John Kunz

Adidas Color Slice Effect Part 2

Added 2022-09-27 08:45:52 +0000 UTC

Back with part 2 of this tutorial!

This time covering coloring, shading, rendering and lighting side of things, everything done in Solaris with KarmaXPU.

Karma and MaterialX seem to be pretty powerful with a bright future ahead of them. The standard surface is much better then any surface shader model previously implemented y SideFX in my opinion. It's based off of this https://autodesk.github.io/standard-surface/ and quite powerful in most circumstances.

You can read more about this in these areas of SideFX's documentation:

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/karma_xpu.html

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/materialx.html

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/vop/mtlxstandard_surface.html

Another lucrative aspect of Karma is that it's licences are included with Houdini, which is quite nice compared to 3rd party GPU options like Redshift and Octane which require monthly or annual payments. Hopefully Karma XPU will become more stable and feature complete over time but for now, it's definitely worth dipping your feet into!

The tutorial can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/7yecpBzj5OI

The reference gradient from the Nike campaign I discuss in the tutorial can be viewed here:

https://www.searchsystem.co/post/696168725844475904/plus-m%C3%BBrs-nike-air-max-plus-20th-anniversary

Scene files are included below as well.