SideFXLabs 2021 - New and Improved Workflows for Artists | SideFX | Houdini HIVE GameDev

all right i'm here with paul and my two guys from the side effects technical consulting team hey guys hi uh my name is paul wilkinson i'm a technical artist as well as the labs lead at side effects uh today we're talking about side effects labs my name's mike l i'm a new member of the zeitgeist labs team and i'm also a technical artist before this i was working in production doing simulations effects and shaded work what are you going to be talking about today so our presentation has been split into in the first half i'll be talking about various little enhancements that we've made such as user experience to hip organization to new little tools in tops as well as other contexts and then in the second half mike will be taking over to show some other really great uh big updates that he's been working on so in my half i'll be covering a new update to our budget animation two sets that comes with new features that improve the visual fidelity as well as make your workflow easier and more ability to customize our tools and i will also be talking about new poly reduction tools that's suited for character generation as well as collision generation and just some day-to-day easy views live improvement tools for you guys right on that sounds awesome let's jump in hi everyone my name is paul royceson and today me and my colleague mai are going to talk about new and improved workflows for artists which is essentially an update to side effects labs that we've done over the past half a year since the last presentation this is also my first presentation about labs in public since mai has joined the team at side effects lab so please everyone give my a welcome so let's get started so the presentation has been split up in three parts on the first half first of all i'm going to talk about some user experience enhancements we've made to the toolset then we'll be talking about some new additions to the tools we'll be looking at an update to some tools and then i'll be handing it over to mai who will be showing you some really cool and awesome stuff that he's been working on all right so let's get started so to begin with uh something that we've added uh some time ago is something called the sticker picker and the sticker picker is essentially a tool that allows you to drop down images in your network editor in a very easy and convenient way so as you can see we ship a variety of stickers by default that you can just place in your network editor just by double clicking on it in this interface it is not new functionality people have been able to do this using the network editor images functionality that's been in houdini for a really long time but this is a really nice easy way sort of an interface around this functionality so you can drop down those stickers and uh work with them with ease so since these are network images you can use all of the default functionality that the network images have such as controlling opacity you can delete them you can attach them to nodes and much more another thing that we've added is the ability of painting in the network editor so if you once again click on the labs menu and click on paint you now get a little paint cursor that allows you to paint in the network um so once again let's take a look at some more functionality up there you can of course change the size of your brush when you press i you can sample any color that is found in the network editor to sort of you know change the color of your brush so in this case um that allows me to write some uh differently colored letters so what would you use this for well that's a good question you could use this for annotations you could use this to draw some arrows on things and you can just use it for a whole lot of things and just make your network editor a lot more visual and pretty in general once again those are also just network editor images so you have the exact same functionality as the stickers you can attach them to nodes you can delete them you can control the opacity and much more continuing on the trend of colors we also added the ability to sample screen colors for colored ramps all you really have to do is just right click on a color ramp and click the sample screen colors and that will allow you to sample a color on any screen that is turned on on your computer so right now i'm just doing it on a spotify that i had running in the background but really what you could do is you could sample from a second screen that you have open for reference and much more so this functionality is very similar to what you'd for example have in substance and is useful for example coloring terrains coloring geometry or just generally making a a ramp hold random cuts that you can use for any other purpose so this is a really cool example of a use case for this functionality you can open up google maps or google earth find the location that you want and then just sample those colors and use them on a height field all you really have to do is use some grayscale value as a lookup for the ramp and then just assign that as a color in this case i'm just using height field visualize and that allows me to create these really really pretty colors straight right there inside of houdini next up a new tool so we added the ability to do booleans on curves this is something that we find ourselves doing quite frequently um previously you do this using the intersection analysis and intersection sketch and then some wrangles and some grouping but since it's a workflow you do quite often we figured why not just add it as a tool in labs so as you can see there are a couple different modes we have the intersect ability which is going to give you the intersection it can give you the subtraction so it can subtract a box from for example curves or shatter which is just going to cut up your curves based on the intersection with the polygonal object that is fed into the second input of the tool next up continuing on the ux trend so hdas are a major part of houdini right we all make them we all use them but it's quite difficult to create them maintain them and it's especially difficult to increase versions of hdas right so let's say you you're working with um an edge damage tool right you did some work on it and you want to increase the version of it so now you want to have a version 2 of this tool what would you do well first of all you'd find your subnet or your hda you'd open the asset manager you press duplicate you'd rename the tool and you'd hit save but the problem there is that it would not have any of the changes that you've made in your network editor when you duplicated the tool right the changes you made would either have to be baked into the version one that you had which then would also go to version two which is not what you want when creating an hd you'd have your subnet you'd say asset create new digital asset from node you'd get this little menu here where you can set the operator name operator label and where to save it you save it and then you'd have to go to the type properties window and change a lot of properties here such as icon tab menu inputs and other things like that so in general it works it's acceptable but it's difficult to work so what we wanted to do is we wanted to make that a lot easier so we introduced something called version digital assets what that allowed you to do is it just very easily wrapped up that hda workflow into a single menu or two menus actually you just right click your node which can be a subnet or an already existing hda you go to version digital asset you click save as and that brings up this window here that allows you to create a digital asset out of it you just control the type you're able to specify the username space or the branch namespace or both if you wanted to you could set the version and the nice thing about this is that if you were to um save as on a node that already exists it would know that there is a version one already and therefore it would give you a a name space that does not conflict with any other node that you have loaded in your environment currently you can set the label you can set the tab menu entry set the save path and all of these of course have drop down so you can see what is already there making it a lot easier for you we also have a preferences window which allows you to control some of the preferences that this window will use by default so you can for example set the default username space you can set the custom branch namespaces you can control whether or not the branch should be put in the label of the tool by default you can set default menu entry so if you know that you're always going to create tools that have to be in a specific tab menu for your studio for example you're going to set the default one right here additionally it also has some other things that you might want to be setting by default such as the save location and these other toggles so just give it a try and you'll see that it'll be a lot easier to use create and manage hgas in general additionally we're also happy to say that all of the labs tools are now fully python 3 compatible they have been for a little while but we've been doing additional tests to make sure that they actually are and so far our tests have returned positive so according to the vfx reference platform 2021 we are fully compliant then another new tool that we added so we added the extract image metadata top node right so since we're all getting more into tops a thing that we figured was very useful is the ability to extract metadata from images so think of this use case you have a bunch of images on disk and you would like to know how many of those images have a specific resolution or how many of those images are larger than a specific resolution or you would like to filter out all of the images that are using a specific color model or have a specific bit depth or number of channels right find all of the images that do not have an alpha channel or find all the images that do have an alpha channel well this node very easily takes in input images from for example a file pattern and processes those using i info and gives you all this information as metadata very convenient next up another top tool we added the concatenate text node so this is very useful if for example you have a file pattern node or some other node like for example the filter by state node that creates a bunch of logs using or containing errors of work items that you had upstream you would get tons of text files on disk that you know ideally you'd want to have in a single text file so you can print it out in a log and send it to you to someone through an email for example well this note just takes all those text files and concatenates them into a single text file you have the ability to control a couple things the most important one probably is this new line each input and that just makes sure that every single input gets put on a new line so if you have a linear of text or paragraph of text here and a paragraph text here you probably want to make sure that those are not directly attached behind each other which in this case would be testing one one one one testing two two two two well in this case you just split it into a new line next up another really cool tool this tool was made by simon on attitude labs it's called labs edge damage and it literally just does what the name says it adds edge damage to your geometry so for example you can create this low poly geometry here and you want to make it look old you want to make it look worn out well you just plug it in and you have it processed and it gives you something that looks nicely detailed like that you have control over the amount of damage that you want to sort of make it worn out at a specific stage you have the ability over three different modes of adding edge damage to your geometry you can use a vdb route which will convert this to vdb and use noises to add detail or additionally you can use the boolean mode which is going to use boolean methods to boolean out these edge damages the nice thing about this mode is that you'll preserve a lot of the original topology which is what you'd lose with the vdb route because you're creating a completely new set of topology and then the last one is color which is essentially the same as the the boolean mode with the difference that it does not actually do a boolean of your geometry but it actually just adds vertex colors to the edges of where the damage would be so this is for example useful for creating masks that you'd want to use for baking or for any sort of shader operations that you might want to do in your game this image here is the same this uh this pillar here is the same as this one with the exception that we just added some color to make it look more old all right next up another really cool content creation tool that we added recently which is the simple rope wrap it's once again a very simple tool all it really does is it just wraps some ropes around an object so let's say that we have this pickhead object here and we plug in some grids into the simple rope wrap it would then use the cutting surface of these surfaces to cut a essentially a ring around the object and use that to create ropes with it you can control the thickness of the ropes you can control the rope profile you can even have it be simulated to get a more organic looking result and it produces uvs and everything else that you need for a rope as well it does poly reducing as well giving you the ability to create a nice game-ready rope that you can just import into your game engine this tool also works in houdini engine so if you for example want to use this tool inside of unity inside of unreal instead of maya instead of 3s max you can just import that tool in those houdini engine plugins and it will work there as well then another really useful tool that we often use has to do with baking so we've had the maps baker for a long time which is really great tool of extracting attribute data into textures um but we wanted a more procedural method as well procedural in the way that it is live and you're able to use those textures without actually having to bake them to disk well that's why we created this attribute import cop and what that does it essentially uses the same technology that the map speaker does with the difference that this is a cop node that is live and is not big things to disk so you could use this to for example do any sort of shader operations inside of houdini using a cop node as input you could do other compositing operations inside of cops itself and just do crazy stuff with it the nice thing is that it uses an attribute to do the sampling with by default of course that is the uv attribute but if you want to use for example a second uv channel or a third uv channel or any other type of attribute that should be considered uvs you can just change it there you can set the attributes per channels that you want it to sample so in this case by default as you saw in this video here it is going to put the vertex color into the rgb channels and then you could for example stick some additional data into the alpha channel for example p scale or alpha or anything else that you might have next up calculating uv distortion so houdini has had the functionality to show the amount of uv distortion on your uvs and on your geometry for quite a while you were able to access those using visualizers but the downside of those visualizers is that there was no way to really sample those visualizers values as attributes so what we've done is we've taken the same source code that that that calculated the values for the visualizer and put it in a node itself and we just wrote the same algorithm in vex and that gives you this uv distortion primitive attribute value that you could use to for example insert additional seams because you now know how much distortion there is or you could use this for for example uh control the uv layout with it right so you might want to take the shells that have a high number of distortion or a higher number of stretch and just modify the amount of textile density that it's going to get in the uv layout so now that we have the ability to calculate the uv distortion we wanted to push it a little bit further we wanted to find a way to automatically reduce the uv distortion based on those attribute values that we calculated so we added this tool called uv remove uv distortion and what it does is it basically finds shelves with high numbers of distortion right so for example this pocket of distortion here and it has the ability to remove the distortion there by inserting new seams iteratively so it does essentially a feedback loop where it tries to remove distortion over and over and over while making sure that it doesn't introduce any new distortion so what you might notice in this image here is that this uv unwrap that i did which was a really poor quality which i did on purpose by the way you see that we have uv shells that are essentially tubes right so these legs here have been unwrapped as tubes and the problem with cubes is that you have these internal loops right inside of this uv shell where the internal loop could for example be the bottom of the pans so to speak and the outside loop would be the top of the pans here right of the tube and because there is no seam between the top and the bottom of that tube you will have a high level of distortion because you're essentially flattening a tube right and so what the remove uv distortion tool has the ability to do is create a seam between those two uh nested loops and flatten it again and once we do that we can see that we've now removed the uv distortion here around the legs so that's one of the modes of the remove uv distortion but as you can see we still have pockets of uv distortion that we want to remove even more so that's what the tool can do as well by just increasing the number of iterations and setting it to remove hot pockets of uv distortion and when we do that we can see that we've reduced the uv distortion even more and there you go so we've taken some uv shells that originally were quite distorted and we've removed most of that distortion so especially this shell here you can sort of see what the tool does is it finds the outside boundary of the uv shell and it finds the highest level of distortion inside of the uv shell and it tries to insert a seam going from the pocket of distortion out all the way to the boundary and once you flatten that you can see that you sort of get this unwrapping sort of origami like effect happening so if you go back here we can see that these are all round right there is no sort of internal cuts but when we go back to the last image we can see that insert those nice cuts here and so that's that's that tool give it a try and let us know what you think we've tested it in a large variety of meshes and it performs quite well the only thing that the tool doesn't handle quite elegantly yet is the ability to remove um stretch right it's really it's doing a really good job at removing compression wherever possible so in this case this is an area that you wouldn't really be able to remove any distortion on but hot pockets like these for example it does really really well but the stretch is something that is a lot harder to do and therefore the tool doesn't quite do that well enough yet but that's something that we're looking into but please please provide us with any feedback you might have next up we have the skinny converter sop so this is a tool that has been in labs for a long time um but it used the old way of rigging and skinning inside of houdini so what we've done now is we've updated the tool to use skin effects so the output of the skin inverter is no longer an object level rig but it is now an actual kin fx compatible geometry skeleton and animated skeleton so in this case you can see the first input is just your bind pose the second one is your rest pose and then the last one is just your animated skeleton in this case with kin effects that's just a set of primitives and points and if you plug that into the bonu form you now have your same forex animation that you had before now actually rigged and skinned and deformed using a skeleton so the input of this kind of converter is something that you would not be able to bring into a game engine without methods such as skinning or photic animation textures but the bottom approach actually gives you a skeletal mesh that you can import into unreal unity or any other game engine that supports uh skinned meshes um yeah so that's that that's the tool that's my half of the talk and i'd like to hand it over to my now thank you welcome to the second part of our talk my name is mai i'm very excited to meet you folks let's dive right into estimation 3.0 which is a big update since uh vert estimation 2.1 some of the goals we are hoping to achieve with this update is to streamline the user workflow as well as adding more powerful features so we started with we designed the user interface um the inside as well as the unreal side in the inside you basically follow a top to bottom and left to right workflow and the number of parameters and options are not necessarily fewer than the previous version but what changed is that you don't need to do many manual work just to get the thing to work it's very easy to just use default settings to make it to work but the new options are extended features for you to customize and do more advanced things here on the unreal side as you can see here the we got a new interface as well and a big thing that we got rid of is the list of real-time data that you need to previously input just together with the animation to work as you can see in the parameter interface most of the stuff you've got here is just static parameter switches and used to enable disable features you don't have to type a lot of numbers you just input the textures and tools you work so what did that data go the solution we found is to use two little triangles as you seen here in the image pointed by the your arrows those two triangles basically situated at the boundaries of your simulation and the list of information such as the frame number the padding ratios and all that stuff are encoded in the positional data of those two triangles an additional benefit is that because those triangles define the edge of your simulation now you don't have to worry about that estimation yet accidentally collision sorry a frustum code when you don't intend to and just pan the camera away and the button is not in view anymore the new bounce ensures that whenever you need to see anything from your estimation the the camera will always detect it we also kept the original um right click menu uh scripted action uh options we actually added a few more now you have the action to set hdr attaches as well as non-hdr attaches you do have the legacy support to use the data table which comes in handy if you want to use instancing with the virtual submission static meshes it's also useful if your simulation is quite large in terms of the size then using the data tables numbers can sometimes provide you with slightly more accurate result so it's an option that for you to choose one of the big things we need to fetch is the rigid mode first frame crack problem uh that just related to the pivot accuracy so on the top left you will see the 2.1 version and to the right is the after which is the 3.0 version as you can see most of the cracks are gone from the first frame we used several encoding methods in the blue and red uh image shows you how the shader will dynamically pick uh which encoding method is better so one of the method the the blue one is um instead of using voltage color we're using two uv channels just to store the pivot position and each v channel has a 16 bit uh depth so that's a lot better than the vertex vertex colors a bed precision the red one um is a more advanced version where we did a lot of bit bit wise many manipulation to just preserve um even higher accuracy while still using system embedded uv channels as you can see most of the pieces actually ended up using the the red encoding method because in the houdini side when the note cooks and you will dynamically evaluate which piece should use which encoding method