Sunday, September 16, 2012

Shot 2 Effects Update

Been working on my second shot mostly today. Adjusted the animation as well as the collision. Imported everything back into Maya and did the adjustments. Added debris in maya as well using particle instancing, with the help of Sun ShiYi's script he let me use! Great help as there isn't much time left till submission.

So here's what I have so far. Further refinements to come..

Friday, September 14, 2012

Update to the first shot

Managed to get the desired looked for my crack on the ground in the first shot. Here's what I have so far. Brought in my match-moved camera from Maya as an FBX and matched the road in Houdini accordingly.


But the only question now is, how to texture in Houdini?!?!

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Effects Update

Alright so I've been hard at work trying to figure out how the hell am I going to get all my effects done by next week.

So after a lot of thinking, I managed to sort things out. So what I intend to do is, render my drill in maya with the textures, lighting and animation, and then comp in the effects I produce from Houdini.

Here is the latest of the effects of the second shot of my project will probably look like.



What I did was export the camera out first from Maya to Houdini using the FBX format. I then created a low poly mesh of my vehicle and attached it to my high-res vehicle's rig, that way, if I animate the high res, the low res poly follows exactly.

After that, I animated my vehicle in Maya, then used a plug-in I found online to help me export the low-res poly (with the animation) into houdini as an OBJ file. Once that was done, I built my ground in houidni, voronoi-ed it, and made the drill interact with only the areas I wanted it to.

Now my only problem right now is, I want the area where its suppose to crack not to drop down as fast. I tried animating my grouped points in houdini to become active at a certain frame, but it didn't turn out as I had planned. Then I tried using attributeTransfer and animating the distance threshold, but sadly, it didn't work as great for me. So for now, I will stick with this and refine further.

Now all I gotta do is texture the ground reference my backplate for accuracy of placement. Oh boy.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Updates

Wow, the deadline is in a few weeks! Ahhh the pressure. Well got to get on with it!

So my latest updates are with texturing, HDRI adjusting, as well as some effects pre-viz.

I tweaked my HDRI to be a bit warmer in order to match my shot a bit better, and as you can see, there is a difference in the lighting of the vehicle.

Added a few more textures, mainly to the drill and the wheels. Aiming to get the rest done before the end of this week.



Tyson came in last Saturday and he gave some valuable feedback. He mentioned that the HDRI will work this this shot, but of course to improve my textures and get it to be more dirty. After all, the vehicle is coming out of the ground!

Lastly, did some tests in class with houdini to get the effect I want for the drill coming out of the ground. Here's what I have so far.



Still so much to do, and so little time left. *gulp*. time to shift into hyper gear and burn midnight oil!

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Updates to texturing

I've been texturing the vehicle now and aim to finish in a week's time. I thought I would use Mudbox to texture, but I think the traditional way of using Photoshop is better for now. Here's what I've got so far.


I do think that the front plate texture looks slighty off, but this is just the first draft. I'll refine it more by my next post!

Friday, August 31, 2012

Roughcut

Got my rough cut out. I managed to track the first shot (thanks to Ron for some help with that). What I thought was impossible, was possible! So in the rough cut, I have the ground cracking up in the first shot, the drill vehicle coming out of the ground in the second shot, and finally it speeds off with smoke coming out of its booster in the last shot.


Thursday, August 30, 2012

Drill Rig

After a gruesome night of work, I've got the rig done for my drill. I managed to get the controls for the rig for most of the things I want to show in the animation. Hopefully it's accurate enough to look believable. Now to animate and input this into my rough cut!