Mark Learnification

Hi all, hope it's super sunny where you are! I'm starting a new jewelery design rendering project. Till now I've been focused on modeling and animation, so I need to shed some light on caustics and Gi. Could any of you good Houdini folks recommend good caustics/jewelery rendering tutorials compatible with H16.5, preferably videos? Thank you kindly.

Awesome! will this be available as an .hda at some point? Looks very good.

I tried to recreate the Houdini curvature tutorial in ‘Mat’ mode and it looks hopeful - will keep extending the functionality, hopefully creating a uber-curvature shader for gamedev/lookdev.

Colours and worn edge effect are just a good starting point for refinement, although I like the cartoony/graphic look. Dr Strange mesh is my own concept sculpt, Eistein is from http://threedscans.com/ [threedscans.com] Mesh topology changes the effect of the shader, which can be potentially used to ones advantage.

Eistein's mesh comes as .stl format and the normals were flipped - so the Curvature+ClrRamp was being applied in reverse, on the concave shapes:used Reverse SOP to solve that.

Using layered shader means I can later go and adjust the individual worn edge layer effects.

Also discovered the measure curvature SOP from game dev tools, but not yet sure how to use/extract the data for further proceduralism in sop/vop. Can't find a ‘bind’ video tutorial, from which I learn best.