Research: – Library on & off line – Films – Documentaries – Research papers – Blogs – Forums – Tutors
Academic support – Sarah Macdonald
Abstract: – 300 words – Clear & concise – Questions that you aim to answer – Primary argument – Your conclusion – Keep only key or most important elements of respect – Umbrella terms. – Short sentences and to the point – No need for references – Be objective – No opinion is better – May need to rewrite
Introduction: – Provide context – Set out aims – Include thesis chapters – Include a table of content – 5%-10%word count – Identify my readers – Hooking them – Background – General knowledge – Review key points – Write for the examiner – they are marking – Get people who don’t know the field to read – Hook your reader – Start with bold intro – Appeal to a wide range of people – Write a list most interesting topics – Are current events relevant? – Background information – Describe the scope of research – General knowledge is research relevant? – Artistic or scientific angle? – Leave best for main body
This is the last week I will be documenting this project even though I will be continuing to get it finished for this external project. I am now in the final stages of finishing this simulation where I will wait for the finished alembic files form the animation team of this project. They will be sending the shots tracked and animated ready to put in Houdini from Maya. When I receive these files I will reload them into the alembic node and have to work down the simulation to make sure it still fits to the new animation. This is something I have never done before so I am really grateful I have Medhi to confide in while I have to go through this process.
So now this if the final glass simulation with the bounding selection in play. As you can see the glass doesn’t all fall out of place immediately. I have put the wire frame of the metal frame simulation to show how the two simulations will work together.
Further down the simulation the glass will break away from the rest in tiny pieces. This means that the constraints are working and this has finally succeeded!
In the glass selection I decided it would be easier to just do it all in one blast node. It was a lot faster than assigning each selection to the for each loop node. Thankfully this shortcut work out.
I attempted to try and do a compile box to include it but i couldn’t figure it out. I watched tutorials to try and help reexplain how to use it but I think I will need to do it another time when I have more time.
Project Evaluation:
I found this project very hard, however, I have definitely learnt how to use Houdini much better even though it was very stressful. As a collaborative group, its hard because although I working on a project with many other people in different groups e.g. animation, lighting & compositing and matchmove… I never really worked with them because there was only me and Diana to complete all the FX.
on one hand I thing its create I got to solely work on the destruction of the car because it means I can take full credit for it in my showreel which is a really great project to have in my portfolio. On the other hand, I feel like I missed out a little on the whole ‘collaboration’ aspect of this project working in a group all the time. I really enjoyed the last collaboration project I did because we were always in close contact and could help each other whenever. This project wouldn’t have worked that way because Diana needed to focus on all the fire and gas simlations and I had to focus on the destruction part. There wasn’t really any cross over which was a shame.
Obviously in out two tutorials a week with Medhi we would listen to what me and Diana were getting up to but because this is all very new to us that we didn’t have any input on each others work. We still would listen to what was being said so that was the collaboration we were able to do.
Final play blast of simulation together:
Project Evaluation:
This project is still in progress as we have a little longer to complete this. That is great as I have been working my as off to get to where I am. I have learnt all of this more or less over the last 10 weeks. I found this project EXTREMELY hard. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I would have liked just because I the collaborative side wasn’t having meetings all the time. Diana and me worked very separate because we had so much to do between us. I feel ver overwhelmed and wish I had more people working on the car crash but now I do get full credit for this simulation which is great for my portfolio but I would have preferred learning with a partner.
I will be continuing this project over the next week or so to finish it off, this video above is just to show an example of how I have done the simulation.
I am in the final stages of this personal project. I noticed that when outlining the logo of the Plastic Terras, there seemed to be a missing trident which crosses the letter A.
Letter A with the trident through it.
So I built one on illustrator which I could add into the scene. I used images from online to help me and then edited the shape to fit what it looks like in the image above.
What I have left to do:
Finish lighting the scene correctly.
Render both scenes.
Collate the png sequence in After Effects and add music.
Final Export of Ekkah animation:
I wasn’t able to render the project on the render farm because the farm wasn’t working which was a shame. I have spent so long trying to render it but it was taking so long that I was advised to just play blast the animation for the hand in till the render farm was working again. The play blast still took a long time because it was long.
Things I would like to change is that the colours don’t seem to match so well to the original. I need to make the mint green more fluorescent and the yellow needs to have less green in it. I do think that this is also because it is exported as flip book so I will have more control when I do test renders.
Final Export of Plastic Terras animation:
Again, I wasn’t able to render but I am till happy with how it came out. It was a slightly a different style to the Ekkah one in the sense that the background was the movement not the logo. It was my way of changing up the style and trying something new. I think I have got the shades of grey close ish but when I render properly there will be more control.
Overall Evaluation:
I have loved this project the most of all the project I have done on the masters. It is music centred, logical and applicable to many situation. This was the sort of project I wanted to do and feel that is was a success. I have learnt so much about Houdini in areas I didn’t know of before like the CHOP network. This was the test project to see if I want to continue down this root for my FMP and thesis. The verdict is that I will continue working on project like this surround audio driven animation.
Now that I have set the scene for Plastic Terras, I now need to do the same for the Ekkah one. Here is the cover art so I want to keep the same colours which I think will be easy. I also need to include the mint green disks.
Here I just took the outline of the three circles and extruded them. I didn’t like the way this looked, I think the idea was that they were suppose to be vinyl records.
So I used the principle shader nodes to create the right kind of colours to reflect the original. I used the render view to make sure the camera was angled correctly. I chose to move the extruded EKKAH logos at a 45 and -45 degrees so you can still read the letters but also see the extrusions.
I knew that in the original there were three discs, so I made a circle and rotated in axis so that they were 3D.
I was trying to figure out how to make the disced ribbed and textured like a really vinyl record but couldn’t find a tutorial or a free model that I could use. I did settle on making the disc have a ripple throughout the disc continuously. This was made from the ripple node below. I still haven’t figured out the right setting which is something I need to ask Medhi about.
I started to remember that I hadn’t included ‘Wendy’s Yard’. I tried to include it in the scene but once again there were holes in the letters again. I was going to do the boolean technique that I have used previously.
When looking in the render view I realised that because I am not making the ‘wendy’s yard’ extrude so I could just over lay the type over the video once I had collated the pngs in a sequence on after effects.
Overall I am really happy with this outcome and just need to check with Medhi before I start to do a final export. I really hope that Ekkah (the) band will like this project.
So now I have got the specks to move in clusters, I needed to make sure you could see the clusters extruding out. When you look face on, the poly extrudes are not so obvious. So, I thought maybe to create a 3 dimensional space using the sheets as the walls. I thought it does look quite cool, but I couldn’t find a way to close the room up. Also because there is a lot of different sheets, the was a lot of points that needed to cook which took so long. I thought it was a better idea to try and find a way of using less sheets in the scene.
Below, it the finished workspace of nodes to make sure the Plastic Terras logo was cut out correctly. I was going to make the letters more like the Ekkah cover but thought that it was better to focus solely on the specks moving.
In order to try and set the scene, I needed to include lights to make sure that the different you could see all the extrusions well. I initially tried to use arnold rendering but didn’t seem to work on my computer so thought it was less hassel to more my file on to VMware.
Here is the final workflow of the extrusions from the sheet. This was the final process to get to my final outcome for how the specks would protrude.
I tried to get the arnold to work on VMware but couldn’t seem to get it to work so I just decided to use the Houdini mantra render. This was a lot less complicated and I have used this one before. This meant I used non arnold lights and the material builders had to be fit for mantra to render. I used the principled shader to make the materials for this project. I kept the colours to the original cover art using different shades of greys.
I decided to not include so many sheets, I made it into a triangle that closed. The set up that I had was taking so much memory and wasn’t closing as a shape. This way was less complicated and you could see more of the extrusion close up.
Now I could see how that is was super important to light the scene correctly as above you can see how you cant even see the logo where as below the logo is well lit. However I feel like there needs to be more light grey tones to reflect the plastic terras cover art.
I was seeming to have issues again with the letter A after having done the way before Medhi showed. I think I will need to ask him about it. Some how it fine in the view port but in the render it doesn’t seem to show…
S0 I was having issues with the specks visually showing the movement. There was only a few specs moving because there were so many individual specks going on. So I asked Medhi about it and he showed how to use the cluster node which separates for you random clusters. As you can see through the visualiser that the cluster are working. This was when there is a poly extrude it will be more visually obviously.
Below, you can see how the clusters are working when they are protruding. This makes more of a visual effect so I am pleased with the result.
Notes from tutorial with Medhi:
convert node
clean node
facet – remove inline points
cluster node – change iterations
attribute promote: points – primitives
bind – cluster value
mirror gives better result
organic moving clusters – make them start at different points to look more natural
I also mentioned how I had the issue with that the images I have are quite long and wanted to duplicate the rectangles so that I could make the shape more square. Medhi introduced me to the mirroring node which simply just mirror the model. This was a simple solution that worked well.
As part of my ‘rethinking’ my method I decided to look on line and see who other people had crushed metal and follow their tutorials and see where I was going wrong. I decided I couldn’t get round this issued with the crushing of metal so I needed to consider thatI will have to use the vellum solver as my technique.
Above is a tutorial about how someone crushed a can of coke. I know that obviously a car won’t crush the same but I can always change the constraints to make sure that the metal frame acts as a stronger material.
I followed the tutorial to get the results of a crushed car as though it went to a junkyard and the car was being crushed to be recycled. So I now went through each stage to alter it slightly so that the car wasn’t crushed as easier but as though the moving sphere was denting the car not crushing. It was definitely an improvement with the bending of the car. Looked like I was FINALLY heading in the right direction.
This was another tutorial that was helpful and easy to follow. When metal falls and breaks it holds its dent and that there is a second response which I added to my metal frame. The person who was talking through this tutorial spoke so clearly and broke down why each node was needed which really helped me to understand the different nodes better.
I was now trying to focus on the glass as I really thought it wasn’t looking like how car glass should. I figured out the the pre made glass pattern actually didn’t look realistic enough and that the concrete setting was better suited as I could add in layers to glass where some are really small and other pieces hold together really well. Below you can see how after the glass has had impact that the shape bends but doesn’t all break off. Only the smaller pieces that are hit break off immediately. This two level of constraints was now heading in the right direction of what the car window should act like.
I was playing around with the glass settings to see if I could improve what I had before the lesson but seemed like It was getting a bit risky to make too much break off easier as I would stray from the progress I had made. I decided to what for the next tutorial to see what Medhi thought.
Medhi’s tutorial was really helpful. Now that I made some progress I was able to finish the car bending and focusing on the parts of the glass that will be staying static.
Below, I have used a bounding box of circles which are copied points from the metal shell of the car. Here I have a more control over what pieces will be static now so that the glass not touching the bounding balls they will shatter.
I am really happy with how much I have progressed this week as I now only have one more week to document my work before I am handing in. The deadline will be later on so I will be continuing this project past this deadline.
