Finally we can do the advanced creature animation, I chose a cat model to do the animation. There are some reference video below:

I think it’s much more harder than the human animation, it has four legs and a lot of controller on its muscle. The important thing is the cat and human’s body structure and movement are completely, so we can only watch their law of motion to learn instead of use our body to feel the motion, so that will be much more harder to the people who first learn the creature animation.

After watching the video I kinda figure it out how the cat walking, left front leg–right hind leg–right front leg–left hind leg, then repeat.

Of course there are many muscles move together while the legs are moving. There are lots of controllers rig the muscles, I need to watch many reference videos to understand its movement.

Choose the characters and set the pose. Both characters need to have face rigging.

Blocking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdn0HZQcJzw

In this performance animation project, we need to choose three audios from film and animation, and pick one of them to do the acting and record ourselves.

The three audios I chose are form some Hongkong movies. My favorite one is a clip from the movie call As Tears Go by.

From 3:40 to 4:00:

旺角卡門-烏蠅與Tony竹館開片片段(720P高清繁體字幕版) – 張學友 食屎啦你 – YouTube

Basically the white shirt guy talks in this clip is just swearing and sneering the guy on the ground. It’s the famous scene in this movie, also it is one of the funniest scenes in Hongkong movie history. Because the face expression is brilliant and the way he talks is so funny, it’s a challenge to imitate his acting.

I choose a knife as my weapon, sit on the chair do the acting. Then I knee on the floor to act the other guy. Finally I set the camera far from the chair, showing the character leaving the scene.

Update:

In the first recording I focused too much on the face expression but ignored the body movement. Therefore I do the second acting, just to fix some body and camera movement.

The second take video:

The role of lighting TD in VFXResponsibilities:

●Assemble all the CG Assets in the shot from the upstream departments

●Design and implement lighting setup in shot to meet supervisor’s art direction

●Create production quality CGI with optimal render settings in respect to resources available

●Provide compositing team with the CG render elements required to deliver the shot

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Skill requirements:

1.Understanding real-world/ studio lighting and photography

2.Knowledge in Physically-Based Rendering

3.Problem-solving ( from the Pipeline point of view )

4.Scripting ability ( For example: Python )

Understanding real-world lighting and photography :

Help the artist to understand the motivation of the lighting design on-set and analyze the lighting methodically in order to replicate the look in CG.

1.1.Three-Point Lighting

1.2.Lighting Ratio

1.3.Quality of Light Source

1.4.Color Temperature

1.5.Creative Setup

Identifying those techniques from the plate / reference and re-create the CG lighting:

1.1.Three-Point Lighting —————> Position and the direction of different light sources

1.2.High-key and Low-key Lighting —> The contrast ratio of the Key and Fill on the subject.

1.3.Hard and Soft Lighting ————–> Transition from the Light area to the Shadow area

1.4.Colour Temperature —————–> Define the time and space of shot is taking place in the story

1.5.Creative Lighting ———————> Adding complexity to the lighting of the image

Voronoi泰森多边形法

key nodes: pointfromvolume, vdbfrompolygons,

key nodes: rbdmaterialfracture,

Simulation:

key nodes: rigibodysolver(rbdsolver+bulletrbdsolver), groundplane, assemble,

key nodes: constraintnetwork, glue constraint relationship

Vex and VOP:

DOP particle system:

dop net work and pop network are the same things.

pop object is create an object inside the dynamic, it’s goinng to be a container for the particles.

pop source

pop solve

key nodes for this week:

timeshift, scatter, pack, unpack, popwind, popforce, popdrag, gravity, pointvelocity, copytopoint, bind, bindexport, fit, ramp parameter

First day learning Houdini.

Note:

SOPs = Surface OPerators or geometry nodes that are inside an object folder. These are used to construct and modify geometry. Any kind of geometry from polygons to volumes.

DOPs = Dynamic OPerators or simulation/solver nodes that are used to construct simulations. Simulations read in geometry from SOPs and passes this data in to the DOP solvers.

SHOP = SHading Operators are materials that represent a shader to apply to geometry. Some are hard coded with vex and others are folders that you can dive in to and modify the VOPs inside.

VOPs = Vector OPerators inside VOP network nodes are used for everything from building shaders to modifying geometry, volumes, pixels, and more.

VEX = Vector Expression Language. The code language used to write shaders. VOPs are wrappers around VEX code snippets.

CVEX = Context agnostic Vector Expression Language. This has replaced all the VEX specific contexts throughout Houdini. It is a generalized language that uses the same environment and functions anywhere inside Houdini.

COPs = Composite OPerators in composite type folders. Used in image compositing operations.

ROPs = Render OPerators in side ROP Output directories which are used to create render output dependency graphs for automating output of any type of data and for triggering external processes like rendering. Commonly used to generate sequences of geometry, simulation data and trigger Render tasks that generates sequences of images to disk.

CHOPs = CHannel OPerators used to create and modify any type of raw channel data from motion to audio and everything in between. Most users safely ignore the CHOP context, and so can you, for now. Put it on the “get to it later” list when learning Houdini. But definitely keep it on the list

modeling in procedural way: