So I have been having a great result with the Ekkah cover, so I decided to also do it for my friends who are rappers in Bristol. I heard their new music drop today and wanted to surprise them with a little extra as they are just starting out. They are called the Plastic Terras.
Their cover album were different ones but I decided to try and use this one as it was their new cover. Its a wall of textured concrete which is very difficult to convert into 3D to animate.
This is the cover art I will be focusing on even though it is difficult to separate the logo from the background. First thing was to make sure there was an outline of the logo to import into Houdini as an eps file.
In Adobe Illustrator I made was able to extract the logo once I had taken images off the internet and heightened the contrast in photoshop to make the outline easier for illustrator to pick up on. I was really happy that I already know Adobe very well which meant I could spend more time on Houdini than these issues.
As I did in the Ekkah logo I will be cutting out the middle part of the letters using the same boolean technique Medhi showed me. It felt nice to know how to do this without forgetting. Feels like I really understand this and could do it in many other situations.
Once I had got the logo in I was trying to think of how to incorporate the background. I screen shot the part of cover where there wasn’t the logo to take into illustrator and see if I could make an outline eps some how.
Using the image trace tool I split the image into three different colours of grey, then using the selection tool of the same colour I was able to separate the layers into three separate images which I exported as eps in import to my Houdini scene.
First layer:
Second layer:
Third Layer:
Now that I have some images to play with in the scene I thought that instead of getting the logo letters to extrude like I did for the Ekkah cover. I wanted to extrude all these little specks to visually contextualise the music.
Here is the logo and all the layers in the scene. Medhi showed me how I can add the chop network into the attribute vop node which directly links the music to the movement of the the model. This is handy as I have more control over how the model will be effects.
Here you can see I have used ‘extrude’ expression in the poly extrude node which links the command to extrude the model dependant on the CHOP network that is now in the attribute vop system.