VFX Tidal Wave Tutorial in Houdini Part 1

well hello everybody welcome to another edition of cgs live hey hamid thanks for joining me um my name is daniel hurigan and i'm the head of effects at cg spectrum and today i'm going to be starting a new project previously we're working on the tornado project um and i might come back to that at some point just to finish it off but someone a couple of weeks ago i can't remember i can't remember who it was but um requested a sort of tidal wave scenes so i thought it might be a cool thing to play with um for the next couple of streams something that i've been wanting to do myself for a while so i think it'll be um it'll be quite cool hey michael how's it going nice to see you guys here um so i'm just gonna jump straight into houdini and i've actually got i um i had this scene already which is a kind of destroyed city scene hey john how's it going um so yeah i had this scene already kind of set up for another um shot that i was doing and it's quite a cool you know little scene it's actually kind of really hard to see um it's a cool little scene of destroyed buildings and i thought this might work quite well for you know for doing a tidal wave crashing against some of these buildings so hey hardik i think was it hey robert how's it going um i hope everybody's had having or had a good weekend how did was it you that suggested the um the tidal wave i can't remember um in any case yeah i thought this would be a really cool um really cool scenario so i've just been i've just been having a look at different camera angles so this was the camera that i was working with for this shot this other shot was a kind of desert shot with dust um but i feel like that we want to have a low down kind of camera angle oh it was you hammered oh sorry um cool well thank you thank you for suggesting it i think i think it's really cool um so i think to show like a really big you know perfect storm style wave it would be great to have the camera load down you know if you have the camera sort of looking top down hey audrey thanks for joining us um if you have the camera top down it sort of doesn't give you a lot of perspective to show like the awesome size of the wave so i want to have like a really cool low angle too low no go back um this plane is really big there we go so you know a nice cool low angle let's jump back to one of these cameras so we reset our view will you know give us the ability to show off that kind of awesome size of the wave coming down um so i think something like this will work well i'm also trying to line it up so stuff in the foreground kind of looks okay like this set i think was probably never meant to be super close up so you can see there's like floating street lights stuff going on here actually maybe that's maybe that's correct wow i'm going to hide this grid because it's uh what is that what is that grid there's a grid coming from somewhere it must be this one which is just ginormous so i'm just going to hide that and i might be able to zoom around a little easier yeah maybe that camera 4 one that i picked is kind of okay and of course we can animate the camera i feel like maybe i want to see a little more over here this cool bus here as well which could be it could be a cool thing to kind of blow away with the wave as well although maybe the size of the wave you might kind of just lose that maybe something like that what do you guys what do you guys think something like that put it out as a uh if i could do a poll if i knew how to do that in a in a comment thing just let me know if you think that that camera angle will work and we'll we'll start with that i mean we can always adjust it afterwards what do you guys think cool that's one vote um all right so it's good great all right well that's all i need two people um so but if it's not a wave that's 50 meters tall we don't yeah that's right that's right so i mean the first thing we'll work at 120 frames that's you know roughly 10 seconds or so um is that right 10 seconds no 5 seconds um so the first thing that i would do in a shot like this if it was a wave or a dust cloud or whatever it is i would you know the camera is usually something that i get given so i don't usually have to do the camera step but the first thing that i would do is start blocking it out and by blocking it out i just mean roughly placing where the things are going to be so and that will help me establish timing and as well as you know trying to figure out these things so what i'm going to do is just put down a tube and jump in and i'm going to template the buildings set that to ghost might turn off my lights for a second and then so i've got my camera camera five so here's my tube let's try and work out where my camera is in relation to that where are you camera five down here so here's my camera here camera five so i want to position my tube kind of over here there it is just transform that over there and i'll just rotate that i think it's that way yep oh i could have done that as well actually x-axis oh no said there we go so just make it really long and really big and so there's kind of you know my shape for my wave make it longer like that five and now i can kind of now that i've got it in position yeah that's right john i i did think that oh no fatal error all i wanted to do was put a transform down all right let me let me open up another houdini here the old fatal error um i was thinking that john that this already looks quite destroyed which it would be better if it wasn't but we may be able to clean it up you know so that it doesn't look so bad or maybe this is the second wave in the set um all right so here's my other houdini and let's go and see if we can open this out of temp wave start there we go oh my tube is still there that's good wave shot okay so i'll go wave version two yeah that's that's right it's that one city it's always america it seems to get seems to get the worst of the alien invasions and the the um natural disasters australia is usually just shown on a map as have been also been destroyed yeah that's right all right so we're back so hopefully it doesn't crash again um yeah that's all right so oh one thing i'm gonna do while i'm here oh i do have 125 gig you can see my hard drives are just like filling up like crazy with all these all these simulations so um i was uh i was looking to try and copy some stuff some stuff off today um but i think we should be okay 125 gig should be enough all right so transform what i was going to do was transform this towards camera so see if i'm going the right way there we go x so we'll start that at zero chuck and eiffel tower in the back that's a good idea um i think i think i do have some tokyo stuff we could yeah i mean we could we could flesh this out i just thought this would be a good starting point um all right so what i'm gonna do is go back to frame zero and i might transform this back a little bit let's go ten and then towards the end of the frame know i'll just move it forwards hit enter on there so i can drag it through like that and that's probably going to be too much for the shot because that will kind of just wipe through and then you know kind of be just out of it um so i'm thinking maybe maybe we'll stretch that out a bit longer so take out keyframe here uh actually what i want to do what do i want to do yeah i think it's just too fast let's just jump back here like that and i mean with this tube what you can you can kind of see here we're inside this like um tubular wave i guess totally tubular um so maybe i'll just clip it yes you could change cameras yeah that's a good idea definitely um what i'm going to do on this wave is just clip it so that i only have half a wave so where's my clip i should probably it's always good to do things at origin instead of offsetting the center of this so what i'm going to do is i'm going to put a transform down after this tube here i'm going to copy the center attributes off here and put them in the translate so paste values and then i'm going to reset the center of the tube to zero and you can see how it ends up in the same place so i've just moved those transforms off the tube onto this transform and then i can do any kind of manipulation to the model at origin which makes things a lot easier so now i can put my clip down and the tube is probably a primitive so i'm going to switch it to polygon change my axes for my clip which would be x there we go and now now i've got a wave so let's take the radius down a bit okay give me a few more polygons okay so now oh i guess the radius really affects the position as well so looks like we can that's right totally tubular um let's see it's not really i guess the radius has really kind of pushed it back a little further than what it needed to be so now oh there we go so that that's cool that's kind of what i wanted to see that sort of wave moving looks like we need to make it a bit bit bigger so you can see how important this blocking step is though instead of just jumping you know straight into effects and and in reality this wave doesn't necessarily even need to be a simulation this this large part could just be a geometry with you know maybe an ocean spectrum on it or something like that that looks like you know a wave and then on top of it we add all the additional elements so uh what i'm going to do actually is rise it up a little bit so i'll grab this transform because i actually want to see this sort of curve on the ground as well so i think that there we go that looks cool now that is a big wave um so i might scale it down touch what i want to do can you bend a spectrum uh well the spectrum yes you can apply a spectrum to a surface um so you could apply a spectrum to a flat surface and bend it up that would work um let's see let's let's have a look have a little look-see so what i'm gonna do what am i gonna do here i think i'm making a bit of a mess for myself of these values oh i think if i just scale yeah if i just scale this there we go so i can actually because the um this transform's origin is at world zero it will actually just scale from zero so you can see how it doesn't move below the ground plane when i do that so that's kind of cool let's have a look at that so now i can kind of pull it down if i want to like that get like a bit tighter or i can make it really massive i mean that is cool but it's a bit too big so yeah yeah i mean i think so i have done some stuff like that like you know just just quickly to look at the ocean spectrum stuff if you were to put down a ocean spectrum and put down an ocean value aid so yeah you may not be able to do the high-res one not not sure about that uh let's let's have a look so 100 by 100 oh let's make this a bit bigger too 50 by 50. let's hide this stuff for a second so yeah i mean this is probably the way that i would do it john um where i would bend or you know deform this plane after the ocean evaluate has been applied so you can see essentially i can you know i can have that be bent like that and basically