that should that give you a better result and that information did carry over to the shader associated to pick um how to decode that accordingly at the bottom you can see uh two of our three accuracy modes so the left one is the high actuation mode and the right one is very high there's a slight difference here as you can probably see and we also have the third version which is the maximum with the maximum accuracy use a 32 bit instead of 16 bit that is more memory intensive sometimes resulting in slower calculation speed and i didn't show that because the visual is using this example there's barely any noticeable difference between the very high and the maximum so i do recommend just stick with very high because it is faster and steeper [Music] the pivot accuracy improvement does not does not only relate to the first frame it actually improves the accuracy of the animation throughout the whole the duration so i did a lot of aggressive testing during my development as you can see here what i tried to do here is using the green version which is exporting the statin stepping mesh version of a particular floating frame it's not even integer frames like something like 120 1.4 frame and we compare that against the colored version the multi-colored version which is the vertical simulation version and i was so glad to see so many z fighting that means the accuracy is pretty good another thing that's added is the interpolation for rigid pieces so this video what you see here is what you would get if you export a fast moving animation and play at a slow frame rate using the 2.1 version basically there's no interpolation so the standard interpolation for rotation is called slope which stands for spherical linear interpolation this video demonstrates a limitation for slop because [Music] the algorithm needs to figure out in which direction you need to rotate since between two orientations in adjacent frames there's basically two ways to basically two ways in 3d space to rotate from this frame's position to the next frame you can go one way and you can go the complete opposite direction and the standard slope needs to limit the rotation to under 180 degrees so they always pick the shorter path um it's just for safety otherwise um we get confused about which direction to turn from frame to frame um you can see the problem here because the i color coded the pieces based on the rotation speed so the redder they get this shippers they should be spinning faster but we see here is the the red pieces and the blue piece and purple pieces basically a spin like a similar speed because every piece is limited to only 180 degrees of rotation per frame so if you're going higher than that there's no way to correctly interpolate using the standard slope and you can see some pieces start to go in the wrong direction as they are increasing the speed so the solution we ended up using is a unique method called i i termed it the multi-rpf slip which stands for multi-revolutions per frame um it supports much higher than 180 degree of rotation you can basically go several cycles per integer frame so you could like you can literally go to thousands of degrees per rotation the advantage that is now you don't have to worry about how fast your pieces are spinning you can just use our new tool to export your animation and you can play your animation in shader at a much slower speed you still get pretty accurate and smooth rotation this method uses the angular velocity to as a system for us to help decide which way the pieces should be spinning and how fast they should be spinning but there is more as you can see here this is using the multi rpf slope this simulation here is sort of like a rock cyclone crippling cool magical effect just a bunch of rocks rotating around in the tornado formation and because there's such a gap between the electrolytic frames you can see the piece is actually contracting the contraction is a reflection of the pieces trying to go from frame to frame position in a straight line um where in actuality they're supposed to be going in a circle so what we want to achieve is to somehow find a way to reconstruct the curved trajectory based on limited frame information so we could do that using acceleration so the two the vat rob now can support internally compute acceleration and export that through the color texture now you can pick that up from the shader side and use the acceleration to help you compute the original curved trajectory so this is a much better result and this video shows the sort of the comparison between the smooth version and the contracting version now if you compare this which is the all the interpolation turned down against this version playing at the same speed with intervention turned off you can see this is basically unusable because there's such a time gap between each frames as this animation is basically playing at five percent of its export speed now this opens up the opportunity for you to basically run your simulation then export through that using a much lower frame rate and just turn on interpolation on the real-time side so this saves your texture memory because there's less pieces and less time you need to export and you will still get a smooth interpolation in your game another thing we added is the support for tangent space normal map which is a feature that's missing from the previous versions in order to support that basically we need to add tangent data to the shader as well as normal data because with just normal data your tangent space normal map can essentially spin around the normal vector there's there's another degree of freedom that needs to be controlled so we swapped out the original normal map export into basically every every mode is using the rotation touch because rotation touch is more compact form of storing both the tangent information as well as the normal information as just the quaternion because quaternion can describe both degrees of freedom simultaneously using just four touch channels instead of six and that get decoded on the shader side and you can apply um your trust