Character Adventures - Rigging, Animation and Crowds | Louis Dunlevy (Cutting Edge) | SIGGRAPH 2018

[Music] [Music] so my name is Louie Dunleavy I work at cutting edge in in Australia and I'm in the Brisbane branch there's a Brisbane branch and a Sydney branch and I'm just gonna take you through a bunch of projects that we've done using Houdini as like our primary rigging and animation tool and so that goes through a bunch of different contexts so starting off with much move with body tracking where we've been using the the older auto rig that shipped with 1880 15 5 and previous versions so a bunch of these present a bunch of these screen captures of networks and things are in 15 5 so myself had been I've been working with Houdini since before Houdini since prism since 1995 when I started in Italy in a company called digit alia so obviously we all know what 13 years today and how side effects have just been so amazing in like all their support and their developers are so open and so helpful so it's really been quite a ride and of course we all use Houdini in an effects context doing lots of simulation work and other things like that so we're all very familiar with that kind of work and but of course you know a lot of us have been doing animation stuff in Houdini since since the beginning and it's it's it's a really excellent animation package although it gets you know less kind of attention because of all the other strengths and the simulation stuff so anyway here's some stuff we've been doing um this are our core team cutting edges is a fairly large company you know a couple of hundred people and then there's lots of people in different disciplines and different departments and people come in and out of Houdini depending on you know what's going on in their skills and things like that as this our core team really are ninjas you know so myself my old friend Rangi Sutton Rob Kelly my krump chassis Shannon Shawn Jacobs and Santiago so there are go-to guys for anything kind of really difficult you know so I'm gonna start off so we've we've got five different projects I'm going to have a look house we've got vamp and you know kinds of categories of creatures if you like we've got vampires spiders kangaroos storks and then our robot Doug and we're actually doing a shark at the moment but I don't have that to show to you so a lot of Australian creatures there should be a bit of fun em so the first one is underworld five so this project was done all in Houdini 15 5 and this is like vampires vampire disintegration principally and I know some other character effects there where we're doing effects on top of actors and of course experience has told us doing various like character disintegration and things like that us the match move typically takes longer than the effect and the effects you know you get the effects up and running relatively quickly you know your rigid bodies in your cloths and your fluid Sims and particles and all the rest of us you know you can work that out and get that really highly choreographed ball and really artistically easy to manipulate but then the the body track typically takes so much refinement and you need to be able to adjust us dynamically like as and when you need it so that the effect is going to be effective in the right area at the right time and you're free to change that so we decided to do the body tracking in entirely on Houdini using starting off with the auto rig that used to ship with Houdini the old Auto rate and then we built a load of things on top of the other eggs so we'd put a lots of extra stretchy limbs and detachable limbs with the other constrain controllers into screen space so we do a lot of things like getting one saw of 2d track points you know because with the skin and cloth and stuff like that it's very difficult to guess you know solved 3d tracking points so we'd get 2d stuff and sort of projected on camera to death matching and then sort of solve things in screen space so we do that with very controllers then we do that subsequently on that on the mesh and sort of constraint everything in screen space and then we do things like get rotor splines and project them down and then make s DFS and sort of nudge the contours the profiles as they're presented on the screen to the edges of the Rose plane so a typical kind of vampire death so this character is Jakob so you know quite a lot going on there rigid bodies and disintegration and and obviously the timing is really a big factor of it like when the you know when the leg is gonna fall off when it's when his head is gonna fall off and all these kind of things so we really need to be able to control that and the easiest way to control ass in a Houdini effects context is by doing the the match move in Houdini you know so that's our first past animation then on top of that we do all those other things I was talking about with you although constraining and stuff like that and you'd see we'd only really track the bits that we need as and when we need them it's this another disintegration shot we were doing so this is like our sort of first pass where we thought oh we're getting to a fairly decent point here but then the VFX supervisor told us that actually there was supposed to be another three vampires in there and they they hadn't actually shot a plate for us so that was a little bit tricky so not to be outdone by Tom Cruise our valiant artist took matters into their own hands so we have a Rob Kelly and Sean here Sean Jacobs taking things a little bit too seriously so this would this is then our first pass of of animation then we do all the cloth simulations and all that stuff and then these would become full DG doubles that then we run through our disintegration process so obviously that was pretty pretty handy um so there was quite a lot of shots like this again you know it's very very quick to get the the effects running but then the the match move would always be the problem you know you would you really notice when you're effects and Andy and the actors are kind of out of sync when it's one is sliding on top of the other another one here Jillian Davidson was the artist doing this one so yeah more more vampire disintegration same thing again here this was going through some feedback compositing in Houdini just to generate the texture maps and of course again if you start to see the effects sliding over the skin you know it becomes really really noticeable so this required like you know quite a lot of massaging and again it's very very difficult to get anything to track on that surface whereas it's quite easy to find the areas that are sliding you know in comp or you know as a manual 2d track and then just kind of push that whole thing of fixing the the track into Houdini and manipulate the mash that way and here we have the mash on top there cool that's vampires the next one is nest so this is a spider film and this is a an Australian Chinese co-production and this is all about the funnel web spider which is mainly found around Sydney and this was quite a big show in that we had a couple of hundred shots of spiders in various different scenarios so we had spiders crawling on people a single hero close-up shots of spiders swarms of like 50,000 spiders and spiders and all kinds of different flavours and stuff and a small team with you know varying different levels of exposure to Houdini and skill sets and things like that and pretty fast turnaround sister funnel-web spider they have quite a bit of variation bus so we started but I'm putting them together you know what what do these guys look like what they moved like you can see so this was like our first kind of spider a bit of test there so you can see they've got eight legs and then they have these pedipalps sort of feelers on the top there so actually that turns into like ten legs because you can see they're walking with pedipalps this is a Chelsea Shannon did this animation served first bit of walking animation so you know we really like the way the animation was going but we quickly realized we were going to be in trouble animating like literally hundreds of shots or well a couple of hundred shots with lots and lots of spiders so the average shot had maybe a dozen spiders or something and so the early tests told us thus animating eight legs and two pedipalps is very time consuming spider locomotion so just getting from A to B is very time consuming we wanted to keep everything in Houdini because obviously for all the various reasons of having to deal with swapping between software just for you know different sections of the pipeline and it was much faster and more efficient to just run everything through Houdini and we wanted to keep compartmentalization minimal so you know we wanted people to have the freedom to just animate if that's what they wanted to do or animate analyze or you know depending on their their skill levels we'd be able to make sure the artists weren't getting frustrated and could get more satisfaction as a job and so typical hero shot so we for their for the hero spiders we have two types of animation really we have sort of your standard kind of animation just movin the rig rent and then we have a curve rig animation so that's basically where we just draw a curve over the the terrain that we're interested in and the spider just walks itself and then the animator just kind of animates on top of us and blends in a narrative where they want you know they'll walk to the atom to be automatic or and hand keyed so more typical shots at spiders quite a few scenarios another very early shot that Chelsea did so really lots of situations with spiders all over each other and different types of spiders you know we have a very large queen spider down there so we had to have a lot of variation and proportion and styles of spiders you know so for the spider break itself obviously we're going to look at a bunch of different rigs and sort of how they had they were built and how they work and you know the pros and cons of various different approaches and so the spider break itself obviously had to be very easy and fast for hero animation you know a lot of animators will come from from my in other packages and you know initially there's always a bit of a steep learning curve initially but then typically animators get going like really really really fast and the main reason for that is because we're able to update the rigs really really quickly and so address any issues you have so I had to be very easy for her animation I had to walk in a curve so that had to be very easy and fast we had to transition you know be able to transition between the hero animation to curve animation and back again seamlessly without any issues add animation on top of the curve rig animations so have automatic animation plus hero animation and that not those things not to be fighting each other and then a lot of secondary animation like sort of terrain adaptation you know sort of Norse going through the terrain so the contact points would always be good and then sort of secondary things like bobbing around and flexing of the limbs and all these things so here's one of our animation rigs so obviously we'd we'd version up with the namespace thing so we could have multiple versions after of the rig in any given scene which is great so an animator could do like an animation rig version 7 and then a month later come back and throw in a rake version 12 in the same scene and keep going so one thing I just