Log into your account to keep track of your progress. You can work through the lessons without logging in but your progress will be lost when you refresh the page.
TOTAL DURATION: 7 h 41m 23s
This course guides you through creating a VFX shot from start to finish, including integrating CG elements into live-action footage. Picture yourself as an FX artist in a studio, and join us as we navigate every step – from interpreting the brief and strategizing your FX scene to crafting each element and seamlessly blending them into real footage.
Begin your journey by understanding the scope of our project. We'll review the shot brief and all the FX elements that you will be working on.
Acquaint yourself with the organization of our project assets. This understanding is crucial for navigating the course materials.
Overview of the Houdini scene and the assets loaded in it. Create your first LOP test of the helicopter geometry to make sure all the materials are linked correctly. Don’t forget to set the $JOB (File/Set Project) so that all the assets load correctly on your system.
Explore the RPG asset and test it in LOPs. Then move onto preparing the environment colliders that you will be using for all your future simulations.
Practice how to match the lighting of your 3D scene with the lighting in the plate using Background Plate LOP in Solaris.
After analyzing various references we will do an overview of all the steps you will take to fracture the helicopter. You will start with a custom glass fracture for the helicopter windows.
Prepare the top rotor of the helicopter for simulations. Practice geometry preparation, custom fracturing, glue and hard constraints. Adjust RBD Configure properties and test everything in an RBD Solver.
Prepare the rear rotor of the helicopter for simulations. Similar to the top rotor, practice geometry preparation, glue and hard constraints, adjust RBD Configure properties and test it in an RBD Solver.
Finish preparing the rest of the helicopter: wheels, small nuts and bolts, objects inside the cabin, and metal fuselage. Test metal tearing and bending using custom plasticity.
Assemble all the fractured pieces, apply the initial animation to the fractured helicopter. Test in LOPs that we didn’t break our UVs and that deformation motion blur is working as expected.
Set up all the constraints for the RBD sim. Use RBD configure to create the correct attributes that RBD Solver expects. Lastly, control when the helicopter is animated and when it is active in the simulation.
Create custom velocity forces and dive into the RBD Solver settings. After you are happy with your simulation, learn about caching optimization techniques. Prepare the cached helicopter to act as colliders for future particle and pyro simulations.
In case you are not happy with the previous results, learn how to use PDG to create dozens of variations of the helicopter RBD sim. Test the sim in LOPs for proper UVs and motion blur.
Set up the sourcing for the pyro explosion and create a custom velocity field to simulate extra wind from the helicopter rotors.
After you prepare all the static and dynamic colliders for the explosion, dive into the Pyro SOP solver. We will go through the most essential settings including pyro sourcing, disturbance, turbulence and the difference between Global and Local Substeps in the solver. Finish with Karma explosion shading and testing in LOPs.
Create sourcing for fire and smoke from helicopter debris using custom attributes, useful VEX tricks and a POP sim. Go through the process of setting up and running the pyro sim for the fire and smoke. Create custom shaders in Karma and LOPs.
All you need to know to create a helicopter downwash dust effect: from reference analysis and procedural sourcing to Pyro Solver settings and in-solver high res sim optimisations. Explore the new Houdini 20 Pyro Solver feature of volume density influencing gravity.
Create sourcing for dust from the helicopter debris pieces that fell on the ground using custom attributes, useful VEX tricks and a POP sim. Go through the process of setting up and running the pyro sim. Create custom shaders in Karma and LOPs. Explore the new Houdini 20 Pyro Solver feature of volume density influencing gravity.
Similar to the dust from the helicopter debris on the ground, create sourcing for the dust from the helicopter debris that hit the buildings. Use custom attributes, useful VEX tricks and a POP sim. Go through the process of setting up and running the pyro sim. Create custom shaders in Karma and LOPs. Explore the new Houdini 20 Pyro Solver feature of volume density influencing gravity.
Time to render everything using Karma XPU! Go through LOPs setups for several passes: helicopter RBD sim, explosion, cryptomattes, shadows.
Set up Nuke, inspect the Houdini render and arrange your Read nodes.
Assemble the shadow passes, process them to be used as masks, and color grade the plate.
Color correct each Pyro render and composite them all into the plate.
Color correct the helicopter and use the utility pass for selective grading.
Set up Nuke, inspect the Houdini render and arrange your Read nodes.
Use the supplied STMap to apply lens distortion to the CG renders.
Create and track a roto to improve the layering.
Replicate the plate’s film grade and apply it to all the CG elements.
Fix issues using tracking, warping and grading techniques.
Review of the final composite.
CREATED BY
COMMENTS
coolbreezeDW 9 months, 2 weeks ago |
I wish I could give this a glowing review the shot concept is great and both are very talented artists. I was excited to dive into this "tutorial" but found it was more just a tour of the Houdini script and everything was pre-built. Based on the description "This course guides you through creating a VFX shot from start to finish, including integrating CG elements into live-action footage. Picture yourself as an FX artist in a studio, and join us as we navigate every step – from interpreting the brief and strategizing your FX scene to crafting each element and seamlessly blending them into real footage." This is not what I was expecting to see. I'm a compositor already and know how to use nuke, but found that portion was done more like what I was expecting. I'm trying to learn more about Houdini, not take a tour of it. Did I learn a few things from this? yes I did, it would have been better to have at the very least a step-by-step creation walkthrough of the dust and explosion instead of Here's this node and this is what I did. The other major issue is that the Houdini script didn't work as shown, I had to copy all the nodes out and paste them into a blank Houdini file to get it to work. I found that by doing this not everything was working as it should making this very frustrating that what she was showing wasn't what I was seeing. I tried two different machines and different versions of Houdini 20 but she wasn't clear as to what version of 20 she was using. When I learn more about Houdini I might circle back to the script and try to make my own version. Again great idea just poorly executed.
Arvan 9 months, 1 week ago |
SideFX, A 20GB download is extremly unreasonable to expect users to download - not everyone in the world has unlimited data/bandwidth much less a stable enough connection to download a single 20GB volume at once.
Please revise the files and split out the actual .hip file(s) and geometry from the massive cache/texture/etc. data
Please log in to leave a comment.