your artist authored surface normal to the result of the voltage animation rotation either per piece or per point so on the left side is a valid animation version and on the right side is just a static mesh version and you can see the result is pretty much identical now that is not limited to soft we basically have blanket support for tangent and normal map for all modes including fluid for fluid that means we're also providing we're also providing native support for uv the two ways to handle uv it's better to determine yourself how you want to uv or fluid and you just send the uv data to the channels that we offered as options and that will be sent to the shader and then detail it and apply the attaches so you can get your normal map as well as other just textures onto your fluid mesh fluid is also not just limited to actually fluid type of animation it's basically a diameter remeshing so i i kind of slightly renamed the mode it's just called dynamic remesh uh you can basically get any mesh into the shader using fluid mode um one of the additional advantage is that fluid mode has a very good preservation of the original normals you signed with soft mode you need to make hard edges duplicated points so that each point can have unique voltage data that's normal data for fluid mode because we're basically assembling triangles um therefore you can export smoothly shaded versions like this one or you can export very harshly shaded like a font and turn into a geometry with the hard edges and the edge of the fence that works as well we try to strike a balance between ease of use as well as extendability because that's a lot of a lot of times people are requesting that to have more uh ability to do things with that so don't let this intimidate you in any way so the the essence is that if you just need normal usage of that you can just hook up the some of the standard outputs or use the standard parameters and that will get the job done but most of the additional long list of parameters and outputs here are for you to extend things in your own way and make cool and crazy stuff happen we have provided very detailed two tips and some explanations for everything from the parameters in vat as well as all the parameters in the shader and all the material functions so you just need to hover your cursor over them and see what they do and and how to use each uh each of the options in relation to other options one of the examples here is to do a translation with the rigid mode so this is actually original mode but you can see the pieces are stretching because we are stretching the pieces uh by their velocity we exported the velocity of the texture now we can use the velocity to fade basically like a motion blur effect in animation this is sometimes deployed to to create this illusion of um of a motion blur it also kind of looks like a soft body even though it's a rigid body another thing we should do with the particle mode is now we support more features that comes with standard particle systems so we can have scale by velocity and a lot align the orientation of the particles along its trajectory as well as adding just custom rotation or particle randomness we also ship additional material functions such as transform velocity or computer based randomness that you can be that you can use it together with the vat functions to achieve some of these additional results we didn't hard code everything because some of that implementation needs to be flexible so a lot of this will be covered in upcoming tutorials now we'll go into details of how to use these features another thing we added for the podcast mode is instead of just a square card now you have a default option of square triangle as well as hexagon cards that can help you prevent overshading or overdraw better and especially if your your visible particle is some is in some sort of circular shape then you may not need to use a square it might be more efficient to use a triangle or a hexagon we also added custom shapes so you could literally um just hand draw a curve and the rough or turn the curve into a custom card again that's what you can use in the shader and you can even include multiple cards so this is a single standard mesh but just use different shape ids you can identify and differentiate different shapes and assign different weight and that controls the distribution between them so here um i had a little fun put together some of the cool some of um demos for for you guys to to showcase uh the new that rob's capability one thing i'm trying to do here is basically to push the limit of r2 uh using some almost film level uh assets with uh with sometimes hundreds and thousands of pieces of vertices but the idea is to really see if how high is the ceiling of our quality then from there we could go on to optimize and make smart decisions about the trade-off between your the visual quality you want to hit uh against uh the performance you can afford based on your game based on your platform that you're using and credits to the kind people who provided me with the the asset the simulations so this is a the soft mode the previous one is the fluid mode this one is also of asset with the film level of density essentially but it's a lot of fun this whole thing is actually three different assets put together but you don't see the sims between them because they they align pretty accurately together this is a particular sim i did against a background from the epic epic games environment this showcases the new particle that mode ability of using basically the scale by velocity as well as the color export and basically a lot of extendability using um the utilizing the power of hydrinis pop sim and volume sim so in this example i use the volume sim to drive the the python to get a more fluid like motion here's another film as an example there is probably hundreds and thousands of pieces here maybe even had a million piece um i don't quite remember but it's basically multiple assets um put together and they merged together pretty seamlessly in this illustration it showcased the difference