wanted to touch on in a few cases here is just the whole debate between flat regs and nested rigs in Houdini obviously with agents and the crowd system that's all built for like flat FBX style rigs which which is great and the new orderic system essentially builds a flash break but of course we find that the you know the first thing anybody really does once they've got their basic great work that is they a citize us you know so it's just so much easier to control but of course we you know it's a balance you have to kind of know when you're going to ask ties and why so here we have the the old rig on that on the left which is flat rig and we needed to keep it flat because we were we knew we're going to generate lots of agents for the crowd system and then on the right we have the nested rig so if we have a look at the the flat one so we can see quite a lot nodes there we've got quite a lot of quite a little eggs that are repeated so we have the same thing over and over again and so that's that was fine basically for the agent generation we would have a simplified version of this we would have this driving a simpler rig but then this quickly became a bit unwieldy so the limitations are obvious I think with that kind of thing if you've got eight legs and to carry tops you know you're just going to some at some stage you're gonna have problems errors that creep in any updates can only be done one at a time per chain and then only one person can edit the rate at a time and for me that's a big one because I think one of the most satisfying things about rigging in Houdini is rigging as a team you know so Rob Kelley for example he's very very strong rigor so you know we would divide up the rigging between us and also Chelsea very very good rigor so it might be I'd say oh I've got the you know I've got this part of the rig and probably go I've got this part of the rig so someone could do a legs and we could do a spine so we could do a head and you could all just be working at the same time and you know you're all gonna just talk into each other's work and that's no problem that's really nice thing about rigging in that way that it's very collaborative so the nested rig where we've got assets for every part of the rig obviously we've got eight instances of the leg asset we can all work in at the same time less human error because obviously things propagate out automatically and any features that you add to one element to the rig just goes on all the different limbs so that's our leg asset for the spider and you will see that we've got some we've got some bones there so basically a bit like the old auto reg system we would we sort of take a snapshot of the bind pose of the of the exterior bone chain so we have a very simple bone chain and that tells us what the initialization of the like reg acid has to be so it's sort of propagate that that through is top-level parameters into the into the leg rig so just dive inside and have a look and as you'd expect it's a you know nice contained rig with all the bits much easier to work at problems on much easier to develop and roll out updates and tricks like for the foot sliding and terrain adaptation and flexing and all these things and then it's just much easier to look at it's much easier to navigate and so we can move forward in easier way and it's typical hit any way to work and but of course nested rigs does pose some challenges so obviously mirroring the legs is you know requires some more expressions all over the place where you're going it's a left leg it's the right leg and dis that in the other then you've got to do that thing of propagating the bone pose from your sort of template bones outside and then if you're editing the capture data and that can be a little bit tricky so a lot of string lunging of after data can crop in usually with the Houdini really gets enough to kind of go you know reset bind pose and there you go but then when you've got a sort of a modular rig system that can be a little bit more overhead just a bit more work really so the other things that we had in the spider egg was obviously flexing the terrain adaptation blends fki okay blends the proportional changes and scales and all this kind of things so all fairly standard stuff for for a rig so we've got just some of the interpenetration so so we just run some intersection things and push that back up to the top level of the rig so we could do that stuff and then we've got flexing so the spiders can flex their legs and other secondary animation like that and then we've got the curve break so basically the curve rig would have to go on either a deforming person or whatever whatever it was walking on or static geometry so we'd typically just turn things into V DBS and remash them you draw the curve in it put spider on the curve and then you've just got some simple parameters to do the locomotion and then you can just tweak things on top so typical scenario they're a simple curve drawn on a simple terrain and then we drop down a curve break and just wire that in and our spiders just going to start walking on laughs really rather easily as we can see there I just turn that on and very often that would guess you know we block out most shot really really quickly like that so so yeah if we had you know it doesn't spiders or something in there that was pretty pretty easy and straightforward and then you can noodle away to your heart's content clean things up a little bit and it's all quite very fast some more spiders obviously we'd would just be able to change the rate of travel along the along the curve just throw in a few keyframes and make sure those spiders aren't getting too close to each other so this obviously offer hero animation not for an agent animation where we have the automatic avoidance so here's that that shot we saw of the spider jumping at the mouth and again that's just a combination of curve rigged animation where we've mapped at footprints along the curve across the terrain and then some here animation and then obviously we could go in and just edit the position of the footprints so - the spider could move around so you just see we're going to dive into us into the asset now and just move footprints around there we go simple simple geometry editing and we just shift our foot around and then of course each each force you know has blend controls for like you know blend onto the curve very you know automatic animation blend off and etc etc then of course the spiders have to be able to just completely go off the curve rigged to hero animation and then go back on us so just to make that easy obviously we throw lots of helper code in to just too fast automatic keyframe generation so there you go spider walks along or we can see those red circles are basically sort of a randomized flexing so that the the secondary animation the flexing would just slightly random as a walks along the curve we've set a keyframe for when we wanted to launch so at a certain point we go okay that's enough of the curve break just said all the blends so that we're free to move around afterwards and then we're free to just do whatever the animator needs to do very often of course with these spiders they they jump so to do a little jump there and then we'd set another keyframe to just put it up put set all the blends back onto their arms the curve break and I just jump back straight on the car break so yeah so automated animation and then back up and of course we've got we've got lots of other controls we can change we can dynamically change the spacing of the of the the strides of the lengths between the the footprints we can change all the spacing of the legs all the flexing you know we can all those things that are that typically you would modulate per points in a Houdini set up we can just propagate that from the curve it back into the back into the full here awake so the curve rig is driving in the heroic base so we can change all the interpolation types we can change how long the spider keeps his foot on the ground like the type of acceleration out whether he's kind of tiptoeing just doing like just barely touching the ground or whether he's sort of more planted and all these Counting so stuff that in a you know Houdini setup I think you know we all take for granted that we do all this kind of a elaborate per point geometry editing and of course once you've got a rig that's listening to all that stuff that becomes quite easy to to modulate for more interesting animation and in swarms of course so this is so the the Houdini crowd system was fairly fairly new at the time and it was certainly there was no quadrupeds or anything like that it was only some bipeds and hadn't really been tested in anger that much in production and of course we had to do spiders with like ten legs and and like lots and lots and lots of them doing lots of silly things so so here we've got you know a typical kind of swarm shot so we'd have a few layers of spiders just to get that nice depth so we do say three layers and then we constantly build up mashed VT B's of the of the surface that they walk on but of course we we also need to deal with changing topology velocity and Harrisons ragdoll the agents getting pushed around and I suppose all the stuff that we kind of take for granted with the crowd system these days but certainly for a spider it was quite difficult so and of course Cameron at side effects was so so helpful with any queries we had and as I'm sure you're all aware you know side effects are just so fantastic at supporting people in production especially if you're doing something that no one else has really done before so here you can see we've got some spiders that are kind of rag doing rag doll animation so they're kind of getting pushed off and they die and they turn into a tasty snack so just kind of build up and again of course the body tracking was so important on this and again so we do all the much move with Houdini rake and do all that sort of screen space constraint stuff that we were talking about earlier yeah so let's just have a little look at some of those crowds things obviously we'd have to set up all the all the collision pills for the bullet engine because it's a bullish we get our curve rigged and baked add some agents doing with some animation variation and then we just test our ragdolls make sure that's all working okay just good fun when we finally got to this point and then we want to do our velocity inheritance and obviously the topology is constantly changing and so you know all these things need to sort of work together to be able to get a good end result and yes that's it for for spiders that was a bit of fun and we have Matt hanger here actually who worked in this project as well so lots of great work there Matt so at last so this is all about kangaroos which in Australia they say Roos because they just love to abbreviate everything and so here we have a kangaroo and Matt Crump was is the lead on this and where is this still actually in progress so I can't show you the back plates of of all the shots so here we have our one of our CG kangaroos and we did the lots of crowds here as well so here's some of our crowd shots we've got for these to have a look at so this is a comedy film so the sum of their movements are kind of deliberately deliberately kind of comical you know I can't really give away too much better film but there's certainly lots of fun and of course we'd put skin dynamics and fur dynamics on all