This fortnight, I worked on more VFX, put out some of my own fires, and started rendering magic for final comp.
List of Output:
Flake away animation
Burn away animation (yes it's different)
Scene 10 pixie dust
Flake Away Animation
The plan for this effect is to show Daruma's death. Inherently, after the goal is accomplished, you're supposed to burn your Daruma doll. That seemed a bit rough and hard to explain in a short, so we're having it be a magic death. The flakes will be a saturated version of the texture and the underlying geo will be desaturated. Because I didn't have the final animation quite yet (I do now) I decided to use on of my other models for this test. I figured this object would give me good problems to solve. For example, it's not airtight geo, which sometimes causes problems in Houdini and it also has interpenetrating geo. Turns out, it's fine and it just works, which is a nice change of pace.
Burn Away Animation
A couple of things about this. One, my friend lovingly called this the dork lord's symbol because I made it. Not important, just wanted to include that detail. So, I made two effects that are similar because I want to combine the two. As you can see with the first one, some of the flakes don't completely leave, and I'd like them to. Next progress check, you should see them together on the final scene (fingers crossed.)
The Magic Render
This is some of the bog standard pixie dust magic that I've posted before, so I've decided to just tell you about it. This was more of a problem than I expected, though I've got it down. Basically, Houdini and Maya cameras don't always talk to each other well. Maya does some math with its cameras to have two different kinds while Houdini just has one normal one.
What this means for me is that Alembics work better for the models imports for effects, while .fbx's work better for the cameras. This is a good comparison shot of the different translations when importing different files. Which looks to me like a bad yearbook pic.
So, as you can see, they're in different places. Not a big deal, I'll just use fbx's for the cameras, and alembics for the geo. Great done... well not quite. The problem with alembics is that they don't carry UV, material, or texture information but fbx's do. This will be a problem for the flake sim, as the whole point is that one texture will flake away to another. I'll figure it out.
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