between the wood pieces as well as the concrete and glass pieces so this is also with interpolation turned on so we can get smooth motions personally i loved this video when i put it together what i did here is essentially it's the same exported rigid body animation but i slowed down the time so much it almost looks like it's frozen but it's nice so still slowly moving and you can see some of the pieces in front of you are still spinning whereas the pieces at the back are almost like stationary that that's that means um the piece at the front is spinning very fast and we can actually support that the frame rate that this particular recording was playing at is 50 times the exporting frame rate so just shows you now you can do so much with a limited amount of export speaking of effects we also did an update on systems so we upgraded our make loop tool to 2.1 in 2.1 one of the major things that we did is to support the tool properly for niagara particle systems basically we need to do some manipulation of the particle id age and life attribute to make an android system read the particles properly so that they can they can loop and and interpolate correctly so once that's figured out it's very easy to use the tool itself you can just um create a part of the sim and drop down make loop and it will create the loops for you then you can just port it seamlessly to the our through our niagara rope to aggro system we also upgraded the volume blend previously the volume doesn't blend very well if you have dynamically resized volumes now that's properly supported and here i'm testing it with the high-res volume and uh the result it's a it's pretty satisfactory um on the subject of pykrosims smoke sims one thing that's pretty useful in a day-to-day life is to have uh some basic tools that control some such things such as the random directions so i created a random direction note it's not very technically uh sophisticated but it just it's one of those quality of life tools that help to speed up your withdrawal so here are some of its abilities you can do basically pure random direction or you can do directions that's radiating from reference geometry or reference point or it can radiate directions from a reference axis or from a curve or some sustain at something like um like a closest position on a reference geometry that's basically the same thing as curve you just pick the closest position and radiate from there the square example uses the closest point on the reference geometry so all the arrows are pointing from the corners of the cube then we also have two directions where you can control the distribution between the two directions randomly here's another companion too um which i hold the random selection which gives you some quick and artist friendly way to select randomly or in a periodic way you can do periodics with constant intervals or you can do random intervals where you can create some very interesting patterns between because just the skip and select pattern between each period is totally random within your given range another tool we'll be releasing is currently called match surface maybe it will become another shrink-wrap mode in the future what we want is basically a sub-level solution to take any topology and wrap it against a target topology as you see here the shaking here that you see is the two try to target the target try to get closer to the target as it tries to resolve itself there's a difference between the new nutrient crab or match surface on the left and the traditional uh shrink wrap on the right as as you can see they produce different results and it could be useful when you want to create some collision or dissolve a completely complicated geometry into a single mesh and use a clean topology to wrap it around it another geometry level tool that we made is symmetrical part reduce this is to extend the ability of holding this pretty powerful part reduce stop one limitation of the part reduce as currently stands is that it doesn't have the internal support for keeping the symmetry if your input geometry is symmetrical so basically we try to wrap it to to to provide a walk around this could be very helpful with characters uh especially because characters tend to you tend to need them to be symmetrical in the poly reduced version so the major challenge is how to figure out how to preserve the uv islands because the solution we use is to clip the geometry in half and just part reduce half of it then mirror that to the other half but then the other half's uv islands will be destroyed so we'll pre-process the uv islands and trace along its uh the circumference of each island and and pick a triangle try three points to form a triangle then using the triangle you can pretty easily define the relative transform between two mirrored islands um entirely coded here in red and uh blue then after the produce we could um restore that transform so here is an an example of a high-res version versus a party reduced version um here is what it looks like with the uv irons properly preserved as you can see the mesh the geometry is symmetrical but the the texture is not symmetrical we're happy to announce that service labs now have a art station page we want to make ourselves more available to the artist because this is the place where artists hang out and check out other people's words pretty frequently and we want to make ourselves visible to you and just keep you updated to what we've been up to we also update um pretty regularly of uh what we're doing on the side effects forum we have a pin post that we document each releases updates and butt fitnesses you can check that out and figure out if there's some new tools you need to upgrade or if there's problems that you want us to solve you can send an email to support and let us know thank you so much for coming to our presentation and hope to see you again soon next time

Channel: Houdini

Views: 7,567

Rating: 4.9863014 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 6svfDLa4Fws

Length: 47min 53sec (2873 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021