Day 16

Today, we came into SESI as usual, I think I am going to skip this line from tomorrow onwards. I started my day by resuming the simulations caching from yesterday. While I was doing that, I was staring at my rock shader.

After awhile, Zack started his class on lighting. He covered basic lighting principles. He also covered most of the lights in Houdini. He also taught us about the IPR render view in Houdini. After that, he taught us more on 3 point lighting.

He told us that whenever you start lighting a scene, always use the camera as a reference, as that is where the viewer will see everything. He also told us about some aspects of the lights. For example, spotlight renders faster compared to point light( which is equivalent to 6 spotlights ) Spotlights uses cone angle to generate depth map shadows. And depth map shadows doesn't work with IPR render.

About 3 point lighting,
Keylight - Area light. Reason being it provides with softer shadows. And area light in Houdini is not as computational heavy as compared to Maya.

Fill Light - Environment light. Reason being environment light gives the subject more bounced light around. For example, sun is our keylight while the sky is our fill light. That works around the same way as this concept.

He also talked about the option normalise light intensity to area, and that means that if the area light is closed to a particular object, the light intensity will be normalise so that overexposure will not occur on the object and at the same time underexposure.

After that I continued with my rock shader:

Below is the look. I am quite satisfied with the look. I wonder if I still need to tweak? Maybe.




Anyways, this rock is a much lower resolution mesh compared to the previous. And with Charles help, I managed to add another set of displacement on the rock itself. Hence, getting more detail on a lower resolution model.

Below is my hierarchy.





And regarding the ripple simulation, I managed to make it break a little. But I realised a problem which is that, when I tried to create velocity for my simulation, the Y velocity isn't created. Maybe because my object is nurbs. I think I will fix the problem tomorrow and hopefully have a flipbook of it here tomorrow. So close maybe?

Got to go to the pharmacy later to get medicine, later!