Node Fest '18 | Ben Watts - Pathways into FX & Design

[Music] another superstar coming up next and I've just found out he loves a Kraken and coke we only had a couple last night I have a couple more tonight Ben Watts is a visual effects artist and motion designer from Swan Hill Australia he works in broadcast design and enjoys creating tutorials in his spare time not that he has much anymore because he's just so damn good ladies and gentlemen all the way from Swan Hill please welcome Ben Watts my name is Ben Watts from BW design and I'm a freelance Houdini effects artist from a small town about three and a half hours north of Melbourne and I think the thing that I love the most about my work is just the massive amount of variety in it and it's probably best if I just show you my reel and give you a better sense of what that sort of consists of them what it looks like [Music] [Music] [Music] all right thank you thanks guys just there we go alright so yeah as you can see like this there's a lot more obviously that I could probably shove in there it's pretty quick but uh you do a bit of a sense of like I said some of the different things that I get to work on and it keeps it interesting I don't know if I mentioned just then but all my works actually done remote so I don't work in house so I'm I'm really lucky I get to grow up next to my kids and family and work on these dream jobs so really really fortunate I I sort of started my journey in motion design around 2007 just you know through self learning like a lot of us probably have and just via the internet I started off with after fact and sort of I was lucky enough to pick up some jobs doing local TV C's TV commercials and you know various other sort of smaller projects and I did that for a number of years and just I never really knew I suppose what it was exactly that I wanted to like focus on and and make you know the forefront of my career so I was going through the motions pardon the pun for probably quite a few years you know just just with a after-effects and it was good like I learned a lot of stuff and that was uh you know I I think one thing though that I've always wanted to do was to get into 3d and I picked up 3ds max funnily enough out of all the packages that were around I started to use that and and you know that was good because it gave me the the basic skills to you know do all the the usual stuff that you want to do in a 3d package alone how to do some organic modeling some hard surface stuff how to texture things you know what you v's were all that sort of stuff so you know that's I guess where it began and I've actually put together a little video of some of the work that I was sort of doing because I used to do some motion templates and stuff which probably some of you guys have doubled in as well a video hive and stuff so I've put together a little video from around about the 2010 era have a look at what my work looked like around that time there we go okay so this this was interesting because there's I didn't know what my style was I had no clue you can see there's a mixture of things here but when I want Doug Beck's through this and I was trying to put some clips together of stuff that wasn't super embarrassing I was like this is like lens flare and glitch porn like this just so so many glitches and lens flares and why are there so many freaking arrows like this just arrows everywhere so it was it was funny to look back on that so fast forward to sort of 2013 I am I'm still doing motion design that's my bread and butter that's how I'm earning an income and I picked up cinema 4d and I did a future toros and cinema 4d I don't know what possessed me to actually make sheet oracles of good know it no clue still to this day but I'm really glad I did because it picked allowed me to gain somewhat of a following online and I think it really catapulted my career just by by people knowing my stuff it was out there you know you've got to expose yourself to the danger of people seeing your work or you know no one's gonna know who you are right so I I would I would do motion design during the day and I'd Evelin c4d on the side and you know one of the things though that I was always doing in c4d was like making explosions and doing those things in c40 that you know most people probably would be in a package like Houdini if they're trying to do these types of things and I really got an interesting technical effect at that time so I had a great time using c4d and all that but I think I might have been in it for the wrong reasons so I whoops too far I did that for about a year and a half and as I said I did multiple tutorials but then I sort of I was seen a lot of cool Houdini stuff online so I thought you know I started to bite the bullet I'm gonna I'm gonna have a go at this and you know earning from motion design and not 3d I was over sort of switch packages without too much hassle you know because I didn't didn't have clients that relied on a 4d work and all that stuff so I spent many many long nights crazy hours just trying to dig deep into Houdini because I'm not a technical person inherently like I I don't have a technical bone in my body or I'd like to say that I kind of do a little bit now but back then like you know I knew a normal was required to make shading look decent and work properly and stuff like that but I didn't know what what you could do with that in Houdini you could make custom forces with it all this crazy stuff so you know I'm digging into this thing at nighttime and you know just trying to try to get up to speed with it quickly and I've been using it for about three months and I put out a tutorial in Houdini actually and I got a lot of traction and people really really interested in it so that was really surprising to see people were saying to me like you were just using the c40 the other day like what's going on here like how how how are you able to pick this up and I think it was just like I'd found my passion you know what I mean it's just it's like that sometimes you just got to find your way through trying different stuff I'd been doing that for a little while and I got the opportunity to take an in-house job at a studio in Sydney through a friend for three weeks and I'd never done a Houdini job in let alone in-house so I'd never have gone away from the family really for an extended period of time you know had a young baby at home and so I went and I did that gigging it was it was really really good like it was a good eye opener to see how the in-house environment works I kind of was a bit like these guys know I've been using Houdini but I haven't been doing it long so how the hell am I going to do the effects that are required and all that sort of stuff but I figured it out you know it wasn't that bad they were really understanding and they knew that I was I was new to the software so I went over fairly well I got home from that gig and then I get a random email which turned out to probably be the biggest and most critical turning point my career was from a German studio who'd just won a pitch for a Nike job and I saw the email and they wanted me to go over to Munich and I'm like I just got home and like that was a big deal on all this stuff I can't go to Germany but it's the biggest opportunity of my career do I said I couldn't go and luckily enough they actually said we don't care we just want to work with he was sending stuff online for years and and I took that took that gig and you know I've really never looked back since like I've been in effect now for almost four years and you've seen the sort of stuff that I get to work on that's just a tiny amount of it but what it pushed me into doing was like learning some coding skills like I said technical not like I had to take a code Academy course on JavaScript just to learn the fundamentals of how to code and what it meant to like or how to write a for loop and what does it do and just all the stuff that you typically I guess you'd know some of this stuff before you went into a more technical program so I'm not saying that you need to know these things in the package like you Danny about it it's really helped me so I'm so I did that and and yeah that's sort of where I'm at now I'm doing my thing and a lot more comfortable obviously now so what I'm gonna talk about next actually something a little bit more specific I did a talk at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver in August and at the start of my talk I explained how like when you get into a situation where you've got to create effects one one problem that comes your way when you're in Houdini for example is there's nothing built-in that's gonna allow you to like drive or control these effects for example like if I've got to make a building crumble from top to bottom yeah I can make it like do that but like how do I do it intricately in like add variation all that sort of stuff and so when I made the switch from say 42 to Houdini see four days got all the great you know plane effectors and shader effectors and all these great tools to do all this stuff and I was like there's nothing so I literally had to come up with something like had to I'm super new in here I've had to come up with a solution so I touched on this basically now sorry briefly at SIGGRAPH and then talked about all the other stuff and then I got bombarded with emails like what is this thing you made like how do I do it what's it consist of so I thought it'd be a good thing to talk about and just show a little bit about my process and how I build things and it's quite a simple thing to me anyway I hope it's I can break it down for guys that you know don't use this software aren't interested in the software enough so that you can take something away from it but yeah so what so in a nutshell what it is it's a tool that um you take an object it creates UVs on that object and they're just planar you these it could be you know X Y Z or whatever it's key frameless so you say between frame one and a hundred you know wipe left to right up or down radially whatever so it's kind of automated in that sense it's got built-in noise functions to add variation um it's got an an RGB mode so that's really good if you've got like a part of a mesh where you want to affect it with displacement say over here but you want to like eat away the tail end of it sort of things so you've got a bit more control having three zones of influence and then it's just got a regular float mode so it could just be you know adding like a ripple or something like that again it's real-time it's not a simulation and the three areas I sort of wanted to hit with the tool was that it can handle linear transitions radial and it can work on curves so I'm just going to what I'm going to do is show you a couple of examples these are R&D shots so don't go too hard on the critique of the rendering but it just shows you a couple of effects that I've that I've used this tool for and how to deal with the problems that were associated with that so I'm just