Patrick's VFX Blog

One of my viewers informed me that a few seconds of my Maya Expressions part 06 - Noise video got to appear in one of their videos. I love videos from The Corridor Crew. They have excellent content that informs and entertains industry professionals and lay-people alike. It is an honour that they stumbled on my videos, and an honour to have my few seconds of fame on their show. :) If you are really interested, My tiny moment of fame happens 10 minutes 9 seconds into the show.

I've always wanted to do this! Advecting swirling colours in Houdini used to require quite a bit of preparation constructing the volumes, but not any more with the volumeRasterizeAttributes that can create volumes from mixed data types (float, vec3, etc).  This is a viewport flipbook, not rendered For some reason, I find myself watching the yellows and greens every time.

One of my students who widely crawls the Internet ( Shivam Upadhyay , that's you!) pointed me to this website:  https://blog.feedspot.com/vfx_blogs/ Written on Oct 17 2021, this article lists my blog as 44th of the top 60 websites to follow in 2021.  I am super honoured to be listed together with the top personalities online such as Allan McKay, VFX Soldier, cmiVFX, Andrew Kramer of Video Copilot, etc. This pleasant surprise serves to motivate me and to keep my passion alive. Thank you for reading my articles and following this blog for the years I've been writing.  Here's to many more years of writing, learning and sharing! Update 07 Nov 2021: The volatility of the ranking shocked me. According to that same page, my blog is now ranked 29th on the same page! It is a pleasant surprise, and I am dead certain it has nothing to do with my popularity or publicity skills. The ranking exceeds pages of wildly popular names like The Gnomon Workshop, Video Copilot and Houdini Video...

Houdini Ocean Spectrum on Toy from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . Watch this on YouTube too! Here's my latest test in Houdini. In this test, I manage to apply Houdini's Ocean Spectrum a non-planar shape. The ocean spectrum in Houdini allows the artist to define parameters that describe an open-ocean surface. With these settings, Houdini can generate a very natural-looking ocean surface without the expensive simulation time (this is much like how Houdini's Heightfield is implemented). Since this tool was meant for an open ocean surface, it mainly works with a flat grid by adding displacement to it. If we plug a non-planar object to evaluate this spectrum with the OceanEvaluate SOP, it results in a streaking projection downwards in the Y-axis. Also, the faces that face towards negative Y will get an inverted displacement pattern of that ocean spectrum. In this test, I derive a set-up that overcomes the planar nature of the projection and the negative pattern caused by the same pr...

  This is a Houdini implementation of my previous Maya Boxes Rolling Rig . In this set-up, I also switched in a Rubber Toy to see how it would look. The path of travel was created with a Solver SOP that advances the position with a noise animated over time. Another Solver SOP handles the rotation of the box/rubber-toy, and driven by the accumulated distance travelled.

Video is also on YouTube here . In this video, I talk about a basic feature working with Houdini: flags in network nodes. These are the display, render, template and template-shaded and lock flags. I also show how I use them in two working situations. The most note-worthy flag is the lock flag. This helps to freeze the evaluation of upstream nodes for faster evaluation of nodes downstream. A special shout-out to Kin Hoeng from Voodoo Visual (https://voodoo-visual.com) who contributed to the asset in the later demonstration.

Maya Boxes Rolling Rig from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . Here's my latest crazy experiment in 3D! The principles and techniques behind this deceptively simple-looking rig took years to click together for me. This is more so from the perspective of optimisation and simplicity of the implemented solution in my mind. The paths of the boxes are pre-animated via a path constraint. But I make sure the boxes are pivoting with their corners planted on the ground, that they are not sliding.  Students who have attended my rigging classes will understand the tedious process of manually rigging a "rolling cube" by unfolding it from corner pivots. The main technique used here is very different. It treats the box more like a rolling wheel than a pivoting box. I may create a tutorial for this in the coming months.