of these guys which is obviously pretty easy to do and Houdini more creds great fun and here we go and so of course for this we used some of the new features you know obviously we're foot planting we're foot locking on or less and and we're using the new banking thing with the with the agents so if we've got the the foot locking channels and of course the great thing about tasks with the agents is that you know if there's any kind of important bit of channel data that's important to you so if it's like a soldier shooting a gun or some other event and it's quite easy to just shove those channels into the into the clip and pull it out later either during the same if you want to modify the same or as a later event if you need something to happen based on some clip and in this case that's just the foot locking so we we just make sure that the the kangaroos have their feet firmly planted on the ground and here we have our so this our banking clips so yep so they would just go into the into the solver so that they would automatically lean over when they're when they're turning into into when they're turning the corner and of course you know these guys like with the spiders you know every single character every single agent is doing something completely different because there's the terrain adaptation there's all the clip lending which is happening all at the same time and and it's typically faster than real time to to run and it's very very flexible because ultimately it's particle system calling all the clip data that you've baked into the agent definition on disk so that's our simulation network so very easy network to manipulate and very easy to get this this thing running but it's just it's just great to know you know like you can basically throw this at any any terrain it's and it's it's just going to adapt automatically you can put in all those behavior changes like if you get too close to this then do that and that's it so it really is a fully fledged crowd system it's it's great fun and of course lots of secondary effects related to the kangaroo so they would kick up some leaves and things like this and then we would obviously do some fur dynamics with the the current first system and give us some nice nice hairy kangaroos and then we do some interaction with some vegetation so various shots where that comes into play or we do more typical Houdini simulation work okay so so this this eye right so this is a actually some birds and this is for a very large hemispherical projection and it was that like so as a couple of thousand frames of animation of a flock of black necked storks on sort of 4k thing at 60 frames a second so just for this we would put in another camera at a slightly different angle just so we could sort of get a good look at the animation so again the birds all rigged up in Houdini I was Andrew can't believe was doing the animation here and he was actually off sites that's the other thing about with Houdini working remotely and working cross-ice is is really fairly trivial as long as you've got a valid license and you're up and running it's very easy to have that back and forth so that's sort of a close-up detail of that animation at 60 frames a second slightly slowed down just so we can get a better look at what's going on there we've got another couple of Clips just one of our storks flying around as this is just all the same animation but just seen from a few different areas and the the defamation on the feathers is quite accentuated because it was quite far away the bird rig itself so we've got a wing rig in there and obviously quite free to change things around and experiment there's just the guts of the feather system so we do all the the stacking the interpenetration resolve all the grooming we do the grooming with the fur too so we can have bent feathers twisted feathers and then so it's you know quite a big network but I think there's some new stuff coming in Dini that's gonna make this an awful lot easier actually and obviously would run the cloth Sims and wire Sims on top of the house so we've just got a few feathers there running through a cloth simulation so you know feathers are always a bit of a challenge but good fun okay so this our last one this is axel so this is a film that's coming out coming out now and it's a robot dog and it's so yeah it's like a kind of a teenage film we're sort of young teenage boy meets military grade hardware and you know forms an everlasting bond of friendship it's this one that when the shots I'm quite quite fond of this one actually again all rigged and animated in Houdini and obviously rendered in Houdini and stuff so it was quite a challenge we were sort of a third in line on the vendors too to actually do the the work so we're waiting on the geometry for for quite some time so we had to move very very quickly to to get her a rig together we did a few motion capture test with a real dog that was good fun basically because we soon as we've done a lot of things with agents we wanted to try just round-tripping it where we would I get to get some motion capture put it through the agent system you know get a bunch of clips hand animation and stuff put it through the agent system and then push that back out onto a hero rig but it turned out that at the end of the day and we did test with motion builder and everything but at the end of the day we sort of needed to just have very fine-grained control on the animation because a lot of the shots that we were working on were sort of shots where the dog was like interacting with actors on scene so the animation was very very specific so even though it was it was fun to experiment with us it wasn't really going to get us very far at the end of the day and this is just you know you might recognize the the the balance there because I would we just sort of started off with the new auto reg in Houdini disappear before they had a quarter pádraig it's just a biped rig and we so we just threw that down because you know it's always good to just see what these things are what's the current state of the auto rig so we started off there and then package it package it up and then of course we would have a layered rig system so we'd have a primary an animation rig which is the top one that you see there and so our animators would do all the first pass animation with that and then we'd have a secondary rig which we're calling in to form rig here where we would resolve a lot of things like in front of interpenetration between the plates and do secondary animation and jiggle and all those kind of things whatever was needed so we'd break we'd break those those rigs up so we just have a look in the rig there so again we've got our lag assets so each each leg has its own little asset and all the various bits and bobs that it needs and again Rob Kelley was doing some great work in here we serve a very collaborative process so this myself Rob and Chelsea and and Ronnie and we all did a bit ring in there it's great fun so that was the front leg and we've got the back leg and you know we were able to try a bunch of different things like we're trying the new chop constraints for some targeting and look at stuff and everything so this is just gonna display some extra little bits and bobs that we needed to work out some of the similar motion between the different like components there you go and and the other thing I just wanted to sort of briefly touch on is - obviously being a robot and then being a having some very high density geometry we would throw it around the viewport with just by setting their primitive intrinsics much like you do with Bullis style geometry or you know pack primitives obviously we you know pack primitives in Houdini there's so many different flavors you've got fragments we've got a lambic pack disc and it seems like we're always adding new permutations to typography moves we found alembics were the fastest throw around so we just define our iraq seas for 3x3 matrix on the rest mesh so I'll just go back there so yeah we just we basically deform for a lot of these rigid elements weed deform kind of a low res mesh with some local transforms defined there and then using simple point form we'd pushed position around and then with that bit of xcode that we can see pretty straightforward bit of xcode we just edit the the intrinsics and that was very very fast to update so even though it's high res geometry very faster around so you can see that we've just added the point positions and then we just supply the rotations and pretty fast and then the same again for some secondary animation so we'd have just more localized controls where we just edit those those vectors so we can just throw some more rotations in as and when we need it so and allow us to give us do we we could put some secondary jiggle on and some secondary rotations and things like that there we go and of course that's the same animation that we saw before that's just the render of straight out of mantra and we'll do some more effects on top of us again Rob Kelly was generally the electricity effects here so great fun that was thoroughly enjoyable and and here we've just got some of the other animations that we did for that project and so some of the animation is obviously robotic that's kind of deliberate and other times is he's just being very very doglike grace is there there you have us that's that's us that's a good question so do we find to fund hard to to get to recruit riggers and well I guess it's always the same kind of it's always the same debate and really that that works itself out on the floor pretty quickly because some of the some of the fundamental concepts are very fast to to grasp usually obviously there'd be somebody senior you know like myself or a rag a rub or you know wouldn't wanted to run the guys who can just get someone up to speed very quickly um I guess people's fears are usually on the animators side you know so very off we would have animators and they have kind of a preconceived idea that you know animating and Houdini is kind of really difficult and all this kind of thing and I'm sorry we usually that usually disappears pretty quickly to be honest because we can update the rig so quickly and if there's any you know anything that's actually an issue we can resolve it very very quickly on the fly without interrupting the animators workflow so we can do lots of testing under the hood and sometimes push out updates in the animator wouldn't even notice that things have been fixed so it is yeah on the rigging side I mean obviously there's a squeaky wheel phenomenon you know the more people that kind of do it and kind of say hey side effects what about this thing then the more that's going to get updated the more people get familiar with it but you know it's a it's a fair question to ask and it's and it's it really is one of those things you have to evaluate you know based on your your crew and you know who ultimately is kind of able to look at the system and go oh yeah no problem you know how long does it take you to go from like the spider rigged like the final delivery all their Indian stuff for like the fundus pilot project how long would that take Oh like as in what was the duration of the project yeah I guess the whole project went on for nearly a year sometime - but it was a couple of hundred shots so there's a lot of a lot of spiders I mean obviously the the rig progressed you know we sort of went through like version 15 or 20 or