stelvis stelvis

craiglhoffman
This is great stuff- why don't we see more of your work in the Houdini Demo Reels?

Was it just lit and rendered in Houdini/Mantra, or was the character rigging and animation (besides mo-cap, of course) done in Houdini also?

-Craig Hoffman
Microsoft Games
FX Lead

you'd have to ask sideFX the first question - we do send them it AFAIK

currently our animation pipe is pretty much 100% maya - we have proprietary pipeline stuff to go from maya to houdini but its not any different from what most people would do I guess - ie vertex cached geo and so on

the biggest issue with Houdini is finding people with experience (especially in scotland!) and for animation that becomes nigh on impossible

Ponge
I know that using the Raytracing render engine makes using delayed load geometry effectively useless (as it has to load all the geometry into memory in order to calculate rays). This might sound like a silly question but will this be an issue for Raytraced shadows as well? Is it better to use Depth map shadows when using delayed load IFD's?

note quite true

even if raytracing means mantra doesn't dump stuff from memory like it would doing pure rasterization, using DRA's for geometry still makes IFD generation go MUCH quicker (and take less file space) in general as you're not having to stuff your IFD full of all the geometry all the time

here typically animation is locked well before people are done tweaking lighting and shading so not having to regenerate geo in the IFD stream saves a heap of time

we also employ other tricks for this so for instance shader properties are always defined at object level = one shader per object, to avoid having to bake any param's into the geometry as well

for things where we do need to do bake some kind of shading related data down to the geo, our assets are set up so we can switch between DRA mode and normal ‘in scene’ mode easily

ie there are good reasons to use delayed read archives even without the memory benefits you normally get with micro poly rendering

I believe for instancing there are additional benefits, even for raytracing in that it can keep one copy of the geometry around but only if you don't do anything that might force mantra to dice it (sub'd's, displacements, etc)

Hi there

we occasionally use modo for rendering previews during asset builds if someone has gotten round to creating HDA's or shaders in Houdini yet but the final output is pretty much 100% mantra (via digital fusion)

we used to use Lightwave for rendering (I still have a soft spot) up until about 2005/06, then we tried going PRMan for a bit with the new plugin version, but the fact it piggybacked onto maya negated much of the advantage.. enter houdini and mantra - pretty much all of the advantages none of the disadvantages (and being frank that mainly meant the hideous costs for full blown PRman on the render farm)

if you ever fancy a job in scotland give us a shout :twisted: