One of our bread and butter techniques when it comes to adding detail into our renderings is using layered materials where we blend between multiple shaders. In this brief video Mo introduces the basic technique.
2020-05-21 14:31:25 +0000 UTC View Post
This time Manuel talks about how to setup sub-polygon displacement in Redshift3D. After going through the steps necessary to make RS render Displacements we'll explore the different option the engine offers and discuss in-depth how the "Auto Bump Map" feature works.
Download project file: https://www.entagma.com/downloads/Rendering_101-pt_17_Displacement_RS.zip
Downlo...
2020-05-17 09:45:16 +0000 UTC View Post
This is Mo’s take on the three different techniques currently available in Redshift to create translucent materials.
2020-05-07 16:44:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Another one of those very (very!) frequent questions concerns shading volumes in general and in Redshift specifically.
Here's Mo's take on the underlying principles of volumetric look dev, how to pull it off in Redshift and the one feature Redshift's volume shader is currently missing.
EDIT: If you're shading your own sims, make sure there's no shop_materialpath attribute on you geo stream. It's created by the Pyro SOP solver by default and Redshift doesn't like it.
<... 2020-04-30 07:38:24 +0000 UTC View Post
As you might be able to guess from this video, Mo isn't the biggest fan of Photon Mapping, but in order to get caustics in Redshift, he has to work through it.
2020-04-16 12:34:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Note: I added a second .hip file where I slightly increased the liquid's roughness. This brightens up the liquid a bit due to the fact that we're now getting more rays from the backlight refracted into the camera.
As our latest poll on render engines clearly showed a preference for Redshift with Mantra coming in second place, we're gonna be focusing on rendering glass in Redshift today.
Glass can be a tricky one especially if you're not used to dealing with it in a studio environm...
2020-04-09 08:40:12 +0000 UTC View PostHeyhey,
as the basics phase of rendering 101 is coming to a close, I'd like to continue with covering more intricate topics. However doing so for six(!) engines in parallel is slowing down this course too much.
I'd rather focus on a few select engines. Help me decide which ones to keep and which engines can go.
So here's the question:
Which engine would you like to keep covered in Rendering 101?
(Please just pick one.)
2020-03-26 10:16:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on our initial Mantra setup we adapt our scene to be rendered in V-Ray.
2020-03-26 09:45:56 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on our initial Mantra setup we adapt our scene to be rendered in Arnold.
2020-03-19 07:51:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on our initial Mantra setup we adapt our scene to be rendered in RenderMan.
2020-03-12 08:56:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on our initial Mantra setup we adapt our scene to be rendered in Octane.
2020-03-05 10:58:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on our initial Mantra setup we adapt our scene to be rendered in Redshift.
2020-03-02 07:40:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Let's get finally started and render something in Houdini. To make this an easy start we're gonna be using a very simple scene and set up a three point light setup in Mantra.
In this video we're gonna set up a basic scene for rendering a single object in Mantra.
2020-02-27 17:12:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Although at this points it's somewhat of a clichée, three point lighting has long been a go-to setup for quickly setting up a reliable light configuration, so let's talk about it once and then quickly forget about it.
In this video, Mo talks & walks you through the basics of building a three point light setup.
2020-02-27 17:05:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Rigging in Houdini is a misterious topic. Even simple rigging like this. Whenever you want to move one object along a curve you're probably using CHOPs based constraints on the scene level. But what if you want to do this on geo level? In this tutorial Manuel shows you how to rig objects to move along a curve with VEX. We'll do position and orientation, too. This setup can be turned into a digital asset as it covers a basic functionality used often.
2020-02-14 16:14:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Admittedly this took longer than anticipated. One failed day in the studio ended with a photo subject being shattered in pieces and me reshooting four hours of studio work... Well at least I managed to get this intro to what we're about to do out of it.
In this video Mo gives you a quick intro of why we light and which pieces of gear we'll be using in our real world excursion into photographic lighting.
2020-01-30 11:58:40 +0000 UTC View Post
This time we'll create an often used effect, a wet road with rain pouring down. While particles are the meat of the effect it really starts to shine by using a wetmap for shading. After coming up with a particle setup we'll explore a cool way to create a wetmap from the particles using a 2D Houdini volume and COPs and thus avoiding shading artifacts, normally introduced by poor geometric resolution. A future part of the particle series will deal with shading the scene in Redshift.
Sound...
2020-01-16 13:22:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Taking pictures in real life involves dealing with light sources. Creating synthetic images involves creating light sources in our render engines.
In this video Mo rambles on about how real life lighting works vs. which light sources are available to us in a render engine.
2020-01-02 10:40:57 +0000 UTC View Post
When taking pictures, we're usually using some sort of camera, no matter if it's in your cell phone, if it's a nice DSLR or that old school Polaroid camera you hipsters keep showing off with.
When we're creating computer generated images, we need a camera too. And usually the cameras we encounter in our 3D tools are based on what we use(d) in the real world.
Which means that most camera models we encounter in CG are based on old school analog film cameras. This Video will give you...
2019-12-19 07:53:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Bright petrol green plastic, warm shiny copper, clear glass, waxy jade - materials define how objects in a scene appear. But how do we model this plethora of appearances? Let's talk BxDFs, Fresnel and microfacets!
Everything Has Fresnel on Filmicworlds:
http://filmicworlds.com/blog/everything-has-fresnel/
Thx to Mike from 2019-12-05 08:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Before we dive head first into our first renderings, I think it's cool to get an idea of how a computer actually calculates how light propagates through a scene and how it computes an image.
This video goes over the theoretical background of what a raytracer and a pathtracer do in order to generate images. We'll be talking camera rays, bounces and monte carlo methods.
2019-11-21 09:02:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Hooray! Mo finally convinced himself to start a new course. Rendering 101 it is!
In this video Mo rambles on about where he likes to take this course: Communicating a general understanding of render engines and photographic techniques to be able to create photoreal, aesthetically pleasing images in any production render engine.
For that it'd be neat to know which particular engines you'd be interested in. Let us know in the comments!
2019-11-21 09:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Volumes are versatile and can be used for some nice effects. So I got excited when I found the sliced data of a very high resolution MRI scan online. That can be turned into a VDB I thought and sat down to come up with a simple setup that imports the data. The .hip relies on standard nodes with a lille Hscript to do the job. Although the SOP loop I use is a little slow, it's not too bad as it only has to run once.
Dataset:
This one took us ages. Literally I had a houseplant grow big and die in the process of figuring out how to redesign our website. It's done finally and we encourage you to try it out and (hopefully don't) find bugs. It is finally online:
www.entagma.com
The website is now a place for both free and premium (Patreon) content.
we've tried to address most of the issues with Patreon you guys brought to our attention:
- You can sort Premium content by courses (AHTY...
2019-11-05 07:15:56 +0000 UTC View Post
What's going on guys? Why the recent interest in the Volumes Course? (Comments, plz!)
Anyway, happy you're digging it. But apparently there is some confusion about updates/changes since Houdini 17. The most prominent and maybe the only changes relevant to the course are the volume visualisation SOP and the smoke/pyro sourcing workflow.
Which is what we'll go over in this video.
2019-10-24 07:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
EDIT: Added file(s) for Houdini 18.5
How do you trigger a specific behaviour in Vellum using another attribute?
In this tutorial we'll have a look at two ways of triggering the inflation of specific areas in a softbody simulation using a bit of VEX and the falloff nodes from MOPs.
You can download MOPs for free here: https://www.motionoperators.com/
Inigo Quilez' distance functions: &...
2019-10-17 07:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
I often get the question how to move simulated particles with an animated mesh. This video shows one technique to achieve this. We'll simulate particles travelling on the surface of a torus and then post move these using the parametric coordinates of the closest location on the torus. A second request that hits our inbox frequently is Mantra rendering. So this time I'll show you the very basics of getting spherical particles rendered in Mantra.
2019-09-26 06:29:27 +0000 UTC View Post
After last week's grain softbodies, let's use that technique to have some fun and build a quick and easy setup that chops up an object into soft and squishy pieces.
As you can see by my preview rendering and hear by the sound, I'm still on the road. But it won't be long and I'm back at a regular sized workstation and won't have to render on a laptop :)
When discussing simulation techniques with colleagues recently, Martin Salfity wondered how I'd go about setting up what he'd done here using purely old-school grains: https://martinsalfity.com/Hardcore-Squidgy
Turned out I needed a few attempts to come up with a straightforward and decently fast setup. But after a bit of trial an error here it is: Softbodies using vellum grains. 2019-09-12 09:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Still on the road, still working from a laptop. Turns out that this setup isn't really the most efficient thing to do without a beefy workstation but hey - let's just take the challenge!
In this tutorial we're implementing a hacked together version of a structural optimisation algorithm inspired by a technique called ESO. This is one of the seminal optimisation techniques in computerized strucutal engineering that's been around since the early 90s.
2019-09-05 08:15:46 +0000 UTC View Post