something of the rig and the curve rig and all that kind of stuff so you had like a few months to do R&D and you know with all the shots coming in you know like how much stuff you need them yeah well I guess we had you know obviously we'd we'd have a few a few shots to test on and then you know we had to really also make an evaluation as to whether we could do it or not you know especially with the challenge of like just the numbers on it and a relatively small team and quite varied experience with Houdini but you know that that's the one thing about working about a Houdini setup it's that it scales very efficiently you know so you can very very efficiently go from kind of quite labor-intensive to so many things are fast and automatic so like a given shot by the end of the project you know you could you could belt out a shafts and you could belt at first pass animation on a shop for like half dozen spiders in a day or two and then you know you might go back and refine it was you'd get your first renders out the first day so depending on you know a nitrous problem and and for like the mesh move that was done I mean humidity would that be done by Houdini artists would that be done by a much more artists or are you guys typically that was much move artists actually so that there would be you know as much moving there's various different levels of expertise and stuff like TAS and a lot of us can be quite labor-intensive at times so that's that's why we wanted to kind of put a lot of focus on trying to make that whole thing easier and more flexible and just kind of give her much more artists sort of different tools to be able to tackle that thing because very often pushing a rig around a traditional Rea ground with traditional control is just it's very frustrating process it'll only get you so far but to be able to kind of go well you know you just if you can track that thing and in 2d if you can if you can make that thing follow in 2d then we'll make it work for you in 3d so sometimes it just came down to that you know well what's the matter of stuff what was the motivation of not just going to an outsource studio that has all those tools already in the pipe normally you had a perfect track in a day well we've done that many times so that was not our first disintegrating human project so certainly I've done a lot of disintegrating humans in different studios big studios small studios the simple answer is it's never good enough it's it's never good enough like once you see once you have some effect that's on skin or a cloth or something and it's and everything's moving like every single aspect of it is moving you you really can't be constrained to something that's been done off-site and you just have no ultimate final control over whereas if you're if you build all the things that you actually need into the rig and into the system before you know you get going then you know you can get to the end result because the amount of times where you know that kind of logic which is often a sort of an economics logic you know it's it's often like oh it's cheaper it's just said sources perhaps to a smaller team that can just do things very quickly but then the amount of time so you kind of go actually that's not just not working for us you know mm but it's very it's very dependent on the bond that on the project you know I suppose on that particular one we also want to just do an Houdini you know cuz there's more fun so what was the final turn around for one body track in the end like well well that's the thing it'd be it'll be the duration of the shop so we'd be tweaking the body track and you know entire length of the shot like we'd get a first pass out very very quickly that allow us to choreograph everything get older you know dynamics kind of all the Energy's worked out in the velocities and things like that but you know inevitably as the dynamics come out you know you you've waited two days for that fluid Sam or whatever it is that rigid body sent me to kind of go actually that's all a bit crazy because there's a little twitch there and the in the button in the body track and you need to go back and fix it hey thank you for your talk I was wondering about the kangaroo rig did you use a muscle system on that and if so did you use the like the I guess basic muscle system or the finite element muscle oh no with the Kangaroos as soon as it's I mean we may still do because we're still we're still working on that and that was that was mainly some just some femme skin dynamics and some fur so the Ferdinand works would cover a lot of it so thank yous know we're I'm choosing the muscle system yeah I was wondering uh great talk by the way I was wondering how you dealt with variations in the crowd in terms of with the spiders if you had different like different models or how you dealt with texture variation and also with the lighting as well if you had any challenges especially when you have by the end of a shot like everything is then you know into the sort of rag doll dynamics where were the challenges they're on the variations and the rendering okay so with regards to the variation of the of the crowd agents that was fairly easy because essentially when you bake out an agent M Houdini has its own sort of rigged definition that it stores in the agent database so it's very easy to test your your variations if you've got like different proportions on the limbs and things like that and and then that flows into the ragdoll system quite easily so if you've got one spider that's got a very small tail or you know some spider that has very long legs compared to very short legs that propagates through into the into the collision pills quite automatically I guess the challenge with with the crowd