Houdini comes with way more extensive ways.you can work with one mantra node
for each pass. where in the mantra node you can put what are the objects you
want to see, witch ones to matte. or phantoms (matte but reflect and refract).
with the mantra node you can Split the channels as color, diffuse, gi,
shadows, reflection, custom shaders etc.. (you can pass an object attribute to
the render)
the other way to work. that will be similar to xsi is using takes. takes are a
basically a list of parameters in the hole scene that get override at render
time. and you can make you own settings, copy them, you can even have one
take and extend that take just like a programming class. and they are very
easy to use them, just turn the check box on the top right interface
autotakes, create a take, give it a name in the take tab, and start moving
parameters, each one of this will change color to a light Brown letting you
know that in that particular take that you are working on as been modify.
modo took the same approach of doing takes. (a Little more convoluted i think.)
or you can go hardcore and mix and match takes with mantra nodes =)
El Jueves, 22 de enero, 2015 16:59:48, Jordi Bares Dominguez
<[email protected]> escribió:
You have a very good passes system but you don’t have Overrides like you have
in Softimage although you can simulate some of that behaviour using takes and
other approaches.
Also at shader level you can setup quite a sophisticated passes system so it is
not as simple and beautiful/elegant as Soft but is the best you can get.
The Softimage to Houdini guide I wrote has quite a long chapter on the subject;
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2711&Itemid=166
hope it helps
jb
On 22 Jan 2015, at 22:08, Kris Rivel <[email protected]> wrote:
What's the status of Houdini and/or other apps in terms of render passes, etc.?
I just love me some passes and overrides and have been using them insanely for
years. I'm terrified to try and work without them.
Kris
On Sun, Jan 18, 2015 at 4:40 AM, Raffaele Fragapane
<[email protected]> wrote:
Be ready to have someone write some help if you ever do, without a decent
system to reduce them to sparse data and to work do the work GPU side 800
shapes move at the speed of a brick chained to a column, especially in Maya :)
XSI 5 however was managing it respectably well already on Pentium III and 4s
back then :)
On Sun, Jan 18, 2015 at 2:44 AM, Greg Punchatz <[email protected]> wrote:
Thanks Raff,
I have used both techniques but never heard some of those terms.... ICE made
doing this work much easier for me.
I have never ended up with 800 shapes.... but give me the time and the budget
and that sounds like a blast :)
On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 5:06 PM, Raffaele Fragapane
<[email protected]> wrote:
You can blame Bay Raitt for some of the names being thrown around, and the LISP
community he grew up in :)
Combination sculpting comes in two flavors, FACS based, with expressions tabled
out and combinations being largely corrective and flattened out, and twitch
based, with shapes representing individual muscles as roots, combinations of
nearby muscles in couples or triplets as first branch, and so on to full face
compensation, usually you stop at tier three or four, which can easily get you
hundreds of shapes (Charlotte in Charlotte's web was twitch combinations and
amounted to 802 shapes, Gollum in return of the kind was FACS and I think Bay
ended up in the 820 or so range in the end).
You can use something like stretch mesh (or ideally better) equalisation
process after that to reduce drift if you're in a hurry with the broad strokes.
Combinatorics are shapes that bridge two other shapes by correcting their
conflict (additive) rather than by replacing them (you can combine with C =
abs(A-B) in the former, or suplant with C = abs(A-B) and then subtract C's
intensity from A and B).
On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 10:59 PM, Greg Punchatz <[email protected]> wrote:
We (Brad did all the ICE magic) worked up some pretty niffy tricks for our head
tech demo.
We could pose our head which was a slightly enhanced FR rig export a reference
head into ZB... bring it back into soft the subtract the the deforms of the
mesh and reapply only the differences from the corrective shape.
Point drift is caused most of the time by subdividing the model in Zbrush. If
you do a subdivision in Z all your base point will shift. In our case the
mesh was dense enough that was not an issue, we could still clearly see the
forms without subdividing while in Zbrush. Brad wired up a ICE tree for the
imported corrective shapes to be triggered by pulling different distances from
the rig. Of course drift can happen from someone moving points they have no
business of moving, or even worse they move points in the wrong direction for
the correction or shape. I always work in a stepped process to avoid this for
shapes, whether I sent to Zbrush or not. I am at first only focused on how the
point mass moves first. I try to get this done with as few proportional moves
as possible. Then I test the motion in Soft and on the rig., take a look at
what it looks like with the jaw open etc. Then I slowly massage the shapes into
place checking the sculpt in action
I don't remember if the zbrush link busts your rig, in our case the workflow
was to use separate reference geo.
