geneome

Image Planes Part 4 (Object IDs)

geneome — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:00:25 +0000

Didn’t think the image plane series was complete enough so I tacked on this little diddy. I covers how to get object (or primitive) ids using image planes and what you can do with them in the compositor using the lumakey COP. The compositor part I learned from SYmek, who I feel is an integral part of the Houdini community (and who I had an argument with about points on the Sunflow forum a while back ).

Image Planes Part 3 (Light Export)

geneome — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:24:57 +0000

I’m fairly pleased with this video only because I learned a lot on my way to get this worked out. Well, I learned a lot of mistakes one could make with VEX like what you shouldn’t put in illuminance loops. I felt obliged to do this video since in the very first video I mentioned that I would talk about light export in the image planes. What this covers is how to get planes/passes for each light in the scene. You can find the video as well as the final hipnc file here. The final hipnc file has specular components added which I didn’t cover in the video since the technique to get the diffuse planes is so similar.

Middle Mouse Button Emulation In Houdini

geneome — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:45:00 +0000

I wanted to post this for a while as being “for the record” since when I searched for it a while back nothing came up. So, for the sake of the search engines (and those interested) I’ll post my grand discovery. Being an occasional laptop user I have only two mouse buttons unless I bust out the USB trackball mouse. In Houdini there is a bunch of stuff you can do that requires the middle mouse button, so I wanted that middle button without having to go search for external hardware. Behold! The answer!:

Click the left and right mouse buttons simultaneously to get middle mouse button functionality.

(Thumbnail image from Declan Jewell under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License)

Image Planes Part 2 (An Occlusion Plane)

geneome — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:39:44 +0000

Okay, so I went a bit off the track on this one. It’s loosely an image plane video and more of a “how to do an occlusion pass inside a shader then put it in a plane” video. So I’m not sure if I should keep it under the “image plane” heading or create some new one. Either way, this topic was a weird one I was wrestling so I did a lot of forum searches and made lots of mistakes (basically writing my VEX poorly). So I thought I would at least show my results so people could see what I found. What’s made this more interesting is looking into the different occlusion functions and trying to figure out why they differ and what they really give you.

Image Planes Part 1

geneome — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 01:56:44 +0000

I’m loving Houdini shaders and image planes are just icing on the cake. I thought I would run through the basics first then in a later video(s) get into extracting specific data into planes then cover light exports in image planes. So you can find part 1 here!

XSI Foundation, Fare Thee Well

geneome — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:39:39 +0000

It has come to my attention that XSI Foundation is no longer available. To most people who know the company this isn’t news, but for those who haven’t stayed up to date on XSI this is certainly interesting to note. To me, this news is both understandable and frightening. Understandable because, having used Foundation, it was severely limited and I couldn’t imagine users getting the most out of the software. Frightening because it just goes to show how precarious acquiring affordable industry leading production level software is for training and/or noncommercial work. Even more frightening because it could happen to any application. One would think that it won’t, perhaps being unchanging and everlasting, but with XSI Foundation disappearing after a 3 year run my beliefs have been shaken. It is surprising though that XSI Essentials has everything I would want in a package for only 3 grand.

BTW, I still have XSI Foundation 4.2

I would love to understand the business of selling 3D software. I would really like to see the costs involved in producing the software and maintaining the business and what profit is expected from sales. Obviously if these “affordably awesome” packages (e.g. XSI Foundation (R.I.P), Maya PLE, and Houdini Apprentice) don’t make money, don’t increase sales of the full-version packages, or actually hurt the sales of the full-version packages, then they will no longer be offered. I can understand that. So for me, I would like to greatly help in finding a way to help these companies make these affordably awesome packages work for the company to increase sales of the full applications.

Of course, with all this talk I start sounding like a leech. You know the ones. They want everything free and when it’s not they complain (and even when it is they complain even more). They want greatness for cheap, and when they can’t get it they whine. I think I can separate myself from this cadre since I really do think that the higher end software is really worth the 2 to 8 grand they sell it for. And I use the “affordably awesome” software with the intent that I will one day buy the full version and no longer dwell in the shadows with leeches.

Still, the thought of no longer having free/cheap training tools available for the production level packages is a thought I would rather not have at all. Especially if it’s one I have invested a great deal of time in. Trust me, switching apps (by necessity or choice) isn’t always a joy - it’s a quick journey from prince to pauper when it comes to knowledge of the tools. But one must prepare. If you are investing your effort into an application using the affordably awesome packages, one must be mentally prepared to be ready to either make the leap of purchasing the full version or be ready to stand alone on a sinking ship.

Carousel Back Up!

geneome — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:27:58 +0000

After the carousel died after upgrading to the latest Wordpress I decided to keep at it since I hate my site not being perfect. The persistence paid off! I seemed to have fixed this issue with some very easy sql manipulation.

I took a look at the section of the options table where Massive stores its options and found that the string looked like this before the update:

….’massive_theme’, ‘a:24:{s:15….

And looked like this after the update:

….’massive_theme’, ‘I:24:{s:15….

Notice the difference? Where it should read ‘a:24, it instead says ‘I:24. So I changed the “I” to an “a” in the sql entry of the current database I have and it is working again and I can even change the featured items without issue. I’m no sql master, so I don’t understand why that change occurred during the update (or even persisted when going back to an older Wordpress version) or why this change fixes it, but the problem is gone and I suppose I should be pleased with at least that triumph.

New Magazine Theme

geneome — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:55:10 +0000

It was time for a change. In part because my last theme wasn’t exactly compatible with the latest Wordpress, and I also wanted something new, different, and exciting. I like it so far because it’s not simply a static site, but dynamic since it has a “carousel” for switching featured articles around while someone is on the main page. It also gave me a chance to clean up the pages and content a bit so if you are looking for a particular page it’s probably still here, just linked to in one of the main pages. I hope to add some more Houdini videos as well as work on a new header image, but all in all, I like what I’ve done.

Feeds, Hamsters, And Colors

geneome — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:11:05 +0000

I wanted to mention four things to anyone who would be interested, and as no one around me fits that description I’ll post it here. Hopefully I won’t make a habit of posting drivel, but I think I’ll allow myself to do so this time:

If you visit this site you’ll notice that I added a feed list to the right which is from my Google Reader “shared items.” I’m addicted to 3D related news so I’m subscribed to a whole bunch of feeds. Google Reader makes it oh-so-convenient in that it’s web based and I can do things like shared items, so I thought I would share what I find interesting. I hope it doesn’t make my site too “myspacey” which I would loathe.
I watched Disney’s “Bolt” trailer a couple of days ago and normally I’m not impressed with trailers, but the hamster (named Rhino) was so well animated it is certainly worth noting. The hamster certainly stands out to me as a brilliant character from both a technical and artistic view and is hysterical to watch. What was in the trailer I hope was a window into the overall performance of the character, and if it is, the animators of Rhino should be congratulated.
I recently upgraded my machine which included a new monitor. For the past few weeks I lived with the colors which always seemed to be oversaturated until I put it to myself to see what I could do with the color profiles. Lo and behold, thanks to this page, I got the colors where they needed to be and now everything looks great.

Using dophassubdata To Change Colors Dynamically

geneome — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:49:28 +0000

It’s a fairly straight forward but I thought it needed to be put in video form. Dynamics and expressions in Houdini go hand in hand and this is an example of that. You can find the video tutorial on how to do this here and the result below: