I have to make some very important decisions regarding the technique I will use for 1 min animation I have to make in my school (it is La Poudriere, animation school in France). 25th of January is a deadline for presenting projects for approval, and till then I have to finish/polish my script (the theme, by the way, is the whole world is upside-down), show sketches for characters, props…, and explain the technique I plan to use.
And this is what I was thinking about. Those two links are to illustrate my idea, they are two Aardman commercials for Robinson Milk that were my initial inspiration:
1st [djordje.petrovic.googlepages.com] 3mb, quickTime
2nd [djordje.petrovic.googlepages.com]7mb, quickTime
I contacted Aardman and the director of those commercials Scott Playdell-Pearce to ask if they can help me a bit with my research and the answer I got was very helpful in one way, and very <_< in other. As I thought they used combination of fluids and particles in Maya with a LOT of scripting. Basic work flow was to use rendered frames to drive fluid simulation in 2d fluid container, mix with particles, forces… and with a lot of compositing in the end. I did few tests to see how things will work for me, and first problem I had/and still have is my lack of knowledge of mel…
So, since I learn for some time bit by bit to work in houdini, I thought to ask you people do you have some ideas if this kind of effect would be possible to achieve in houdini, and how…. Because if it is, and if you can help me by guiding me through the process I would prefer spending my brain powers on houdini then on maya scripting…
One of the first problems I stumble upon is efficient way of loading image sequence into the fluid container. The script I found on net (written by Duncan Brinsmead) has some strange behavior of not loading all the images sometimes, and sometimes unloading them when scrubbing the time line… so…
as I said I'd have to re-write parts of it, and in general to mess to much with mel… and I simply don't know how to do it…
These are some tests I made yesterday… nothing special, but for me enough interesting for the beginning. I did a small animation and rendered it in black and white so I can use it as a density map.
I'll stop here with hope that this will be interesting enough for you to participate.
Thanks in advance
Djordje
p.s. I posted the same topic on odForce…
(disclaimer note: I uploaded them to my googlepages just because it could be a bit more time consuming to find them on Aardman site, and since this is purely for educational purpose I hope this won't be a violation of copy rights in any way. However originals can be found here: Aardman Animations [aardman.com] among mr. Scott Playdell-Pearce's works. All credits goes to Aardman, and two links to my googlepages must not be re-posted or used in any way than the one I described in my post.