It is better if it when done all under one roof but if my point count goes high
enough I will jump through a few hoops to get to a better point manipulator.
Raf I have never heard the term combinatorics before, and when I looked it up I
could not find any references that clearly showed me how it applied to shape
animation or rigging. Can you point me to a reference that might help fill in
my knowledge gap : )
Also Eric, I had heard of folks having a different neutral vs skinning pose
but I have not really seen a good explanation of the idea. I have modified a
sculpt to be better for rigging, but that shape then becomes my base shape.
What is the difference?
On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Raffaele Fragapane
<[email protected]> wrote:
If you're doing combinatorics you don't model the shapes in isolation, you
tweak a base and need to see the result on the combination, which might be one
to four tiers of combinations away.
You don't do combination sculpting without the rig because you don't do
combination sculpting on the final shape half the time if you're sensible and
can't waste a lot of time in kickbacks.
Doing shapes in ZBrush is doable, but they all need a lot of work after coming
back in because by the nature of ZBrush you will have shit drifting all over
the place. When they will add more than a single morph and a few simple vector
operations to wire the morphs it will then be the ultimate tool for it, right
now it's like trying to drive a truck out of a parking lot with a small gate.
Blindfolded. On iced out ground. With a monkey hitting you on the head with a
baseball bat every five seconds. Technically doable, but not worth the bother
unless you get to show the mental breakdowns on TV and cash them in :)
If you're doing cartoony or largely procedurally shaded stuff you can take a
fair amount of drift. if you're doing something that has hundreds of rigid
scales or precisely styled hair bound to the UV space it's an unmitigated
disaster when you don't have something like Soft (or a shitton of stuff piled
on top of Maya) around to do the work.
On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 6:16 PM, Greg Punchatz <[email protected]> wrote:
Raff while what you say is true about needing to check the results of your
sculpts in combination with with other shapes and deformers. There is no reason
those edits should not be done in the tool-set best suited to sculpt.
Using something like Zaplink or a few scripts can make the back and forth
seamless. ICE made it so much easier to to pose based deformations and
corrective shapes using Zbrush to edit.
That being said I still do a great bit of my shape work in soft, unless its a
very dense mesh, then I whip out the Z
On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 6:16 PM, Raffaele Fragapane
<[email protected]> wrote:
The problem with ZBrush, or any modelling app that doesn't have your full rig
in it, is that for things like combination sculpting they are useless, because
you need to see multiple timelines of the shapes converging as you refine them
for the result to be any good. It's also a ton easier to get combinatorics
started in Soft since you can start any shape from any number of others with
ICE. I so miss that in any other app (that last bit is literally the only one
where Houdini could compete or even surpass Soft, actually, though it's
somewhat painful to wrangle the shit together when you hit a certain degree of
complexity and you end up spending more time making an uber rig than you do
working the shapes' alignment).
On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 11:27 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez <[email protected]>
wrote:
Thanks for the notes, there has been quite a lot of changes but it is true
there are a few of your comments still pending, the most pressing to me is
speed and the viewport needs still lots of love.
BTW, I was not advocating to use Houdini for modelling though, rather use
Zbrush to be honest and now that Zbrush is getting closer to a full set of
traditional modelling tools it is pretty obvious it is the route to go.
My feeling is that character work is certainly more painful but at least you
get some serious gains and unfortunately there are no options so we are in a
transition moment.
So far they are listening and moving forward so I will stick to Houdini for the
time being and keep an eye on others.
:-)
jb
On 16 Jan 2015, at 21:28, Raffaele Fragapane <[email protected]>
wrote:
A lot of quality rigging, despite piles of papers trying to sell the public on
the contrary, is still manually tweaked. Taking things out of the app where you
have the full rig makes authoring a major pain. The most basic example is
shapes, doing shapes work in XSI for something like a combination sculpting
setup was as easy as it got, especially after ICE.
The way data is presented and accessible, the speed on large meshes, the
modelling toolkit, it all lent itself to that kind of work in a perfect storm
scenario.
Doing the same in Maya, comparatively, is beyond painful and requires a pretty
big staging effort to separate work and write accessory tools, in Houdini you
don't even have a particularly intuitive modelling toolkit, and the handling of
large meshes was pretty meh with it (at least up to 12, it seems to be getting
better and promising to be getting better again).
The toolkit in general is pretty hard to impossible to give to a modeller with
little inclination to learn something like Houdini, while with both Maya and
Soft that's not a big challenge.
I haven't tried the muscle system in a while, so my comment might be dated to
the point of not being valid, but the last time I did it was a bit of a joke.
