This week I was definitely struggling with this project. I felt like I hit a wall and got kind of lost through a mind field in a spider web. I felt like I wasn’t very good at this project and I was starting to compare myself to Diana who was doing the smoke and fire simulation. It was hard because the model had so many more parts to it where as the smoke was secondary effect. This made me feel really inadequate. I did have second thought if whether I wanted to continue in Houdini but I think that this struggle was something I needed to over come and learn that you are always going to come to points where you don’t know how to continue. That is the same in graphic design and will be the same in FX. I think it wasn’t that I couldn’t understand it it was just i needed an explanation in a different way.
I did feel like I was letting the team down which made me really guilty, I was worried that Medhi and Diana thought I wasn’t trying but I was it just took me longer to figure out.
I was changing and testing the different settings for the glass to make it more realistic but seems it was breaking the glass model. I think I needed to go about it in a different way as it just looks really bad.
This is what it looked like when I pushed the settings too far so clearly I wasn’t doing the right techniques.
Above is a screen shot of someone else’s break down of their car model when they were smashing it in Houdini. As you can see they made a lot of tiny segments which I needed to do to create a similar car glass style.
I added in more detail to the glass so that when I played the simulation dropping to the floor it would break off in a lot of little pieces. This seemed to reflect a more realistic constraint system.
Questions for Medhi:
- How to connect the glass to the metal? (they break differently)
- How to send through to the animated car to check proxy?
- Slow but cant use the poly extrude in the compile loop
- Bending of metal doesn’t look like metal
- Initial force of sphere?
- edit node is not better to use transform
- use the vellum solver instead
- initial velocity to remove
- timeshift
- don’t animate in sop
- animate keys in attribute
- file cache needs to be saved somewhere to access simulation easily
After this lesson I felt I really needed to focus on how to fix it and make sure I was caught up. I had some good tips from Medhi but I think I needed to go away and rethink my method. I was getting quite nervous as it felt like I was still trying to figure out how to proceed from the first stage and it was well into the 10 weeks of work.