houdini tests

So i have painfully  creeped and tiptoed my way into partially understanding houdini's pop and fluid networks. They are very difficult! in a word. Because every node has a different piece of script attached to it, they all do different things. each node may only have a few lines, or it could have a whole page, depending on how complex the opperation is that the node achieves!

Here are the tests i came up with in houdini, they are not great but they are a start!

fluids in houdini

So after doing some fluids in maya, i have gone into houdini to work. i is actually so much different though. instead of some gui forms that you adjust attributes on, you have node trees in which each attribute is its own node more or less.

I have looked at tutorials on line but its still hard to get my head around what i'm supposed to be doing!

I have had a play though with the different elements and come up with the following test.

I have also taken some geometry from maya into houdini and used a geometry cache to preserve the animation on it. I will use this for practivcing the spells in houdini! I shall update on how this goes!

maya vs houdini!

I have been talking to some of the TD's at Framestore, and they said that they rarely use fluid systems in maya as they take a long while to cahce and compute. instead they recomended using Houdini by side affects.

houdini is a procedural node based program which is a lot more set up to deal with effects work and simulations. If you change one part of your simulation, you dont necessarily have to cache the whole fluid again!

It is a completely new piece of software so i will need to learn this from scratch, but it shouldnt be too bad as I am familiar with the concepts laid down in maya, i'm sure they are not a whole world different!

planning each characters spells

so i have come up with an idea of what i want the spells to look like.

Handsome wizard:
Floaty, fluffy, cloudy, light, bright, glowing, happy, energy,power, beautiful valor, auror, blue, purple, red,  smokey, magical, delightful, sparkley

Crude wizard,
Sludgy, goo, dripping, wet, cold, foul, odor, stench, horrible, old, festering, green dark, deadly, skulls, juju, foggy, murky, dirty, ghastly, garish

using these words i have crafted a couple of concept designs for the spells

different characters, different spells

it has occured to me that since we have two characters that use magic, with two personalities, we could and should have two different styles of magic that reflect their personalities. Since one is handsome and one is crude, theyre spells could reflect this.

one set of spells is sludgey and dark, the other is floaty and light!

this will be really interesting as it will require me to develop two opposing styles of fluid spell! I also think think this will aid the narrative and help build the characters personalities well.

I would like at all times for the audience members to know whose spell is whose.

3 characters defined!

so our three characters have been defined, we have 2 wizzards and an old man:

The handsome wizard:
This guy is the tall, broad shouldered, muscly strong, jawed
The rig will need to reflect this, the joint chain will be evenly distributed with the joints closer to the inside of folds such as under the shoulders. this will accentuate the buldges of the muscles when he moves his arms

The crude wizard:
This guys is spindly and hunched, he might also be tall if he stands up straight but he is crooked. he has long limbs and a long tall head, so his jaw will be enlongated. he has long thin fingers too. the joints will sit in the moddle of the geometry to make him move like a skeleton

The old man:
Small and compact, this character is like a box. small limbs, big smile, no neck archeched back.
like a hamster on its hind leg. short steps. the lenght of the joint chain will need to reflect this.

I will begin rigging as soon as i get the drafts are in and the dimensions are decided

multiple rigs

for the spellbound project we are planning to have 3 characters, two tall wizzards and one small old man. This will mean that we have to create multiple rigs to suit diferent models. This will require starting right from the joint chains, so i will need to rig the models in the same way for continuity in controls for the animators to deal with.

This will be tricky, and a lot of work but as the theory is the same for all characters, its just the lengths and exact keyed attributes that really matter.

I will be directly trying to rig with the animators in mind so i will be asking for their feedback and updating the rig accordingly