have the you know the wave like that but we could i mean we could just try let's let's have a look at this so we've got our grid here let's remash it at this point just so we have a bit more information and then just feed an ocean evaluate into that and you can see it kind of applies that spectrum although probably here it's being oriented weirdly so what could you do what could you do i think yeah it's probably better to start with flat plane and then deform it maybe maybe that you know that would be a better way to go um if we were applying the ocean spectrum like that yeah i don't know but that that would be the process that i would use for kind of applying deformation after the um yeah tighter mesh maybe but i think what's happening there is that the projection of the ocean evaluate is kind of from the top down so what's happening here is just stretching you can see how we get like undulating at the top and the bottom but then here is just it's just stretching out which it doesn't really look that bad i mean that's kind of it looks kind of wavy anyway so um yeah i mean maybe maybe it's not a massive deal maybe we can just use this um but yeah i feel like that's what's going on there anyway i mean that does help makes it look like a wave straight away almost um let's let's push on with just the animation first and then you know we can come back and have a look at that so back to ghosting let me just hit save before i do that back to ghosting other objects no no all good no i wanted to kind of uh try and figure it out too um just for my own you know make sure i'm make sure i'm telling you the right things um so yeah i think that's pretty cool and one thing that we could do with this geometry version of the wave if this is indeed the one that we're going to use is we could have it kind of crash down over time as well so i think what i'm going to do here instead of having this um see how at the moment i'm transforming it sort of from here and it's sort of moving across what i'm going to do is put my pivot here and transform it so i'm going to get rid of this animation set that to zero and then i'm going to transform my pivot and you can transform your pivot by hitting i think it's insert is now pivot mode there we go so i'm going to put my pivot just kind of in the center but i'm going to leave it i'm not going to put it like do it based on the centroid because that would put a smack bang in the middle here i still want it to be on world zero so that's kind of fine like that okay so now i'll move it so get out of pivot mode hit insert set keyframe and go forwards i'm set to on mouse up that's why it's lagging behind there we go five sometimes when you're doing this uh you know when you want to be out in perspective but also look through the camera it's sometimes a good um a good time to have two two views like uh something like that two views stacked and i'll choose like a perspective view for one oops there yeah and the camera view for another and then i can i can mess with my transform but also look through my camera so that i can kind of position this stuff as well as see the result in my camera so i think that's pretty good there and maybe our starting position could be a little more forward whoops minus 10. there goes something like that and let's set these keyframes to linear so instead of doing this through the animation editor shift clicking and adjusting these you can just type this linear and it will change the animation curve so you need to do it on both keys and it doesn't actually change the values but you're changing the if you should click on that now you see that's made it linear so yeah you can change it back to bezier if you want just by typing which is kind of cool so that just means it's going to be a constant speed now rather than ramping up and ramping down now why i moved this was i can now get this kind of behavior going where i get my wave rolling like that and i could kind of create it a sort of crashing effect even a scale as well at the same time so that i could kind of let's see it's zed it looks like so i could actually have it sort of rolled back a little bit at the start and then through the shot i could actually roll it forwards so let's see so you can see i get that kind of a little bit of rolling motion i mean maybe maybe roll it even more i could also scale it at this point as well so that it kind of looks like it's really kind of crushing down you can see as i scale this like that or maybe adjust the um maybe even just adjust the y scale so let's set a keyframe on that and maybe yeah maybe we'll set a keyframe there as well so it doesn't start straight away and then let's go down to like 0.4 and you can see oops you can see what's happening in the other viewport there how it's sort of you know bending over more so squashing down and crashing almost with this perspective it's kind of hard to see that behavior um so you know i mean maybe i need to do it earlier click on my transform maybe i'll move this back a little bit there we go so now it's kind of crashing down a little earlier because what i'm imagining when i'm doing this is that you know this edge here this leading edge is going to be just spray and all sorts of stuff kind of coming off it so we want that to look pretty cool and maybe having it bend down towards camera is gonna is gonna help with that we could go back here and you know adjust the whoops too much adjust the height of this so maybe i'll just use the slider perhaps we need to um need to adjust it a little bit in this direction so you know we could kind of adjust that to pull that that edge just you know a little bit closer to the camera or something i don't know not sure how far we want that to go back into infinity there maybe we do want it to just go all the way all right let's just adjust our scale here so maybe i'll just pull this down at this point oh maybe the rotation i think might help oh look at that that's what i wanted to see that kind of curve there we go so maybe yeah maybe i'll just keep rotating that down so it sort of crashes like this yeah i mean you know this is just this is just kind of blocking at this point so i'm not um you know i'm not trying to be perfect with it but it may end up being the you know the exact thing that we need um now i think yeah sort of i'm just going to roll that down like that so it sort of crashes right down on the camera so think my timing my keys here a little bit a little bit awkward so let me delete those two i might just move these two back there we go okay it's all about timing just trying to get that that event there we go so that's crashing like right down in front of the camera which is kind of cool all right so if i was to put the um ocean evaluate on that to get some noise or i mean probably we could just add our own noise to this first let's go to our tube and just add a ton of points to it so whether we add a remash in here or whether we just crank this up doing it up here means that it's done before any of the transformation stuff so this remesh here at this point will re-cook every frame which is really inefficient so if i was to move that back here maybe after the clip then it's only been cooked once and then we're doing all our transformation and rotation stuff after we've done the remash and the remash is really slow so you don't want to apply that every frame so now we can see that we've got our our remesh done before and then we're applying our animation and transformation stuff so this should be fast now there we go and then we could add our ocean evaluate if we wanted to don't need that bend but probably what i'm going to do i guess the ocean evaluate is relating this resolution is what we're seeing here that boxiness but probably i'll just do this in a um in a point for add my own noise that kind of mimics that stuff so let's just do a turbulent noise and add it to p okay 3d noise and you can see we're getting lots of detail out of that let's make it original perlin and let's adjust the frequency let's take it down so it's a bit larger scale up take the roughness down a little bit so we could we could layer this up in you know many different um many different noises potentially let's have a look i'll go back to single view so we've got a nice kind of wavy edge which is cool one thing that we could do here as well is adjust the frequency so it's you can see how if i crank the amplitude a little bit you can see how adjusting the frequency in y i can kind of get that same thing that was happening on the wave where it stretches down the y axis so that gives me that sort of feeling that the noise and the wave sort of deformation has been dragged up and i guess in reality that is kind of what you do see so it really helps kind of to do that i think looks pretty cool maybe maybe just not as much so you can cut that's the cool thing with this is you can really control it and it's very sort of dynamic and flexible now the other thing that we could do all the way up here is actually create you know a bit more of wavy motion so or a wavy kind of detail to the lip of this tube so what we could do here rows clip and we could actually just edit some of this stuff so maybe you know we could create a bit of a bit of more interesting edge we were sort of trying to do this with the rotation but if i just scroll down to soft radius i can sort of you know i can create a bit of an interesting lip on there which might work a little bit better than you know the kind of just the real um the real sort of tube shape even even just something like that with a curled over edge um the noise looks cool the noise will animate uh the noise will animate at the moment the noise will phase because of the um because the animation the transformation so you can see that there so basically what's happening there is the noise is static and the wave is moving through and sampling different sections of that noise if you imagine that noise being just like clouds of noise all over the place in 3d space this plane is just moving through and sampling that noise at different positions so you can see you get that motion and it looks really cool down here where you get that kind of feeling of water being sucked up into that height section looks really really cool so we've got that and you can see there's my little curled over edge that i've got on there and i can just go back here and turn that off if i want to the re-mesh will re-cook but so you know you could go you could go in there and just add little little adjustments which kind of make that really cool i might also at this point create a group from those points that i selected and i'm just going to call this top edge and we are re-meshing after that so group name i'll make that dollar os that'll take the node name so my group should be called top edge we've got a remesh hopefully that will interpolate the group so we've got 18 points it doesn't look like it did remash do we have any settings for that doesn't look like we do doesn't look like it um added any points to our top edge group but that's okay we can always reselect that edge it's pretty easy to select that one so maybe i'll just oh there's a lot of points there let me go front view there we go i'm just gonna oops what did i do that's not what i wanted to do but i can actually take this point selection get rid of this group place paste that below ah don't you hate that when you copy a note it puts the path in the copy buffer which is really annoying that's all right let me just select these again there we go all right so now i've got this top edge group and that will be important later on so there we go it's looking pretty cool one thing you could do here to give this depth as well is now we could just use a polyextrude and pull this back whoa crazy point normal all right so what i'm going to do here is to do existing attribute in so i'm going to set my normal to just point in x so i'm going to say at n equals 1 comma 0 comma 0. then you can see i just get this straight extrusion backwards it's not kind of working here so that's a bit kind of wacky let me turn my output back that will give me the front of my wave so yeah i guess it's not quite working there maybe that is kind of what i want to do let's have a look i was hoping to get more of a sort of um yeah i guess larger shape at the bottom and less shape at the top you know what i could do here which might um might kind of work better now now that i've sort of blocked this in and i'm sort of maybe getting ahead of myself here because i haven't checked what this looks like so maybe let's do that first always getting ahead of myself let's jump out i can see we've got a little thing that we need to deal with here this little hump that's happening where we can see through to the underside but let's have a look and see what this looks like so i'm going to flip book first i'm going to save and then i'm going to flip book uh another group for the for the bottom so which mean um let me flip book this and hit start wacky shack all right so oh for the extrude yeah maybe i'm actually thinking maybe i'll draw a um a curve instead of a tube so the noise is a bit wacky shack so that's you know something something that we'll need to look at but in terms of the kind of animation i think is fine i think i'm missing the crashing that was happening now i quite want to see this sort of crashing down in front of camera um and maybe the curvature as well i would like to see improved so i kind of have another idea here which is to let's go to front view here's our here's our original shape and i'm going to do a curve and i'm going to draw this curve uh yeah i guess i'll do it here and draw it out keeping a pretty low poly to begin with a little bit channeling my inner hockey side here i hope that makes sense to somebody um so let me make this a little bit here we go like that and then maybe i'll just come down here like this i don't know if i'll keep those bits but uh there we go so if i was to extrude this extrude volume that's not what i wanted polyextrude now i can get um you know this kind of perfectly controllable wave shape and it gives me you know the kind of possibility of just drawing this thing out and then potentially i'm not entirely sure how i'll do this let's see let's try something kind of interesting yeah i don't know if this will work but uh i kind of want to try it so i'm going to make an edit here and i'm going to change this stuff so i'm going to turn on my uh let me just select these and hit transform go down turn on soft radius i've got my original one um kind of templated which is cool so this is probably you know not necessarily the first thing that i would try but i think this will be a kind of interesting idea anyway you know it's always good to try new things um and i really like things that are very customizable and art directable and that's really important in you know working in vfx or in 3d or in any kind of creative field it is really important to kind of be able to make these very flexible kind of setups so what i'm going to do from that one is i'm going to take another edit here and i'm going to then let's template that maybe you can kind of see what i'm thinking here i've got to make sure i don't uh edit the wrong wave so i see this other one is showing up as well so i'm thinking in terms of time here you know i'm looking at this wave shape and i'm thinking how is this how is this wave evolving over time on the spot turned out my radius and you know this is potentially not something that um you know that everyone would kind of think of as in effects land it's sort of you know you always think well how am i going to simulate this wave i'm going to go straight into flip and i'm going to just you know run a whole lot of points into this and try and you know try and get this beast of a simulation working looking cool but it doesn't always you know it doesn't always work out that way and sometimes it's also not faster to do that than you know than these kind of more manual methods which um you know i find a lot of a lot of new um people coming into effect sort of think that this is a bit of a you know hack or some kind of some kind of cheat or something but um you know it's sort of whatever gets the job done well and can be easily changed if the director wants a change and you know those are the things that are really kind of important not um you know how amazingly awesome is your flip sim because if it's not right nobody nobody will care um you know kind of about that fact so unfortunately that's that's just the way it is um so you know i i can't say that i've ever done a wave like this i know that um i know that in the past you know animation studios have done these kind of these kind of wave ideas where you draw the curve and or a curve drives the wave um so i think you know i'm not necessarily breaking new ground here but i think it i think it'll just be an interesting thing to to kind of work through i'm not sure if this this shape is kind of right but um let's let's try so i'm going to put down a blend um i might do a sequence blend let's see if sequence blend works because sequence blend actually allows you to blend through multiple inputs in one i'm not sure if it'll work with curves but let's see so plug them all in in order turn off my template oh yeah it's a little bit hokey so i need to kind of refine my shapes a little bit maybe that like that to that feels a little bit weird maybe that's just not enough rotation or something on that second one maybe it needs to feel a little bit more sort of rotaty let's try that so yeah i like the sequence blend because it gives you that ability to kind of um just just run through a bunch of inputs a bunch of animated inputs that's a bit of a downward you can see how this one kind of goes forward and then it hits that wall there and just sort of pulls down like that so i might move this one across more and see there they're basically in the same line so i'm going to just pull this one out and then this one again probably just pull this whole thing forward so let's increase that soft radius usually a wave crest extends past the main body and crashes under its own weight um usually a wave crest extends past the main body the thing the thing the reason i'm not doing too much um kind of i don't know horizontal movement is because basically i'm thinking of it as happening on the spot so that um let's see what do we got here yeah so the reason i'm doing this kind of on the spot is because i'll be adding the transformation movement afterwards um but yeah i think i think i do need to kind of have this roll more and maybe i just need another um maybe i need another edit in here which is in between so maybe like this then that one then that one and that one yeah well it is it is um it is visually pleasing you're right i i really like you know kind of working this way because it sort of uh i guess stylistically it allows me to really design the effect um and and that's something that i really like you know i have a sort of i guess 2d um a little bit of a 2d sensibility so this stuff kind of really makes sense to me um but i appreciate it's not not for everyone yeah this kind of blending is not great hopefully we can we can make that better interpolation that's happening here is just yeah not amazing maybe the sequence blend is not gonna let's try blend shapes and see if that interpolation works any better so the issue with this one is that you have to kind of um hey well i guess the thing that i'm doing here is is not uh i'm trying to avoid simulation first off but i am um i am just blocking this shot out at this stage trying to work out what you know what this wave animation is going to be like and i may you know i may come back to doing this as simulation but i want to kind of i want to kind of know first of all what you know what this behavior is is meant to be before i you know before i go down that path um because this in the long run even though you know it's time consuming and i'm fiddling with this a lot this in the long run will save me a lot of time [Music] so even though you know simulation i and i was just talking about this even though simulation seems like it's the easy kind of way to go it does not give me the control that i need so i want some sort of guide and the tube you know was kind of doing it but i just thought this might be an interesting sort of idea i can't say that i've ever done this before but i just thought this might be an interesting idea to play with because that's the cool thing about houdini is that you can you know you can do things so many different ways and this might give a really interesting result so yeah i you know simulation certainly and and this this will be combined with simulations so don't don't worry simulations are coming um but yeah so you know yeah that's right john i mean that's that's what i that's what i really enjoy about it hey here we go so now we're getting i think so the interpolation is still a bit kind of hokey but um and maybe it's just that i need a ton more steps um that's that's what i love about houdini is that it is a real kind of sandbox and you can kind of just come up with these really kind of crazy workflows and some of them you know some of them don't work but it kind of you know you can just sort of you can just sort of mess around with this stuff until until you get something that does work and you might just hit upon this really interesting idea or this really interesting way of working um that you know nobody nobody's kind of done before which um which would be rare because you know a lot of people have done all sorts of different things before um often these these sort of more manual processes are the way that people used to do things you know before simulations were really kind of fast and powerful you know this more sort of manual approach would have been the way that you know animators would have done things a long time ago um so there we go it's a little bit kind of it's a little bit hokey but let's plug this into the poly extrude and you can see now i've got this three dimensional wave shape and if i animate this over time so zero to i don't know let's go 96 we'll go so this this input blend the number like three corresponds to the third input so we've got one input two inputs three inputs four inputs five inputs so five is probably our i guess starting at zero so four is our maximum there so let's go to 4 and now we can see got this kind of crashing wave shape but you can see the interpolation is a little bit a little bit kind of hokey if i was to let's see resample see if we can smooth it out a little bit let's go .25 smooth what are we dealing with here we got polygons use an attribute blur our find attribute blur is actually kind of better for um smoothing p positions let me just hey there we go pull extrude yeah so it's a bit jerky but let's have a look through camera when i plug this in so this should correspond to kind of that i think maybe here where did i trace it from i guess i traced it from there copy that paste it i'm going to get rid of the rotation and i'm going to it at zero should line up hopefully let's see no what did i do where are you where are you wave oh i see i extruded it the wrong way so it's not showing let's do negative 100. hey there it is yeah it doesn't really i mean it's kind of not safe i have been i've been saving slightly more than usual thank you for the reminder how dare you extrude the wrong way that's right how could you um it's kind of i guess it's probably because we can't see the profile of it it's off off screen it's not as not as interesting as i'd kind of hoped for i guess maybe the sequence blend duration is probably just not long enough or short enough i should say and this real kind of jerky resample [Music] the good thing about it though is that i get this interior um which is what i wanted that was kind of the main the main purpose of it but yeah it's not i don't know it's kind of not um i'm not not loving it as much as as the tube anyway thank you for joining me on that on that journey um i think it's an interesting idea and i could probably make it work but i think you know i don't want to spit i don't want to labor over it because it is just kind of a blocking step um yeah i don't know i feel like that jerky kind of stuff is something that i really want to work out and that that might take me a long time to figure out i may revisit that at some point let's just continue with this one because i think this is working pretty well and we can deal with not having geometry behind it or work out some better way of dealing with that so the noise is something that you know is a little bit kind of crazy so what we could do is apply that here at this point our wave is not moving if we were to apply our noise here you'll see that the the noise now does not move at all i mean it moves with the object but it's not phasing and then we could add our own phasing to it so hey david how's it going thanks for joining me um so let's promote the offset and now you can see i've got control over that phasing so i could you know let's just do dollar ff divided by 24 um and see there we go so let's have a look at that 25. that looks pretty good nice slow rolling motion on it let's get this rotation happening a little better i want that to really crash let's just pull this back i think there we go boom don't tell me you don't tell me you're doing a wave now david that would that's just um that's just too much um that would be great if you were ah and so this see this bottom edge business are you doing waves crashing on a beach that's cool nice how's it going that's right psychic hit any powers um so this bottom edge here you know we see is lifting off the ground which i don't want don't want to be able to see that arguably i may be putting something in there that might cover that anyway but let's just let's just attach that back to the ground so what i'll do with that here's what i'm going to do there on that i've got my top edge maybe i'll create a bottom edge as well so after the remesh i should probably create these with bounding boxes because if i change my remesh resolution i'm going to lose my groups so i'm going to do that i'm going to create a group it can be a point group learned a lot about gerstner wave formulas oh interesting i don't uh i don't know if i know anything about those what's um is that like the the sort of mathematical generation of of wave forms is that how they kind of calculate it so what i'm doing here is just there that's kind of all i want to do i just want to select those points right at the end there but i'm doing it based on a bounding box because right now if i change the remesh this top edge which is based on point selection will will go away so using a bounding box we'll just always capture those end points so maybe i'll just um pull this right in to that point there so we just get that end group so this can be called um os and then i'll rename that to bottom edge top edge i could actually do the same so i might delete that one call this one top edge essentially how the normals are affected you end up basically with multiple normal maps oh i see i see gotcha um all right so let's move this one to the top and we'll select it this way all the way in there we go there's our top edge now this needs to be super duper long so let's go 50. there we go that should be enough bottom edge 50. okay so now what we could do is we could what could we do we could do a few things we could say group oh actually not group let's let's do it in a wrangle let's say at choose our group bottom edge at p dot y equals zero okay so that will just make that bottom edge group always equal zero no matter what you get a little bit of kind of stretching there which maybe you know maybe is not great the other thing that you could potentially do [Music] is what else could we do there let's try this instead so what i'm going to do is use let's try to try this so i'm just going to try and figure something out in a pop so maybe i'll put a hm ah right that's that's the stuff that the ocean spectrum uses john got it um your last short featured some bats oh cool awesome i'll look it up that's great i'm glad i'm glad it was helpful um so what am i going to do here i'm going to let's try this i'm going to create a grid um so what i want to do now i'm going to do this instead i'm going to choose relative to point bounding box and what this is going to give me is if i do a vector to float and grab the y axis plug it into cd we should see a black to white ramp on this thing so as the stuff gets closer to the ground it's actually going to show up here as well as this stuff gets closer to the ground it's going to show up black and as it gets further away it's going to get white not close to the ground actually just the bottom of the object because it's based on just the bounding box of the object so what i could do with that if i put a ramp on here plug it in go into cd and i can kind of adjust that so you can see how if i move that black all the way up to the top goes all the way to the top and vice versa if i flip this around i could get things that are just sort of at the bottom like that and then i could use that color to mix between two p positions so if i put a one p position into there and then this one could just be a constant of um actually what i'm going to do is take this p position use a vector to float and i'm just going to zero out and then i'm going to do a float to vector so i'm going to zero out y so i'm just going to leave that set to zero and then plug that in what that will allow me to do is mix between everything flattened to zero on y but every every other aspect of x and z is the same whereas if i didn't do this whether if i just tried to mix between one p position and zero zero zero it would just collapse everything to a single point you can see all the points are just there so i want to keep the x and z positions the same but i want to flatten y to zero so bias can now be color and i can derive that mix by this color ramp so let's have a look at that you can see as i take this color up so it becomes one at this location here right at the bottom it's sort of stretching that stuff down but instead of where i did it with a grid where it was kind of like just doing this pulling all those end points down i can sort of control it by this fall off so you can see i can sort of you know dial that in so that will then oh look these pieces here which are kind of i guess below the ground so it's moving all those up as well which is interesting i really want it to kind of be a subtle thing but just pulling that stuff down so that i don't get anything lifting off the surface and getting a little bit there let's just pull this nice and nice and kind of controllable effect there we go look at that crash and it also sticks this stuff to the ground when it crashes as well which is kind of cool this nice curtain effect coming across there's a little bit of lifting happening there the other thing we could do um just to make sure that this was really down is just transform it down a little bit as well you know we don't have to go crazy with the complex adjustments something like that might be cool let's just uh i'm just going to put a color node down to get rid of that you'll also notice this is blue on the interior which means that my wave it's just a single surface at the moment so if i reverse it then we can see that front face looking a bit better okay all right let's uh let's have a look at this outside our buildings all right we could actually have this sort of cresting and collapsing a little sooner and then see that you know see that splash a little more i don't know let's have a look through the other cameras and see how it looks there's a bit of a wider camera angle you know that that might be more interesting to see that sort of that sort of this will be just white water and foam so seeing that just sort of push through a little longer might be more interesting i don't a look uh through a different camera angle so see what that one is oh there we go interesting it doesn't really work obviously we've designed this for a specific camera angle so sort of doesn't work when you look at it through other cameras what else we've got camera three yeah i guess we'll stick with our camera five or camera four the slightly wider one that still works so now that we've got that we can start thinking about you know simulation wise or interaction wise what is going to happen here we want the wave maybe destroying buildings but we also want a lot of interaction you know from the wave we want i guess wherever the wave touches the building we basically want a lot of spray and foam going on so let's start by by looking this up or trying to you know trying to set this up and see see what we can see what we can kind of come up with so i think we can keep this wave as a geometry and not have to do it as a full flip sim but we will add flip i'll start with particles and we'll we'll see how far we get with pops and then we'll see what we can do with you know with flip and that we might not get to that today so let's call this geometry i'll just hit save let's call this wave oops wave and let's have a look i've got these geometries in different foreground mid ground and background so i might just start with this mid-ground building i'll just focus on this one this first one here it's kind of not super in camera let's maybe see if there's a better one i guess let's focus on this main guy here so go into this bj here and there's a bunch of things that i've done to isolate buildings but this was for another project so let's isolate this guy don't have a lot of groups for these buildings which makes it a little bit tricky to isolate them but if i go to top view i should just be able to do this it's pretty good nice uh i might just get rid of those get delayed building be gone there we go so let's just go out oops ah copy buffer come on there we go all right so out uh test building i'm gonna create a new geometry node i'm going to call this one building spray keyboard all right object merge and it's in bg buildings test building there we go and this one we need to put an out for our wave as well so null out wave okay so we've got those two things now so one thing we could do here let's have a look at our our building hasn't got too many um subdivisions so what i'm going to do is maybe just scatter a whole bunch of points onto this building for starters that's a lot i'll turn off relax because relax makes it quite slow there we go and then attribute transfer this is kind of like how i start every effect actually transfer when yeah one thing is affecting another red to black you can see it's already transferring cd there we go so i only want it to affect it where the wave is though there we go beautiful so anywhere where that wave geometry passes through i get these points that's awesome so let's blast those away at cd dot x greater than zero set it to points delete non-selected look at that now let's try trailing our wave our wave of blood um trail compute velocity save i'm going to create a marker it looks like i've already got one here for velocity so just v set the style to vector velocity give it a label and you'll see that because this is moving this trail is just going to calculate the velocities of this movement so i could also transfer that to my particles so that they get the same motion transferred onto them okay and that just gives me a good kind of starting point for my motion see that yeah i mean that's right if you were attempting this uh just as a pure flip sim you'd be you know i'd just be i'd just be talking to you guys for two hours watching a bgo cache or you know just watching simulations like it's such a huge scene to get the fidelity out of flip you you're looking at just a massive simulation so you do have to be kind of clever about about how you approach these things and and when there's such massive scenes you need to kind of you need to kind of yeah simplify it's my big thing just simplify so here's our building here's our points let's go popnet and see what behavior we get out of this so popnet all points uh i might just do points actually so i can set a birth rate let's just say play boom there we go so we got some points happening yeah i mean look i haven't done loads of oceans so i'm not super up on all the ocean spectrum stuff but um you know certainly in terms of i've done a lot of water stuff with interaction and this is kind of you know this is the way that i do a lot of foam and spray as well it's just i just created myself i don't use i don't use the interaction tools that the side effects have provided not that there's anything wrong with them but i i like to be able to control this stuff myself and i find it's a lot easier to get the result that i want so pop drag i want this stuff to slow down and i also want it to fall because we have gravity so pop force and let's just set it to -2 i don't want it to fall like straight down i want to fall slowly down this is very small kind of spray that we've got here let's have a look just need to run this together with our wave to see kind of what we've got so far okay and probably our building would help as well let's bring that in give these a little bit of a better color a little bit too green okay all right so there you go you can see that interaction stuff happening the speed actually probably you know needs to be a bit greater it needs to be a much larger event and we need a lot more points so let's crank that up go crazy we don't actually need to simulate this until frame 40 something so what am i gonna do here i think what i'll do is i'll take this original birthright down i'm gonna add some variance to my points and i might turn down my drag as well it's pretty strong so we'll start this at frame body okay we also don't have any collisions at the moment that will help there we go let's look a little better so now i've got quite a sparse number of points but what i'm going to do off of those points is pop replicate so that behind those points and sometimes i'll just do something like this to get a bit of an idea of um how these trails look i'll just say v at v equals or times equals zero and that will freeze my pop replicate points where they lie and i'm going to do that on the group step forward one frame stream pop replicate you can see we're getting a giant sphere here because shape sphere so i'm going to set that to point and then what we should get is these kind of trails happening but behind each um behind each point that's emitted here it should be trailing a point from the pop replicate and i want to let's see if i set my life expectancy down a little bit we should be able to see these trails a little clearer maybe oh there we go they're starting to disappear let's make it make it even less oh there we go so it's a little bit clearer to see those trails now so what we can do is have like quite a ballistic um initial particle so let's go back here we've got this velocity on these but let's add a point velocity there we go we'll keep incoming velocity and we'll set the curl noise so that will add some crazy curl noise see what that does i'll just uh disconnect this stuff for a second so we can view there we go so that's a lot more kind of chaotic which is great let's add these back in okay cool so we've got these kind of nice spray sort of things happening now we don't want them to just freeze in space we can actually put another pop force in there after and let's just go minus two on that again see if they fall yeah so you can see they're sort of falling very slowly let's add let's let's make that -10 add some noise as well so what the what the pop wrangle does is it just sort of basically removes the inherited velocity so i find that even if you have used inherited velocity set to zero they still just spray out like crazy um maybe i'll just set initial velocity let's see if that works i think i did try this some time and it did sort of work there we go so that actually works a little better although you get this weird kind of interpolation thing happening with these sticks so you see that doesn't quite work either which is a bit weird so let's try let's try add to inherited velocity yeah just i don't know why it just doesn't doesn't give me anything let's try just setting it to a really low number ah so zero it just passes the velocity straight through which is broken seems like this complexes things you think so um how in in what way hardik i mean um if you think this is complicated you know i think doing this in flip just is is very challenging um i can certainly i can certainly show you how i do it in flip but um yeah you know this is not the way that i would i would not approach it by doing it in flip even though it's doing something in a simulation might seem easier to get the quality that i want in terms of the fidelity of the number of particles and the scale the simulation will be just out of this world because of the scale of this um because of the scale of this effect so i'm really trying to avoid you know doing stuff in flip as much as i can so let's see what i want this to do yeah so i'll have this inherit just a little bit so that works a bit better you can also inherit negative velocity as well so that this the um the trails sort of stream backwards you see that so they sort of stream off the trailing point um yeah look that's okay i mean you know it's all just experience um you're you know you're at the sort of start of your houdini journey so a lot of things will you know will seem kind of complicated um and i guess you know for for a lot of new people even though i'm not really explaining what i'm doing because this is not meant to be a a lesson that's what you know that's what our our courses are for it's teaching people the meaning of all this stuff you know seeing me work and seeing seeing how somebody who's been doing this for a long time work is a really good way just to think differently about things and to yeah that's why i'm sort of telling you that you don't always have to do things as simulations just trying to give you a bit of an idea of how you know how we work when we're doing this stuff in film we don't a lot of the times you know we try to avoid doing simulations as much as possible because experience has told us that simulations are hard to control they're really kind of slow and if somebody wants a change it's a 24 hour to 48 hour turnaround so you know with this set up at the moment i've granted i'm not finished with it but with this setup at the moment if somebody wants a change to that wave shape or to the way these particles are running i can have it for you in an hour um you know so that's it's a big consideration when you're working on this stuff at a higher level is that you have to make things that are easy to manipulate easy to um kind of address notes from director or vfx supervisor and you know are quick quick to turn around um yeah thanks john i mean i think yeah that's you know and this is the good thing with um you know with doing something like the cg spectrum intro to houdini or the houdini diploma courses is that you have someone like me a mentor that has been working in the industry and with houdini for a long time that knows a lot of these tricks and and sort of things that can make your life simpler um and we teach you you know the basics of houdini and all the things that you need to know but then there's this other important side which is now that i know all this stuff how do i work with it in a way that you know makes sense and doesn't kill me in terms of my computer or the time that i spend doing something so that's just something that you learn you know you learn from time and through practice but it's something that i try and share with people so it doesn't always have to be you know it doesn't have to be simulation it's what houdini is really good at but it doesn't have to be that all the time um i'm glad i'm glad you still enjoy it audrey that's good so this is getting there it's not still not quite what i what i'm after we got a lot of points now yeah i i think that's right john and i i get a lot out of that too when i see other people work you know it gives you ideas of how you know how somebody else approaches something you're like oh wow i would have never thought to do it that way you know and it just gives you another perspective it's like everything really you know everyone kind of has their own way of working at things and the way that i do something is completely different maybe to the way that somebody else does something but it's it gives you like a greater depth of understanding and knowledge if you know all these different approaches and can kind of use them so yeah i'm not you know it's it's okay i'm not super thrilled with this at the moment one thing that you know we could potentially do with this is run it into flip but i'll i'll proceed with this for a little bit longer so one thing that i'm going to do here is hey uh what is it stoney gaming stan don't stony gaming live i was gonna say stony aiming aiming glive um and then i realized that i can't read um thanks thanks for joining me um you're joining me on twitch not many people not many people seem to watch me on twitch but um thanks for thanks for stopping by i'm working on a i'm working on a tidal wave um so this is houdini houdini is a uh effects of vfx software it's a complete 3d package but it's sort of well known for for mainly doing effects and simulations um so what am i going to do i'm going to put down a pop flop here and i'm going to add some curl noise to these initial points so there's a few ways of doing this but one kind of way that i like doing is just to add kiln noise to the position of the particles and it's a really kind of direct change but you have to take the amplitude right down so you can add it to like the force or the velocity but i find just adding it to p gives me a really nice sort of direct change and it's kind of an instantaneous change whereas adding it to force it takes a little while to accumulate but this gives me like a really nice easy way of just getting some sort of curling shapes in there and then when i add that pop replicate back in i should see a bit more of a wiggly kind of trail coming off the goal with this yeah there you go you can kind of see those have gotten a little bit more curly and a little bit less linear the goal with this is to make it feel like flip essentially you know a bit more organic and a bit more kind of interesting i'll show you one thing actually i discovered the other day which is really really cool attribute blur i did that earlier on the way of the attribute player but with points if you turn on turn off pin border points and set it to proximity and it looks like i'm also merging out my ground plane here so i'm just going to change that to be um star pop star uh houdini yeah i mean you can get the apprentice version of houdini for free and it's sort of it's full-featured you will get a watermark but you can learn it it's fine um i'm not i mean you know i'm doing some animation but i wouldn't say i'm doing character animation we have other channels on cg spectrum streams that happen during the week that are that are about animation if you're interested in that using maya also 2d animation if if that's you know something that interests you um there's lots lots of stuff so check out check out the um the cg spectrum youtube channel or the twitch channel i guess you could see those um so have a look at this attribute blur set to proximity so pin board points is turned off and we've got to be quite a big scale here so up the proximity radius see if i can get something happening here why aren't you doing anything what have we got here one million unconnected points attribute blur proximity radius how big how big is this that's five meters so 5 should be fine maybe not 20 max neighbors 50. oh something's happening ah here we go so the scale might kind of be a bit wacky here but yeah what you can kind of get is so that's what we started with but as i blur this the points kind of blur into these interesting shapes which can kind of look a bit you know a bit flippy i guess because flip kind of start tends to stick things together in little trails but this kind of it is an interesting little thing where it will blend it's basically averaging the positions of points based on their neighbors so it will average those points out so you can see the more neighbors that i give it the more it will sort of average those points together so you know if you just do 50 neighbors it's just going to look this about be the point and it looks for 50 neighbors to average but there's also this radius as well so that's going to control be the sort of limiter on the distance it looks as well and then the more you blur the more you kind of get these interesting really interesting shapes is it yes i did forget to watch again sorry um i'll make it i'll make a note if i have a pen somewhere i'll find one oh i'll make an i'm i'm thinking too old school here i'll just make a note again i did make a note last time but i don't know what happened to it luka trailer there we go um is it possible to animate with maya and put it in houdini yes it is so you can certainly do animation in maya and and this this building and everything was done in meyer i mean it's probably an asset that was bought but it was all positioned in i know i know last time i made a note i don't know what happened to that note i must have turned my computer off and it got lost um but now i have it see here it is here i probably just did it in an untitled notepad and uh it went away look at me still using notepad um so yeah this this was done in maya this building you know kind of set um and you can absolutely just export that from wire as an fbx or an alembic file and bring it in to houdini to do whatever you like with and that's quite often what you know what people will do so [Music] what was i doing oh i was going on this attribute blur tangent yeah you can see it creates these really interesting shapes so i think that's a really kind of interesting thing to do um i don't know if it works in this case but it's kind of a cool little thing that i discovered and you can try it on all sorts of things like if you do it on a grid with um just scattered points on it it creates this really cool kind of pattern let me turn off relax and there we go like that so you're starting with that and you can kind of get these really interesting almost voronoi like bubble patterns in the points maybe not even need a scatter yeah i guess you do crank that up yeah so the points really seem to make a huge difference there and then you know imagine if you um if you use like a particle fluid surface on that you're waiting for my review yeah sorry i will uh i will watch it straight after this now that i know that i've i've waited so long i made you wait so long to to hear what i thought i don't really you know watch a lot of stuff that's that's kind of why i just don't i don't have time um so you know you could create some really interesting patterns with this type of effect and give it you know give it a ton of points or maybe work out some interesting things that you could do with it i don't know i just thought it was a kind of cool cool idea makes really interesting patterns just from a grid with scattered points um so let's get back to the main event running out of time we could even reduce our main spray here let's make that thousand points and then we get much less kind of main spray points like the the big guys that are driving the trailing stuff um that gravity is a little strong minus two yeah yeah send me a reminder john that that would be great yes i i am a mentor with a lot of students as well as doing these streams i'm also the head of houdini effects and vfx at cg spectrum so i um i do have a lot i do have a lot on my plate but um i will i will try my best to uh to watch it i'm also restoring a caravan at the moment so uh when i'm not at my desk i i've been finding myself outside trying to trying to finish trying to finish that um so yeah so you see by turning down this base number of points like even a hundred what you end up with is this kind of you know more distinct trails i guess you know it's a little bit more designed and a little bit less kind of um just points everywhere so that looks kind of cool it's a little bit a little bit kind of crazy with the um with the curl noise it's a little bit magical looking let's uh jitter birth time negative let's see if that makes any difference so i'm getting a lot of stepping here that didn't help so what i'm going to do is just increase my point uh my sub steps let's go three two and three next stream yeah next stream we'll do it out in the carport you can see this kill noises it is really crazy actually so you can see those really big shapes so i'm going to turn that down let's go 0.05 maybe the frequency is just a bit too high too low could also be this let me turn this off no crazy crazy kill noise let me just turn that off for a second and see what the behavior is like yeah just nice and boring all right turn that back on kill noise let's increase that take that down so because we're adding it directly it only needs to be a very small amount otherwise yeah it just kind of it goes a little crazy um how many hours do i work in a day well it varies i tend to work about nine hours uh for the main sort of role that i do in cg spectrum every day monday to friday and then i also do tend to work you know around i don't know an extra three or four hours uh most days not not always but but when i'm really busy you know i could be working 12 or 15 hour days to get something finished um and you know it's yeah i don't like doing that all the time but sometimes you just need to put in a lot of work but yeah i spend about you know i spend a good nine eight or nine or ten hours every day on houdini just to give you an idea of you know how much work i put into learning and creating things in houdini and helping people kind of go i ask that's right john thank you i'm going for something a little a little stylized here i guess you can see this curl noise it really does you know add some really interesting shapes but it also can you do have to be careful with adding noise because it can start to look like magic so you see there there's it's it's kind of subtle a bit more subtle i also want these to really spread out these trails so to make them a bit kind of wider so i might add a little bit of variance to that let's see if that helps ah there we go look at that oh yeah that's nice okay so maybe a little much and maybe i've got too many points here a thousand nobody asked me questions after business hours john yeah i do i do get i you know cause i i mean i i live in australia but i have students that live all around the world um and you know they ask me questions at all all kinds of hours and if i'm awake i will uh you know i'm not too busy i'll i will go to my desk and reply and try and help people out that's that's what you know that's what it's all about trying to help people learn this stuff and get a job so this isn't quite working but it's kind of cool you know it could be a really cool event um i feel like it's happening a little late to be honest so maybe it's just the speed is a bit too low so maybe i'll just crank the inherited velocity up a little bit so they really shoot ahead a lot more hey michael there you are yeah yeah look you know i i really like helping people so it doesn't doesn't bother me too much that uh you know i spend more than my a lot of hours uh that i get paid for helping people because i just want people to you know learn this stuff and and kind of get through you know get through the hard part of houdini which is um you know which is it can be really challenging at the start and really daunting so let's see i think we need more base points i think we're not getting enough here let's try 500. and i mean this this actually could be a completely separate event like this could be just like a lesser um event maybe let's uh let's go a little more variance here maybe a little more roughness on the curl noise and then maybe just a few more sub steps take that down a little bit life expectancy two or we can add some noise to here as well that might be cool uh maybe a little more variance whoa what happened i think that might be the noise yeah so yeah this this one could could actually be um just like a more hero sort of trail stuff i don't know it doesn't really look like water at the moment but rendering can kind of change a lot and then we could have an additional pop network which was something like completely different which is more of the just generic sort of spray coming off so maybe without pop replicate and maybe just like a ton more particles and let's see and maybe also not quite as fast and then we'll see more down there down this front edge as well that's maybe what are we going to do here let's turn the variance down maybe just turn the inherited down as well then merge that in let's see what that looks like these these might be a bit tenderly and creepy looking i don't know you're welcome john um so yeah you know it's a bit hard to see with them both being white but if i make that one pink you can kind of see those two particles working together the other thing is as well like our base scatter is not particularly dense so we could always just amp that guy up as well and that will kind of help hopefully with this one this one seems to need a bit more i reckon birth let's go 50 000 take the life expectancy down as well we could also do something like pop interact and set the um we set the force to negative so i kind of get things sucking towards each other i thought it kind of did but maybe it doesn't maybe it's too strong there is pop fluid as well so we could try adding that um that might be an interesting way just to get some kind of fluidy behavior into this stuff let's try this it gets a little bit funny with the particle separation on this but let's um let's see there you go so see they're spreading out really quick so i think the particle separation is too low or too high let's try 0.01 is your question about particle fluid john or are you questioning audrey's day walker remark i assume that has something to do with game of thrones or some such because i don't really understand either oh this is an evil all right let's see uh tensile strength i think if we increase this viscosity it's been a while since i've used this particle fluid pop fluid i can't really remember what the settings are exactly probably also the things dying doesn't help yeah it's not really not really doing anything for me let's leave that pop drag let's increase this a little bit a little bit crazy i think that's probably coming from this let's just set that to zero why are you so crazy let's turn off the pop-pop let's turn off everything i'll leave the pop drag so yeah the pop-pop probably don't want to oh there we go so the pop-up i think was adding that curl noise which yeah maybe wasn't helping let's try turning the pop fluid back on now and see if that looks any better with the curl noise off hey batman thanks for joining me long time no see um let's try increasing tensile and viscosity see if we can get these to blob up a little bit there's some interesting shapes happening there but i think they were happening without the particle fluid so i feel like that's just not working um all right we only got 10 minutes left i feel like i haven't really achieved much but i think i think i do have the kind of bones of a good setup um i just need to kind of run it and and see what we get and just keep adding things you know i would usually kind of go into rendering pretty quickly when i'm doing this stuff as well just to see what this stuff kind of looks like i mean in the last 10 minutes i can just render this and see what it looks like so let's we've got our wave in another object so we don't need that let's merge these together no only 10 minutes yeah no it goes fast doesn't it um let's merge these two things together and i'm going to just put an attribute wrangled down and say at p scale equals 0.01 something pretty small and i'm going to revert the color to white uh i want to begin graphic design but i don't know nothing in this program adobe illustrator well i'm not using adobe illustrator but uh there are i don't know if we have anyone working in illustrator does any audrey do you know um if anyone works in i don't think anyone works in illustrator in the cgs streams we certainly do have 2d streams um i'm working in in 3d yeah so probably it's not going to help you although you can do lots of cool kind of graphical things in houdini but um yeah this uh this probably isn't going to help you on your quest um photoshop yeah well it might be worth checking out our other streams batman on um on this cgs youtube channel because we do have a lot of 2d streams they don't tend to be more they tend to be more artistic rather than graphic design but if you're looking for you know things like that uh photoshop is not free but there are alternatives like affinity or critter um things like that affinity has has um yeah a few options photoshop is definitely yeah the go-to but it's not free i don't think there's a free version of it um so let's set this render up really quick i'm gonna go materials oh looks like i've got a whole bunch of stuff in here already i'll just get rid of that principled shader i'm gonna drag that onto the wave and then i'm going to just grab this utility constant shader for the particles drag that on that will take the white from the particles and just it's got use point color turn on principle shader let's go reflective one roughness zero base color go for my kind of bluey greeny color something like that really dark maybe a bit bluer okay um no graphic design streams yeah live drawing stream yeah and then there's also concept art i can't remember what day that is um so oh 10 a month that's that's not too bad audrey i thought it was more but maybe it's changed it's been ages since i've used photoshop working at studios where the operating system is linux you don't have the ability to use photoshop which is kind of annoying so i just kind of got used to using input critter um all right app context i've got a whole bunch of mantra ops i'm just going to get rid of those that was from the previous project that this file came from and i'm going to put down a new mantra i already have an environment light in my scene and i've got camera 5 so i'll make sure i put that on my mantra node uh here camera five and then i'm going to set my resolution of camera five where are you come up here set my resolution to hd and get rid of that background image and i'm going to render this at half res i'm going to choose my rendering engine as pbr set my pixel samples to 1 to start with limits i'm going to come down to 3 and 3 and that should be all right okay so what else am i going to do on the building spray i'm going to turn on sampling velocity blur i'll do that on the wave as well why not i don't think i have a trail on this though let me put a trail here to calculate that velocity and yeah we've got our environment light let's see what it looks like so i'm going to render these bg buildings as well let's go to my out node objects forced objects is going to be wave building spray and vg buildings and ground plane why not actually ground plane can be under forced matte so it doesn't actually render whoa control v control b candidate lights i think i only have one light i'll just stick it in there okay save render view one camera five render no redshift uh no i don't have redshift in 185. i may end up switching to redshift for this one um i still i don't know why i haven't done it yet but i still just haven't i've only got it in 18 not 18.5 all right so there we go we got something it looks awful but we got something so let's make some adjustments to our building spray do we have velocity i should maybe i should maybe use redshift yeah i should uh although you know you can see this only rendered in 14 seconds so it's not not too bad um my velocity doesn't look that good did i turn on motion blur maybe i didn't i did not hey that's a bit better all right objects building spray let's take that p scale down zero zero five i want it to be quite fine but at the at the pixel samples that i'm rendering it's probably not going to come out super fine so let's go up to three there you go so the pixel samples really do affect how much you know that fine detail you can get so if your points are too small they won't show up now probably it's a good idea i do have an id attribute here coming out of the pop net so i'm going to fit 0 1 rand at id so i'm going to create a random value based on the id of each particle and i'm going to set my minimum point size to point 0 0 1 and my maximum point size to 0 0 5. and that will give me random scales makes it look a bit more interesting let's look at this wave so the shader it's very reflective let's add a little bit of roughness maybe even just turn down the reflectivity and i mean we could make it slightly transparent as well might be interesting let's make it fully transparent see what that looks like maybe kind of maybe too much like glass but just to kind of see you can see making something refractive definitely um slows things down well it's like uh it's like a liquid metal wave um but yeah you know it kind of is good to see what it looks like when it's refractive i probably wouldn't make this refractive i just deal with deal with reflections only probably add some displacement might be cool to this as well just to get that extra level of let's just try it noise displacement just to get that extra level of detail turn that right down uh what is learning according to me i mean that's that is a very good question um i do have a there is a webinar out there that i do with