SCAD x Harbor Week 6

02/20/23

New Improved Shot 1 Layout:

Improvements: Need to fix intersections

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02/18/23 - 02/19/23

Particle Effect Updates:

Issues/Changes:

• New scene scale changes the way the forces are applied in the simulation

• New curve layout due to change in flower layout; therefore, I need to figure out new settings that work for the new curve

Solutions:

• I began by creating a simple popnet with an attract-to-curve node sourced to the curve Zach created within the flower setup so it wouldn't intersect the flowers.

• While working on this particle effect, I studied Entagmas particle explosion for techniques that could be transferable to the effect I was creating.

This is the tutorial I watched for inspiration; my effect isn't quite the same as the effect he was creating, but it was helpful to see how certain nodes were used in the particle workflow and how they affected his effect.

• Some ideas I got from entegma were

- to use multiple popnets for different streams of particles with different properties applied for variation

• I am also looking into adding volume as he did to create a finer dust around my particles

Post Render of Particles:

After rendering the particle sim, I found some issues I will need to fix:

• The particle's colors are too similar to the background, so in comp, they almost completely disappear

• the particle count is too low they look sorta spacious

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02/16/23 - 02/17/23

Plant Effects:

Todo:

• transfering the leaves on the plants from procedural leaves to quixel mega scans

Issues:

• finding leaves that matched the plants I was creating: Quixel megascans has alot of scans but somehow they didnt have non grouped individual scans of a fern or a eucalyptus leaf

  • In houdini you cant extract individual atlases out of a group, you can only do that with 3d model, so I had to figure out what to do:

- 1st Idea(Fail): bringing the scans into photoshop cropping them and then using them ( this didnt work becuase after cropping down the scans they were too low res and no longer had any visable detail when brought back into houdini

- 2nd Idea(Success!): steps below:

1. Uv quickshade onto a grid the diffuse leaf group texture and pick which leaf you want to use

2. group select the primitives of the grid which contain the leaf you want

3. use a delete node, select your grouped primitives and delete the non selected

4. Done! this will keep the resolution of the original scan but get rid of the other leaves

• To retain the original animation I had to now transform the projected leaf to the orgin of the grid and made sure it was pointing int he Z-direction.

  • This ensures that the normals will face the correct direction, this is important becuase the animation depends on the normals

• The leaf is then successfully instanced as the procedural geometry was before retaining all of the geometry

Issues:

• After adding the displacement and tessalations to my leaves I realized that it is fully transforming my leaves away from their stems

• To fix this I tried:

  • Caching the leaves in a different geo node and instancing them after being cached (fail)

  • Packing the geometry(fail)

  • both together (fail)

• Every option I tried my leaves would transform the only way this wouldnt happen was if I turned off displacement. Which I decided todo as its very small leaves and a minor detail.

Example:

As you can see in the images below the first image, without displacement, the leaves are still attached, and in the second image, with displacement, the leaves are transformed above the stems.

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02/14/23

This week we presented our progress to the mentors, and our team made a much more significant jump than the prior week. Some of the notes and critiques we were given were:

• Scene Set Up:

  • Add more flowers and make them bigger so they consume the entire screen.

    • This will make the scene feel more full and have less negative space

    • add this to every shot

    • NO NEGATIVE SPACE

• Cameras & Shot Sequence

  • Shot 4 camera movement too wide and large

  • Switch shot 3 and shot 4 and improve the camera movements

  • Bring back shot 1

• Lighting &Post

  • add more depth of field

  • play with backlighting

  • a very subtle vignette can go a long way