No arbitrary topology for the deformers unless you cloth collided (and the
cloth solver was anything but acceptable), only some weak superset of
metaballs, rather slow, but at least it was relatively stable, and overall
clunky and requiring the lot a lot of micromanagement and a lot of SOPs that
often refused to play nicely with the rest of the app.
Mind, I haven't found a single commercial muscle system I would use if they
paid me for it, which is pretty embarrassing given when we needed one for WWD
we got a rather intuitive one done in just a few weeks that worked for over 99%
of the show meshes without manual intervention of any sort on the sim, and
literally only a dozen mesh fixes across over 800 shots.
On top of all that, and again this is pre-14, most pre-13, it's slow. Mind
boggingly slow to articulate a decent animation rig. I suspect this last point
has been, or is about to be, superseded though since the viewport has been
getting some love.
The main issue though remains that preparing an asset in Houdini remains a long
and involved process which very few people from other departments, some times
nobody, can be recruited into, it's born, lives and dies in the hands of TDs.
I've always had a soft spot for Houdini, and I'd give my money to SideFX rather
than many other companies any day of the year, but as a company their
commitment to character work of artistic or hybrid nature has always been
patchy (and I don't necessarily blame them for it) and subpar.
They have a lot of work to make up for it, but they seem to be slowly doing it
while making sure they don't lose their core business with FX and end-to-end
clients.
I will certainly be looking at H14 as soon as some space for it in the stash of
stuff I need and want to do before clears up :)
On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 6:45 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez <[email protected]>
wrote:
May I ask you to elaborate the “complex character rigging and tuned
deformation”, I may be missing something.
To start with you have muscles in Houdini which you don’t, let alone FEM
simulations and a universal physics engine to cope with pretty sophisticated
things…
Certainly it is easier in Softimage and more artist friendly to setup but I see
the rigging side as one very strong point.
If you are talking about screen space corrections, blend shapes and advanced
contact collision its certainly doable with the toolset.
:-|
thxjb
On 16 Jan 2015, at 16:59, Raffaele Fragapane <[email protected]>
wrote:
It's only true for some definitions of rigging.
If you need proceduralism of course it does spectacularly well, and assets are
simply best of breed in the industry and have been for years, end of story.
For the hand-crafted complex character rig and tuned deformation kind of job
though, no, it's not nicer than Soft, and I'd be hard pressed to make an
argument for it over Maya (which I consider pretty bottom barreling already
without a ton of custom work).
Some of the upgrades in H14 and some of the future roadmap do bode well for
that though.
On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 1:28 PM, Gerbrand Nel <[email protected]> wrote:
Well I say nicer, because there are allot of toys to play with.
I think rigging is the part where you need a non destructive procedural work
flow the most.
In Maya it feels like you have to make damn sure you are done with step A
before moving onto step B.
Houdini is flexible to the point where you become reckless with your work flow
:)
Bit more complex when you get started, but worth it.
The auto rig at the very least doesn't break like the soft one used to in 2011
:)
G
On 16/01/2015 14:08, Mirko Jankovic wrote:
Riggin nicer then Soft? Will have to check it out then.. In maya rigging and
enveloping is huge crap and biggest reason that I don't wanna ago back int
othat hell at first place.
On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 12:11 PM, Gerbrand Nel <[email protected]> wrote:
After trying to learn maya for about 6 months, learning houdini is a breath of
fresh air!!
It is not softimage, but I think its the only thing that will come close to
the flexibility and power of soft for small studios and freelancers.
Once you get into it, It is even more power.
I tried learning it about 2 years ago, and gave up because I thought my time
would be better spent getting better in soft (the future was still bright back
then)
Back then it seemed complicated, but after dealing with maya, it feels sooo
much friendlier.
The way I see it, you get the operator stack, and ice tree, all in one place,
the network view
So its one thing to learn.
In Maya I feel like I have to learn new software every time I do something
else.
Rigging I found nicer than soft, and the animation editor in houdini feels
like a polished version of the soft one.
Houdini engine is still blowing my mind.. like it doesn't stop!!
At $300 you cannot ignore this as a piece of your pipeline!
I'll probably do allot of work in maya because I need to fit into teams of
Mayans, but with the houdini engine, I can do the work in the software best
suited for it, without forcing the rest of the team to conform.
G
On 16/01/2015 12:08, Mirko Jankovic wrote:
modeling and character riga nd animation wise it is I assume sitill nt as
suser friendly as SI right?
how us ievrall generalist and smalls tudio experience?
SI is more or less out of the box great steramlined solution..
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let them flee like the dogs they are!
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let them flee like the dogs they are!
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let them flee like the dogs they are!
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