Android Live Wallpaper: Paintballs
So this is my first simple android app. I specifically wanted to do something simple so that I could actually finish it in my spare time..
Let me know what you think!
Here’s the link to Google Play, where you can buy it!
Demoreel
I finished a demo reel, and it already got me a job! That actually happened a month ago but i was on vacation in Australia and Thailand since then, so the update got a little delayed.
In July i quit my job as Senior Rigging TD at Ilion Animation Studios to take a break, dive a bit deeper into houdini and create a houdini reel. Most of the work on the reel was created in that time frame. I was aiming to get a job using mostly houdini by the end of the year, and it all worked out. I’ll start in january 2009, but not telling where yet :)
Here’s the reel.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Even more work on invasion
I’ve been doing a lot more work on this project, on pretty much all aspects of it.
Also added some music, it’s from kingdom of heaven. I wanted to do some more stuff, something ‘big’ was going to happen at the end, but i think this is gonna go onto the reel as it is for now.
As always here’s an mp4 version, and a lower quality flash video for quick viewing. both are around 3mb.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Rendertimes are as i hoped they would be: around 5 minutes for a 1920×1080 frame!
Upgrade
To my shame, i have to take back some of the things i said in my last post… i decided it’s gonna be worth investing in a new machine for doing my personal projects. It’s pretty amzing how cheap a 2.66ghz quadcore with 4gigs of ram is nowadays, especially if you didn’t check prices for a while.
So what’s left to decide now is what to do with a 3x increase in render speed. It’s either rendering in 3 minutes now or rendering 3 times as much stuff. I guess history should tell us that it’s inevitably the latter. Oh and actually it’s 4x because i will keep using the good old laptop. Just need another Houdini HD license!
More Invasion
I decided to go a bit deeper into the invasion thing. My goal with this is to do a complete sequence with fairly high complexity, while doing everything as efficiently as possible, especially when it comes to rendering. I want to stay under 10 minutes per frame on my CoreDuo 1.83ghz/2GB ram laptop.
None of what you see in this video is really finished, but it already contains most of the techniques that i will need for getting the look i want. Render time is about 5 minutes per frame at 1280×544 (This is 720p with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio). This is with displacement and proper motion blur as well as ambient occlusion.
All animation is driven by the crowd tools I’m working on, but it’s still a bit bumpy in places because of a bug in a new system I added. Even the camera is procedural system built for following any of the drones.
I’d really prefer if you got the 720p mp4 version (5.7mb), but here’s the low quality flash video for quick viewing as well.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Some of the techniques that I used are listed here:
- The general terrain shape is created using the compositing part of houdini, it’s mostly some voronoi noise mixed with other noises. There’s also some blurring tricks to get sand dunes against the mountains
- I rendered an ambient occlusion map without any displacement details at 2k resolution
- Extra occlusion details are added in comp using the normal angle of the surface (parts facing up get more light) and the depth of displacement in the rocky areas (deep grooves don’t get as much light)
- The occlusion on drones is rendered using a low poly version of the terrain. This is very fast so no need to bake.
- I’m writing my own shaders that do exactly what I need and only what I need. In the shaders I make extensive use of AOV’s (Arbitrary Output Variables). AOV’s provide a way to get any variable from a shader and render it’s values to a separate pass. This way I get all the passes I need in one render. This speeds up renders many times. I’m also exporting separate passes per light using illuminance loops in my shaders, so again everything can be rendered in one go.
Invasion Project
Here’s a first preview of a project that i’m working on.
A bunch drones are emitted from a mothership and land on a landscape, where they pick the best spot to land based on surface inclination and any other factors. The whole system is procedural and works for any number of motherships and drones, as well as any landscape.
The steer effects and the resulting dust are all procedurally generated based on the drone’s motion.
I’m doing this using my own crowd tools for flocking, predictive obstacle avoidance and other things. Take look at the tools page! I will post these in the shape of digital assets as soon as i’ve gotten some more testing in.
You can see a low quality flash version right here or click the download arrow in the playbar to get a 720p mp4 file.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Times are changing
Hello everybody,
you may have noticed that the look of the site has changed, but this is not the biggest change around here.
2 months ago I quit my job as a senior rigging artist/td at ilion animation studios, where i finished work on the feature film Planet 51, to take a break and take on some new challenges.
The roadmap for the rest of the year involves spending a lot of time just relaxing and doing stuff i like. I’m going to stay in spain for now and enjoy my time here. A little further down the road the goal will be to get a job using my houdini reel.
you can expect some posts in that general direction in the near future.
the new tools page will give you a little preview, if you’re interested!
Soft Contact Deformer for Houdini
This is a digital asset i developed in Houdini, based on pixar’s paper “Acting with contact in Ratatouille” to be found at graphics.pixar.com
It’s a geometry operator that simulates contact between a soft surface, e.g. a character with other objects. The area around the collision is deformed using an animator-controlled curve. It also supports history based effects so the deformation can be ’sticky’.
Here’s a quick demo
This is a more detailed explanation.
I had some problems with the sound recording in this one, volume is pretty low and i sound like an alien at some points… that’s not me, it’s the recording ;-)
PointCache Manager
Hey, a CG related post, who would have thought!
Due to the amount of emails i get about this i finally decided to release my old PointCache Manager tool, i added a minimum of documentation and reworked it a little. This was a few months ago, after some user requests.
This tool is for mass-recording and loading pointcache files.
It’s still max8 only, maybe if i find the time i will make a max 9 version which should be fairly easy.
aearonPCM_1.1.0_max8.zip
You may want to visit the Website of Kai Wolter for an XSI .pc2 exporter/importer
I think in a while i will also release a new version my network update/menu generator system which is for max 8 and 9.
Maya-Like Utility Nodes In Max
Ok… after some discussion with a few other max guys I finally started to try and implement Maya-like utility nodes in max.
After a day i already have them semi working! (It’s more like a rapid prototype though, just the framework, no ui for most of it yet)
here’s a demo of it: SceneGraph_UtilNodes.avi (tscc codec, 860kb)
and here’s another clip with new features : SceneGraph_UtilNodes2.avi (tscc codec, 1mb)