally intended . The result of this work is a collection of scripts that let me:

• boot and shutdown render machines
• switch between the latest version 10 or 11 that happens to be installed on a render machine
• retrieve the chassis status of any render machine (on or off)
• retrieve local or remote hserver status
• open a remote (through ssh) shell to a render machine
• install a version of houdini on a render machine
• publish a set of scripts to a render machine that are used by the above where needed

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