gonna play this there's no audio nothing so so some pretty abstract stuff but just take note like everything has variation some of the Nike stuff don't drink alcohol kids that's what happens no and you have more shoes he's the curved stuff at play so you can sell that variation of the threads and all the weaving and stuff like that so without building something like this I feel like I would have been yeah in a lot of trouble in terms of time management and stuff like that so it's kind of it's a really great skill to have and know how to do something like this I'm just gonna talk through the sort of three major components of what this is and explain what I'm doing yeah I'll just probably after watch this one over here so if you take any object you can essentially just assign just basic UVs to that object in this case again it's just playing are you ease and then in Houdini you can jump up and down levels of all they're called context I suppose and I just create a node to get access to some of the properties that are inherent of that object like how many points there are the point numbers all that sort of stuff so this might be if you're a c4d person this might be more close to something like espresso so what I'm doing is I'm just taking those UVs that I've just assigned to that object and if I plug them into color I can visualize them so now it's just like having a set of coordinates on this object right and the cool thing about that is what I can now do is because they're locked to the object not only is it great from when I move it around and they're gonna stay local to that object is I can I can plug those coordinates into another node which will actually will allow me just to offset those across the surface right so what I'm just setting up here is I'm taking the frame and I'm fitting that into something which my I think it's got a range map or something like that in Express I don't ever really use that much but essentially what I'm doing is I'm just saying take whatever the current frame is and allow me to fit that between say zero and a hundred or whatever this is where the automation comes in so I'm not actually like relying on keyframes I'm telling you the minimum maximum values of this effect is going to across like the time frame it's going to look care across all right so that's all well and good but then we're going to need a ramp so we can actually squash the values or clamp them and get a bit more control there so that's what I've done there that yellow node and the most important part here I suppose or one of the most important parts is here given these positions on the surface what I want to do is I've actually want to add noise to those positions which will effectively displace them which is what you're seeing now and this is where you get variation in the edge and this becomes really powerful because you know one director is never going to say he do like a linear what thanks mate that looks really good it's just never gonna happen so you need to have you need to have these little tricks up your sleeve you know so what I'm doing don't a bit of housekeeping here naming stuff I probably should lift that out but I'm I I'm essentially like in this lower context we say I'll just jump back up now but I've promoted those those parameters up to that higher level this is like the top level if you if you get my get my drift there all I'm really doing here is I'm showing you that I can scrub the timeline this effect will just propagate across the surface I'm adjusting some of the noises and stuff like that and I'm just kind of like showing a little bit I suppose of what it what it looks like when it moves across what you can change what you can alter and very you know you've got things like roughness controls frequency of the noise all this sort of stuff like things you'd kind of expect to be able to control alright but remember this is only a couple of nodes so it's not like a complicated system here so yeah I think though the best part though is the key frame this thing I'm sure you guys will you guys will agree with that it's pretty cool to be able to just slap it down on an object and go go from here to here over this amount of time so got the got the grid going there and now just plug a sphere in there just to show you can just plug any object into it and and does the same thing effectively so yeah it's it's it's kind of a good solution that you can just bang it on anything and this like I said I use this so much just to get up and running and get things going quickly that's kind of a real lifesaver all right so now I'm going to talk about the the component which would be if you've got something like you know you need to do a knitting effect or something like that but you need the curves too low wiggle and come on with variation right that's a lot of this system is the same but I'll talk about a few differences so I've just got a curve I'm displacing it with 3d noise so it looks like a spaghetti noodle and it's just same same thing here it's just taking the current position and adding some 3d noise to it and playing with the frequencies and amplitude just to sort of see you know what looks good this is really just up a thing where I'm doing a few tests then I just sweep that curve so I'll get some thickness so we've got that now we've got an actual surface on there I assign normals to see the the normal directions they're the little blue spike YZ point now that's really critical because I'm going to use that as my displacement