Brickwall Generator

Created a brickwall generator utilising the useful copy SOP. The generator takes in two values for the width and height of the wall. 3 variations of bricks are 'randomly' chosen to form a row and then variations of the rows of bricks are copied to form the height of the wall.

I decided to use my own surface and displacement shaders instead of the off-the-shelf bricks shader in Houdini, in order to have more control. The look is grayscale as that is the style I want for my shots.

Awesome visit to House of Moves (part of VICON)

Kewwwlll...awesome...swell...totally...

That's what our visit to House of Moves was. Enjoyed it so much and so did the students and rest of SideFX. We were treated to a full demo of a take with 2 actors, sound, video crew and the whole VICON mocap whizzbang. And to top it all, we were given lunch and took a t-shirt home to put icing on our experience cake. Real nice people.

The work that these guys do is awesome and some of their film credits include Titanic, Spiderman 1 n 2, MIB2; and for games, Quake 3, some Star Wars games, Dead to Rights, NBA series (Shaq's shoes with markers were encased in a glass shelf). More recently, they worked on Star Wars : The Old Republic, Uncharted 2 and Resident Evil 5. I found the work on the Old Republic trailer was the best of the three they screened for us.

One of the coolest things we experienced was the virtual camera that was handled like a prop on stage, but its mocap data was used to drive a 3d camera in MotionBuilder. The camera handler then get a live feedback on his monitor as he moves the camera in mocap space. (Photo's showing one of the students trying out the virtual camera). Would be a cool project to do in school since we have a VICON studio ourselves.

Looking forward to the next visit....Rhythm n Hues.

Tribute to Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett

Double tragedy reported yesterday...sad day for fans all over the world. News channels in LA from yesterday evening and this morning are completely inundated with reports about the late stars.

I first heard of it while on the bus. The bus driver just yelled out, "Michael Jackson's dead. Oh, My God!", after she heard it on her radio. Everyone I passed by who was on the phone was talking about it.

But Farrah Fawcett's passing away is over-shadowed by Michael Jackson's. I guess hers was in a way expected, his wasn't; the cause of his death is at the moment controversial, hers wasn't; his life was controversial and hers far from it.

Farrah Fawcett (1947-2009)

Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

BootCamp Week

Going through Houdini bootcamp this week (2nd round seems better). I guess it was difficult concentrating during the Singapore bootcamp as I was in and out of class due to work.

Some results from the bootcamp training..

- Waves with VOPSOP...

- And some of my own experiments with the Break SOP...

The students have landed...

Met them at the airport...

Arrived at the apartment and met the landlord...

Then they were whisked off to the SideEffects office and on to Universal Studios for a VFX talk. Super loooooooooooooooooong day for them!

night@NIGHT at the Museum 2

The talk was nice and short but the movie was a little shaky, liked the first one better.

Francisco Rodriguez, FX Supervisor at Rhythm and Hues delivered the talk on one of the VFX-filled shots they did for Night at the Museum 2. Had 6-8 layers of FX for the shot where the Egyptian Bird Warriors appear out of the door - the one at the top right corner of pic below...

Attended a rehearsal for a 'webex' lesson to be conducted in Toronto - was on Houdini's cloth system. Cool features and quite 'fast'. Although called cloth it can be used for non-garment/cloth simulations, basically anything that can use deformable RBDs e.g. dentable metal.

Features include pin constraints to lock down parts of cloth, plastic deformation so that 'cloth' keeps its deformation (think crushed cans) and SOP solver integration with DOPs.

Some results from the tests I did...

No plastic deformations...

With plastic deformations...

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Students will be arriving soon so will be meeting them, taxi them to their apartment and after a short rest, we'll be heading down to the SideFX office. We are having a 'Night at the museum 2' screening and VFX talk at Universal Studios; co-sponsored by Siggraph LA chapter and SideFX.

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Had blueberry pancakes for breakfast...nice.

Finally here in Santa Monica. after a super long flight of 16 hrs. 

Weather's good though a bit foggy for sunny California.

Rested for one day due to backache. Skipped lunch to rest but had to get out for dinner.

Walked down one street to have a look at the beach...

Food - I lasted one full day without rice. Not that I was yearning for it but Panda Express (Chinese takeaway) was nearby so why not have some rice. Was preparing for the worse but turns out the food's quite nice. Kept some for breakfast as it was too much for one meal.

Will go into office tomorrow morning to meet the SideFX people. Better get some zzz's.