side effects where i talk a little bit about learning in general um yeah look i think i mean to be specific about learning with houdini i think it is a lot about practice it exactly audrey repetition um i think i think you also need to be kind of you know you need to go in a particular direction instead of just trying to do everything all at once just focus on one particular aspect of it at a time and don't try to master everything all at once because that just becomes very kind of chaotic and you'll be jumping all over the place and not really sort of honing one particular skill in so i think i think it's really good just to sort of focus on particular aspects for me the most important thing with houdini is learning fundamentals learning those fundamental skills of how you can manipulate things what attributes are and how they work and the rest will follow and the rest will follow very easily if you understand that it's very easy for me to learn a different solver in houdini or a new skill because i know how houdini fundamentally works so each new thing that comes across is kind of like yeah i mean i need to learn those specific ideas and those specific kind of controls and concepts but the base fundamental way that houdini works doesn't change so it kind of you know that is the most important thing um but yeah look when i you know when i learn something i just really focus on that thing and i i don't really do anything else i just i go very hard at trying to learn that thing that i'm trying to learn and and i don't stop until i feel like i've you know i wouldn't say mastered it but gotten pretty close to you know to to being able to to do that thing whether it's learning guitar or learning to carve timber or you know whatever it is drawing it's all the same approach and it's just yeah i just dive in you know i dive in and i i just live that thing for for as long as it takes uh i don't sell my work batman um i you know i work professionally as a visual effects artist so you can see my work uh you know if you look at my imdb you can have a look at all the movies that i've worked on and go and see that but i get paid for my work i don't i don't really sell it um so if you look my name up daniel horrigan on imdb you will you will see you know my films um but i'm also yeah i'm a teacher now so i teach people how to do this and that's that is what i do and i get paid for it so uh i you know i occasionally do sell things from time to time when i do artwork but it's usually not in 3d i usually do more traditional artwork so yeah you can see this has a long way to go but i think it's a good start you know we kind of have a very kind of basic thing going on but it's a really good thing to build from i want to get this wave edge covered in foam and covered in spray because that's going to hide you know this awful edge that we have for one thing but it's also going to tie everything together and then we're also going to have a line of spray and interaction happening on the very base of the wave basically we just need foam and spray and you know maybe some addition maybe some very specific flip elements here and there to tie everything together and to give it that fluid motion um but i think yeah i think this is a good kind of start and if we let me just hit save again um if we kind of step back through and see you know what this looks like at different frames we can sort of see how this effect evolves so there it is right at the start so you know imagine that there's just foam and points spraying off this thing the whole way along probably need to extend this out more and then as it kind of comes crashing through we're gonna see these points kind of spray off and we probably need a lot more to make this you know feel very sort of um very solid and very kind of thick with foam and spray um so one last thing that i can do just to finish this off and i am over time now but um one last thing that i could do here with this spray effect is to take the result of this to create a density value on here so i'm just going to say at density equals one and then rasterize that using a volume rasterize attribute so this would be the same way that you would create a pyro simulation so there's my density uh i've got a particle scale on here which is really really small so i might just bypass that for a second then i can set this manually and you can see i can create a volume here so let's take the resolution up a little bit okay something like that i'm just going to go null out density i'm just going to create a new object here and say spray foam object merge out density there we go go to my material context uh anyone that knows me knows that i like to build my own pyro shaders so material builder compute lighting hook up the relevant inputs and outputs and then a volume shader core layer into layer bind density into density and then i've got this very simple density shader so i'm going to take the shadow density scale down to maybe 0.5 and the color of white is fine let's call this oops let's call this foam and i'm going to apply that to the spray foam just i don't have i don't have velocity on this stuff at the moment so i'll just do it without there we go foam and we'll add that to our mantra node okay let's render that save and render okay there we go so it's not perfect by any means but you can see how it helps to tie everything together a little bit and gives it that sort of foamy atmospheric feeling and it also makes it feel like there's a ton more points so you know i need to work on the scale of this thing it's too um you know the scale of it is too big particle scale wise maybe you know just take it down a little bit and then increase the density in the shader and you can see it starts to have that feeling of lots of points and maybe i'll have a couple of these volumes maybe one that's really kind of um i guess tight to the points so maybe something like a particle scale of 0.2 and then you know perhaps i have another one here which is a particle scale of 0.8 and if i just flick that over you'll see that come through there we go so that's really really big maybe the resolution could be less and it looks kind of a bit more blurry but then also so i'll just hook that one back up this one can be density i'll just call it density b grab this spray frame here duplicate it this can be spray frame 2 density underscore b drop the density here yeah how did that happen um so foam one so this one's going to be way less dense this will be foam one i'll add this just by doing spray frame star and now i'll get this sort of dense foam that's really tight to the particles so you can see that one in there and then i've got this other one which is really kind of much less dense doing the sort of outer so i can layer it up and just continually sort of add more and more to this so yeah i think you know adding that has certainly improved things and you can imagine if i had that same kind of deal down the edge of the wave here that is really gonna help other things you know that you can do with the points is just duplicate them jitter them a little bit whoops whoops um i better stop this before it crashes yeah i uh sorry once i once i get on a roll i can't uh i can't seem to get out of it so if i just jitter those a little bit and merge them back with themselves i end up with a much denser amount of points with the same kind of um so good i i knew i was out of time um i get the same amount of points or the same simulation but i get twice the amount of points just by sort of jittering them and i could do that multiple times so almost sad sound effects that's right um so you can see you know we started with that and we get that so we had 28 000 points a very small amount of points really and then we end up with 85 000 and that will improve our density as well but it will certainly improve the look of our points as well so that's uh that's where we're rendering from there and render view and this is you know this is still in my opinion in the blocking phase where i'm just trying to work this stuff out and you know just see kind of what's what's working and what isn't i think this you know needs a bit of a bit of tweaking certainly you can see that it's maybe not quite working or that i need to change p scale a little bit or something because now i have many more points and some of them look maybe a little large but you can see how filling it out and adding that volume especially really really helps and if you have a look at the alpha if i have a white sky behind this this stuff is all going to just disappear pretty much so and it will help it'll just sort of blend into the background so i'm not really worried about this looking a bit weird like this like these fingers because it will all just blend away into nothing so there we go 10 minutes over time i'm going to wrap it up there and we'll keep working on this for a few weeks probably it's a lot a lot to do but this i think will hopefully um you know give us a really good starting point for what else we need to add i might just go back and tweak my wave at some point but i'll kind of continue adding all these elements in and just seeing kind of what you know what happens with them that's a little bit stylized but you know i'm okay i'm okay with that for now stylized is always slightly easier because it takes less time realism is you know it's always challenging because you just need so much so much stuff to make it look real so many more points so much higher resolution so you can see the um the shadow here there should be volume here but the shadow from the wave is kind of not showing that up um so if i was to exclude lighting from these that might show up maybe maybe not i might need to uh i might need to exclude shadows or something or even just go back to the material and turn off shadows that might help maybe maybe not i don't know next week's problem all right guys uh thank you for joining me i hope uh i hope that's been informative and yeah just uh keep keep joining me and if you haven't already like and subscribe and uh check out cg spectrum website or the youtube channel if you're interested in everything else that we do and uh yeah i'll watch the luca trailer don't worry i have it now on my desktop um so yeah i'll see you guys next week thanks a lot for joining me see you guys you

Channel: CG Spectrum College of Digital Art & Animation

Views: 3,663

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: vfx, visual effects, houdini, unreal engine, animation, digital animation, sidefx, sidefx houdini, tutorial houdini, cgi, behind the scenes, vfx artist, vfx tutorial, visual effects video, how to vfx, how to vfx editing, cg spectrum, cg spectrum review, tidal wave, vfx tidal wave, wave, houdini tutorial, houdini tutorial water, particle tutorial, vfx breakdown, Houdini tutorial particles, Vfx tutorial, Learn houdini, Cg tutorial, particles, after effects, houdini nodes

Id: Do_VmnRnekk

Length: 132min 3sec (7923 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021