Thursday, November 12, 2009
Finally another update. October was a little rough. Had a lot of stuff going on, sick for 2 weeks, some freelance stuff and ran into a problem with the rig and procedurally animating it. Anyways I hope to finish this before Thanksgiving, so I can start some python and tool building. Or maybe a demolition fx.
So since the last post I had to re work the rig for the fish. I was getting a lot of deformation I didn't want, plus I wasn't getting the control I needed. Having a background in character animation help with this part of the shot a bit, but without a great character rig and controls I wasn't able to get the motion I wanted, so I decided to go at it procedurally. First I created a line, and then used CHOPs to animate it. After editing and tweaking the CHOP Network so that the curve would move in a wave form, I used Houdini's rigging feature Follow Curve, which used the points to layout the bone structure. After that I just had to capture and edit the captured geometry. This was my 1st attempt to use CHOPs, and I'm definitely going to continue to use it, very powerful tool. (Thanks goes out to Andy N., for pointing me in the right direction, great tutorial and example file.) The next step was getting the cycled fish to actually move, instead of staying in place.
Normally I would just animate the character (in this case the fish) moving across the screen as I animated the movement of the character. However, since the original rig didn't workout I decide to continue animating it procedurally, through the new Motion FX feature "Lag". This feature is very simple you select the object you want to "lag be
hind" and the object you want it to "follow." In this case I drew out a curve and applied a sphere to follow along the curve or "the path". Next selected the fish to lag behind the sphere, and there you have it. The fish looks as though its swimming along with the sphere. Right now the motion isn't exactly how I want it, but I'm going to be editing the curve and some of the expressions a little later when I bring it all together.
As usual, here's an example vido of the actual test and breakdown. If anyone's thinking about breaking into Houdini, CHOP's is one of the things I recommend you learn (after getting the basics down). It's very powerful and you can tweak any of your animations, fx and simulations with it, and it will make for a better shot. Up next I should be posting some tweak I've made on my ink effect R&D stuff, as well as some shaders. And hopefully soon a final animation/simulation for you to view. Please feel free to leave any comments, suggestion or critiques.
So since the last post I had to re work the rig for the fish. I was getting a lot of deformation I didn't want, plus I wasn't getting the control I needed. Having a background in character animation help with this part of the shot a bit, but without a great character rig and controls I wasn't able to get the motion I wanted, so I decided to go at it procedurally. First I created a line, and then used CHOPs to animate it. After editing and tweaking the CHOP Network so that the curve would move in a wave form, I used Houdini's rigging feature Follow Curve, which used the points to layout the bone structure. After that I just had to capture and edit the captured geometry. This was my 1st attempt to use CHOPs, and I'm definitely going to continue to use it, very powerful tool. (Thanks goes out to Andy N., for pointing me in the right direction, great tutorial and example file.) The next step was getting the cycled fish to actually move, instead of staying in place.
Normally I would just animate the character (in this case the fish) moving across the screen as I animated the movement of the character. However, since the original rig didn't workout I decide to continue animating it procedurally, through the new Motion FX feature "Lag". This feature is very simple you select the object you want to "lag be
hind" and the object you want it to "follow." In this case I drew out a curve and applied a sphere to follow along the curve or "the path". Next selected the fish to lag behind the sphere, and there you have it. The fish looks as though its swimming along with the sphere. Right now the motion isn't exactly how I want it, but I'm going to be editing the curve and some of the expressions a little later when I bring it all together.As usual, here's an example vido of the actual test and breakdown. If anyone's thinking about breaking into Houdini, CHOP's is one of the things I recommend you learn (after getting the basics down). It's very powerful and you can tweak any of your animations, fx and simulations with it, and it will make for a better shot. Up next I should be posting some tweak I've made on my ink effect R&D stuff, as well as some shaders. And hopefully soon a final animation/simulation for you to view. Please feel free to leave any comments, suggestion or critiques.
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