direction to push these curves out because now I'm going to kill away the polygons and it leaves me just with the curves right so thinking about the things I just talked about with the the effect moving over the surface that's all well and good but I need these curves to like have variation and different like timing offsets so you can see here in the white that's what that's sort of showing it was really quick I know but you can see that they're not all coming on at the same time and what I'm actually doing is I can get access to the number of each primitive or curve we'll call it it's called a primitive in hitting and I can say subtract that a random number or a random curve from that amount that that effect moves across the surface and that's how we get the randomization there now I'm actually displacing those curves along that normal that I mentioned a minute ago so I can push them outwards same sort of thing I can take a random value based on any given curve number in that geometry and sort of subtract that from the equation which will just break things up make it a little look a little bit more interesting and you know all of a sudden you kind of have an effect that just looks a bit more organic and a bit more interesting so you can sort of play this back now and within a couple of nodes you've got this so you can imagine how valuable something like this could be because you don't have to displace it out along its normals you can do whatever you want you can make it move however you want but yeah I'm just changing the amplitude on that they're making it pretty crazy so yeah another instance of how this really became critical than some of those Nike jobs where I had to like make shoes just come out of nowhere from threads and things like that like it's they're just good things to have in your back pocket um I think that's done all right even on that plant so you guys in c4d love your your clonal object I know that it's awesome you use it all the time just going to sort of show how this would fare in in a situation where you've got a heap of clones I've just got a grid I've got my effect which now it's wrapped up in a digital asset so now it's become instead of two separate little thingies it's one tool which is that red node it's just got the controls promoted to the top level so it's like a user-friendly almost like a plugin right so I've got just a bunch of points and I've cloned some cubes on there now I'm just showing the radial part of it so I didn't break that down as to what that consists of but if you just take an average of the amount of points on a piece of geometry there's your Center and then you can calculate the distance from every other point in the mess do that Center that's basically what you do so yeah I'm just sort of showing cuz this tool if you think about it like the values of the outputs it's just between 0 & 1 so it's a normalized output and really it's just a multiplier for anything you want to create or drive on this mesh and so I'm just sort of playing with the settings here showing a few different variations and yeah I guess you know it's sort of showing that there's a lot of possibilities what I'm doing here if you're interested the reason the colors vary it is because I'm saying you know if the height in Y goes above a certain value you know color this this point this color and it plugs into a ramp that's that's how I get the variation the colors now I'm showing the the linear mode again and yeah so there's two conditions that these things affecting right now you can see it's affecting the color and it's affecting the scale of those clothes and that's all it's all wrapped up in that little purple no down the bottom which is just a little bit of code I talked about that earlier touched on that you know learning even if it's minimal code in Houdini goes a long way I can just write a couple lines and and and implement the scaling the color all that sort of stuff you can do it with nodes if you want to as well but it makes you feel like you're pretty cool if you can do it with who's code that's the main reason I do it now you guys just got volumes you fancy bastards so we've had it for a long time so what I'm showing here is I can plug an object into this so it's a volume representation assigned distance field if you guys up with your volume lingo but it's a representation of the object where at the surfaces it's zero outside the surface it registers as one and inside is negative one so I think you've got that right I'm on the spot but I'm just showing you can plug an object into this thing and it'll give you a fall-off I've got a moving in quite an awkward way funnily enough but you can just remap those values very similar to what I've sort of been seen with the c40 field and stuff like that so I thought that might be a little bit relevant given you guys I just got a nice new set of tools all right this bad boy all right so I mentioned about the big sort of first job that I got onto the Nike staff early on and part of one of those jobs was some was like a balloon and it had to like be wrapped with multiple different types of net and sometimes I feel like I'm a grandmother because I get so many knitting jobs that's it's insane but this thing like what I'm gonna show is three things it's the automatic some test renders and then close to what the final would look like so it's hard to come up with all these ways these threads coming on right and if you look like there's three different types like different layouts and things like that but if you look at the way this sort of moves it kind of looks like it's simulated right like it has that sort of quality to it like it's it's got a bit of offset it's little bit of floatiness all that sort of thing but when I actually had to do the effect I thought well what if there was another way what if we could do this in a non simulated way and that's exactly what I did so and how I did it was the good old tool it comes again so I had this sum this piece of the balloon and these things it's already you vide right and if you want to know more about how this actually has good UV coordinates or anything like that give me up later on and I'll explain the process of getting something like this flattened out but yeah this thing in this case is already UV so all I really had to do was like squash the UVs in the x-axis in this case and if I throw down the trusty old fall-off node and I created and I visualize that have a look at the what the pattern it gives like I saw that and I was like ah I thought it kind of looks you know like the way that cloth would kind of fall you know behave and I was like we might we might have something here so right so what I did was I took some normals from a sphere because the normals that sort of were on that object for a little bit sketchy so if I just take a sphere and transfer them across with some with some fall-off I'll get something that's a little bit more even so that's what I did here and this is B this is again it's a displacement Direction thing so I get these spherical normals so I can push this thing out off the surface and so now you can see we've got my nice actually let me explain that so that wobbly thing you just saw was another instance of the geometry which I've warped and I've pushed out along its normals and I'm using that nice cloth II like map to to morph essentially between the two states and so you can see as this plays back like it's got to cut at the back of it the cloth and it didn't matter to have that because we're never going to see it anyway in the final spot but yeah I can actually um I can take that the output of that tool and I can use it as a multiplier or a driver you could think of it as to morph between this bigger wobblier shape and the tight shape that ends up being a final shape on the on the balloon and this is the RGB mode I touched on earlier too the great thing about this is now I've got three zones of influence so here I can establish an alpha Channel in the viewport and I can get rid of the the ugly blue part I think it was yeah it's gone see so now it was there now it's gone and all of a sudden we've got a really nice quick solution to a problem that could have been a lot more technical and cause a lot more headaches all through the use of you know building the scene with a few notes so if we look at this merge back with the original geometry you can see it fits perfectly because it ends up being the original geometry so it's kind of like working backwards in a way but yeah there have been a nice solution to this problem so yeah just another example that you know again with a knitting so much knitting so it's a really noisy Aranda and don't worry about this effect I'm gonna keep talking about this thing until I just flog it to death but I'm going to show you how to how to do this why not so um get a square piece of knit or thread and what we're gonna do we're not going to use the tool actually here we're gonna just talk about like a simple incarnation of the other radial transition I'm gonna take this thing this this patch of knit it's just a heap of points and I'm gonna like I said measure the distance between the center point on this mesh and every other every other point in the mesh and just do a similar thing - what's in that tool but without using it it's a lot more simplified so I didn't have to do that but yeah I can in this case I can just manually animate this thing I'm actually manually I'm manually animating that the maximum distance is what I'm doing and that's how it sort of opens up from the center out so yeah that's what I'm doing there I'm adding noise to it again to add some variation sort of just playing with the fall-off just to see what looks good what feels right I'm adjusting noises and stuff here but you can't even see that like the edge it's it is getting some some stuff going on there and might be difficult to see I don't know then I basically blast away anything that's blue so I delete it right they better get these threads coming in from way out in space to essentially grow this thing so I took the radial transition did you say you would have just seen the color switch I did another instance of that now that I've blasted away that that extra geometry and ivory mapped it and I'll do this several times so I can re-establish designs of influence so now I've got the red green and blue zones looking slightly different I'm tweaking the noise again just to get a bit of a feel for sort of what kind of displacement I want to see in the surface here I'm just creating an attribute which is like a weight value that I plug into this smooth and I'm just saying anything that's green smooth that guy but leave the red and the blue areas out of it so if i zoom in hopefully can see this as I turn this on and off yep you can see that that's cool and then i displace the are displace in the positive y-direction anything that's green alright so I start to get this starts to get a bit more interesting so yeah it's you can you can use as much or as little of this displacement as you want but this is yeah where the effect goes from something super plane into something that can you know you can layer it up and create more detail and make it look a bit nicer so using a little bit of xcode here just saying if any given point has one neighbor put in a group that's why I love code it's just how do I do that otherwise like I don't even know but it's so good because I can now I can just expand select all those guys on the outer rim of this thing where I deleted that part away and then I select them and I pull them out i scale it mount like you can see here so it looks like this big weird thing and yeah but the thing is now I've got no points in between the the outer edge and the and where I stretch them forms I've got to resample them to establish new points so I'm gonna lay down another version of that radial ramp in a second to again re-establish my fall-off zones see that there so now I've just changed that up again and this is important because the next phase of this is going to be like integrating a pattern into the center of this so it doesn't just look like a big piece of poo that hasn't been a ripple in it it's actually this this was for a mattress spot a mattress commercial and I need the pattern of the mattress to pop up through the center of this thing so it actually looks like something so I'm adding a little bit of noise to that green area and now too and you can really say that in the render you can't really tell what it's doing so much here but I'm just displacing that a little bit now and this is the part where it kind of looks a bit more interesting I suppose is I take a geometry representation of my mattress surface I turn it into a volume alright looks like it looks weird there's my volume big pile of clouds can't tell you anything and then I sample the values of that volume and I use that to again displace whatever area I like in this case it's going to be the red area because that's the that's where the action needs to happen and if I visualize what that volume sample looks like this is what we get because a really cool pattern now can smooth that out or keep it hard whatever I want to do but the fun part becomes well the fun part happens in the next node is when I use that pattern see that now I can I can just use that as a mask essentially for my displacement can go as high as low as I want with that thing and yeah I get something that all of a sudden sort of has a bit more life about it something usable and then once I've sort of done that for the most part it's pretty much good to go I I'm going to probably smooth out some some of the green arrow again it looks a bit noisy so I used that white attribute that I talked about earlier you can just you know establish that based on the green value of the of the color in the mesh you can see that I'm just tidying that up a little bit it looks a bit ratty and then you can add some thickness to it bad demo sorry about that not good yeah I'll show the renter again after this but yeah I mean you can you can visualize a thickness in the viewport but if you've got redshift like I know you should have it it is just so easy and quick to to view it or render it while you're doing it so it's really just as a back up sort of thing that you'd have the thickness in the viewport just to have another look at the result of that you can sort of see now that you've heard me explain it if you look around the areas well the dense areas before that it hits the threads that shoot off into space and you see all that like the little intricate pieces of noise that bumpy and up and down that's that's what comes from taking the time to like change up those areas of influence and just put in those little details that's it guys thanks so much questions for being end up yellow tip he said I've got a nice tool oh you've got a nice and do I know when to stop tweaking it's good enough sorry I had to yeah no he said the tour looks good and do I kind of know how to get the best out of it is that fair to say like without going overboard and yeah yeah definitely nowadays like I built that thing a long time ago it's kind of gone through a few iterations it does a lot of other stuff as well I've got some like growth algorithms and things like that going on as a subset and another way I supposed to like propagate attributes across surfaces I've spent a lot of time like building assets and things that like have that it's really designed to like travel across geometry and things like that and bring these effects to life so you know got quite a kit of things but yeah definitely know what to do a lot more so nowadays with that that answers your question no how do you know when to stop tweaking that's my wife now it's just an experience thing like you know there's a limit to how far you can go with these things and you just you know like I'm gonna always be in constant feedback with with the team that I'm working with so you know they're going to rein me in if I'm over tweaking so you know I mean like it's it's just an experience thing you do know up into a point but you know there's always gonna be someone in general together and that's little step in if you go too far how do you find working in isolation well I've got a good situation I really enjoy it like I said I've been in house and it was it was okay but you know being able to do what I do nowadays I probably would find it very hard to go back to an environment like that I just feels extremely unique and