system for the spiders was really well you know the system was only divided designed for bipeds at the time and it's a lot of legs so you know it would go crazy quite a lot at the beginning and then also the velocity inheritance was was quite a challenge so to have you know the guys getting dragged along the ground and sort of get picked up by the spiders you know that spiders would go from a static terrain onto a deforming mesh I was pretty pretty tricky but again because it's just a particle system and adeney it's quite easy to just kind of do a pre solve step where you so transfer the dimension and then I post off where you just sort of add that to the position and so turn out to be quite straightforward and I mean I suppose that's the thing it's a Houdini solver so it's quite easy to build a solver within a solver and just you know daisy-chain different operations per time step did you use any of the material cell sheets were doing oh yeah yeah we did actually although at the time at the time the star sheets would would max out really it was kind of because we were hitting like 50,000 agents and and you know so you want to have different textures and all the spiders and different shader attributes and things and so so I think yeah oh yeah that's right there is a there is one little hook in there still in the shader things where you can you know you can you can pull they're packed are tweets directly from the render students yeah it's just like a vex thing for their free you know in the shaders where you can kind of go sort of like getting object level properties you can get packed primitive properties as if it was an object so you can just have per point variation on spiders and just push that straight into the shader so that turned out to be the fastest which doesn't work with packed fragments but I worked for us thanks anyone else oh no that guy again yeah we rendering all in mantra everything yep yeah yeah I'll rent it in mantra yeah it's kind of our work you know because you get so many licenses and and it's yeah PBR is pretty solid too few Spencer very quick the FIR a rendering is very very fast so yeah all rendered in mantra obviously we've been you know especially of late we've been using Arnold for different projects given that it couldn't have spin and in Houdini you know typically a lot of us come from a random and background so obviously that makes and it's just nice that kind of mantra and Redmayne sort of come from the same sort of history same sort of progression so from a shader perspective a lot of those a lot of that logic kind of maps across but yeah mantras are sort of our workhorse render he just inspired me do you have to deal with fur and crowd agents at all yeah yeah yeah obviously the Kangaroos lifer yeah and then the spiders all had fur although back then I was harder to render it's basically because the subsurface that were he had in the spiders was using the old kind of right dress the older subsurface model - if - it's a the classic shader and nowadays the the subsurface lobe say that comes with the principal shader is so much more faster and efficient so it's much it's much faster to render that with fur now so so it was it was harder to render the spiders were fur than it was the Kangaroos but of course it's very easy and Houdini like to just do the first emulation on all the Kangaroos you just loop through them and process it out stick it on the render farm he any sort of bits of couch rigging that you want to explore next after having done all this research yeah well so much I guess you know it is it is I think obviously the the you know the one thing that I think we'd all like to see is just that round tripping from like hero asset you know hero kind of rake and motion capture into an agent and then back at the other end where you go or that guy over there we're just going to totally take him over and be hero so so we were doing some of that with the with the dog actually but it didn't really matter to work that we'd have to do especially on the rig perhaps I'd to push all the hooks back into the hero rig if we're doing lots of big long fast run shots with the dog like so that that was what we thought we might be doing where we have lots of shots where the dog had to like run around and cover a lot of ground so we thought well maybe maybe this where we need to go from the agent back into here at rig but yeah I'd like to see more progress there I'd like to see some of the things on on nested rigs versus flat rigs kind of being a bit more resolved with with side effects just because obviously there's a lot of things involved there especially when it comes to agents it would be great if the agent system could take you know a leg asset with an embedded reagan ass and know how to deal with it so currently the the agent sort of ike a definitions are all like vex headers you know so all the all the solvers i sort of worked out in the in the agent of x libraries and and also the rig the rig bones themselves are sort of embedded in the agent definition so even just getting the you know you'll push over again but then the bones that you get back out from the agent aren't quite the same bones you know they said okay reinitialized for the agent definition so just I think and I think these things just naturally will work themselves out as more people use it you know and it gets more or milage anybody else [Applause]

Channel: Houdini

Views: 32,221

Rating: 4.9339452 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: b1jR4ozuOXI

Length: 57min 24sec (3444 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 24 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/schmon]

Real nice insights on production rigs/crowds.

And pretty clean FXs