you just don't lock people yeah that just breaks my so do you work from home blue Troy I literally work from home yeah so big on big on slack channels big on skype lots of meetings all that sort of stuff all yeah yep but that's the exciting thing obviously in this day and age you can work anywhere i remote Australia you can someone promote and work anywhere more questions that be shot yes you with the glasses it's putting yourself out there does it help you get more work if I didn't do that I did that in like there was when I started doing the whole tutorial thing I had no idea would turn into this like it was just a hobby thing like like I said I was getting paid to do motion and after-effects and arrows and witches and stuff so definitely like if I look back over the past four years or so even five years like that's how I got known that's how I established my brand I guess was just through that exposure and you know I think if you're out there and in people's faces you know you're gonna be on you know on the tip of their tongue when it comes to hire someone that's doing that type of work that you know that you're probably doing so if you if you just hide in the shadows and that's how I learnt of you firstly as you know when you were doing cinema4d cheats and they helped me they helped others that I know and then you're moving into Houdini and then I guess you wouldn't get invited to things like this if you didn't have a bit of a profile through that education that you're doing for people it's true like I'm not really active on forums and begin to like that sort of stuff so if it hadn't been through social media in that exposure I just yeah people wouldn't have a clue yeah I'm glad we know what you do you know okay so far anyone else drew again I talked about at the start of the talk that I wasn't there was a non-technical person but clearly I am somewhat technical how did I make that jump is that yep wow that's that's a really good question the script wasn't it yeah so the JavaScript course that I did so when I was doing the job with the German studio I was working with a super technical guy they're like crazy code experience like it was just he's like a wizard but he was building all this in Houdini from scratch and what are you doing like there's nodes that do that you know sort of thing and so we had a really good dynamic where I was showing him things he was showing me things it really inspired me to like figure out a way to learn like a lot of this fundamental stuff you know and and I got unto that Java course and at the end I still didn't know how to do a lot of it but it really it was enough to kick-start me in a direction where I could just not feel scared of that sort of stuff and I could go off on my own accord and just continue the learning so I reckon that was like the turning point because prior to that and I wouldn't know like how to build kill noise or anything like that you know none of that stuff so it's yeah I really think that was that was a critical thing and that's one had been to be here today even if some of that went over your head and Houdini's not for you it's today is really about thinking differently you know putting yourself out of your comfort zone putting yourself out there thinking in new ways exposing you open to new options which Ben's done amazingly through his career we had a question over here compared to other 3d softwares I've heard you know through memes on the Internet Houdini's learning curve is dangerously horrific like there are traps along the way and yeah saying no you just give up so you mentioned a lot about that that job you took in Germany was that sort of your turning point that got you're over that and gave you the confidence to move forward I think what it was no I'm not really cuz prior to that like I'd already been in there a year so I think I saw the work and it inspired me so much and it wasn't any one specific and then just a side note that there was not learning material around when I picked up Houdini either so there was bugger all like now there's so much like if you wanted to pick it up now he'd be so much feel I thought you'd be so much better off than what I was but um yeah it's um I was kind of like into it prior to that and yeah I I don't I put it my first Houdini tutorial about three months after I been using it and I did have people say to me but you just was using you were just using cinema for day like what's going on like well I put in what crazy time like to sort of fast-track it but um look it was it was hard in that there was just so much stuff that you had to become familiar with that's just given to you in other packages you just you know I feel like at that point it can either like really discourage you or just you go now I need to know how and why and I think I've always been a how and why person so that's why I grabbed a gravitated towards it so pretty much just just give it time and gotta give it some time I think you've got to make a bit of a commitment to Houdini if you would do want to learn it or pick it up you can't just expect to learn it yeah I think that's the thing like c4 T's so awesome in that anyway just say that again for the sponsors because it's cuz it's a the learning curve is it's very nice there's great tools built in and nowadays like I think when I was using it was like a 14 or something like that back in the historic ages yeah the stuff you guys have now cuz I still really keep up-to-date with what's going on I love the technology and love to see it evolve had big long conversations with a lot of c40 guys at SIGGRAPH about you know the new fields and the volumes it was really interesting to see it evolved there so yeah I think um look good Eve these things time yeah it's not going to be comfortable and easy for a lot of people specially coming from these other packages but if you want it you want it you'll make it happen so and I think there's probably a big option these days to keep working this field it's like visual effects for design is really a big new thing with you man versus machine type absolutely workload yeah the Houdini / motion movement is grown like tenfold since I started yeah so you can be a destruction pyro guy in a studio if you want and that's fine but if you want to do motion with this as well it's it's there yeah plenty of work just can't do it now if you fix with that equation over here so true how much code versus nodes how much coding versus node in in any given setup or projects it's not look I don't code a lot the thing with code is and I might it might be different for someone who's like picks it up a lot more natural to what I did but if you don't use like a muscle if you don't use it it's weak you forget it it's out the window like in no time so there's like I've learnt like it's much code over a period of time but there's you know a small amount that I'll use like daily so I would say like you know maybe between 10 and 20 percent if that sometimes sometimes yeah it's more little snippets here in there so is that what you're asking yeah it's not I'm not writing like scripts like I'm talking like you know five line and stuff like that which saved you from dropping down 10 notes yeah yeah a shortcut it's a real time-saver like if you're doing particles or something like that you wouldn't believe how many times just to do you know if statements and things like that like if this happens do this it's just unreal like it's you don't understand until you start to do it yeah no so I don't know JavaScript at all I know it's vex in in Houdini its own language yeah it's got its own language but Java like it just taught me the fundamentals of code in general it was just relevant like it was just you know when to use a for loop and you know when to use an array or and what isn't a write all that you know just the stuff that you would go back to the start and go through and evolve further through the course like it took me ages to get through it but you know if I hadn't done that I would have been a lot worse off I think yeah sorry okay another question I can't see oh knowing I may write it down number two alright so this stuff like it is quite complex tanned it looks a little bit impenetrable how do you quote for this sort of stuff and if you're a client or studio who wants to get this stuff done yeah how do you estimate the amount for stuff because I imagine you would charge a lot because it's so specialized how do you do estimations and how do you do estimations on how long the work would take so usually they'll shoot me you know some boards or a brief or sometimes just words you know which isn't that helpful of course we've all been there sometimes you get some pictures which is great you get you know a bit of a roadmap of what's involved it's definitely experience for starters because I think back to what it was like a few years ago wasn't as easy as what it is now but I've I've kind of got this role like anything they want the lease write down a week like a course like it's you're not gonna get anything beautiful done probably prior to that in Houdini like it so you can do stuff I can do so much stuff quick but it's not gonna be awesome you know what I mean so you'll I'll note that down sort of straight off the bat and I'll just see what's involved like it's it's a based on a per job sort of case you know what I mean but it's really just take the time go over the notes and and have you done this before sort of thing like just go back over the setups think about what I've done in the past cuz a lot of the times like I said about the kneading in that that's so many of those setups if someone comes to me with something like that I've got a lot of stuff to draw from so I know I can save time there so there's no sort of like easy answer to that you've just got a lot analyze what I've given you and sort of yeah go with experience but knowing that nothing is gonna be quick you know what I mean like you're in forever like usually a couple weeks you know three weeks depending but yeah and if it's simulation-based work well that's a whole different kettle of fish again you know your clients need to in a lot of cases they don't understand the iterating that has to happen with that sort of work so you know that there's just a lot of back back and forth a lot of dialogue and trying to figure these things out but the most important thing would be just experience I'd say cool thanks very much thank you very much Ben big round of applause for being everyone [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TheNode

Views: 7,564

Rating: 4.9831223 out of 5

Keywords: node, node fest, node fest melbourne, melbourne, acmi, creative conference, creative talks, tech talks, demo, animation, motion, mograph, motion design, yes captain, motion graphics, australia, art, artists, digital art, mgcommunity, VDB, houdini, procedural, cinema4d, c4d, sidefx, ben watts, bwdesign

Id: VIW_Wolpfuc

Length: 48min 46sec (2926 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 11 2019