Pushing Through

Well, welcome to the apocalypse. We're witnessing history, and it's quite a time to have a blog dedicated to something completely unrelated. But like everyone else in the world I do want to address the whole COVID-19 topic. Denver is currently in lockdown until at least 4/11/20, campus closed just over two weeks ago now, and the historic Larimer Square block on which I worked part time has completely shut down, some restaurants temporarily, other shops and restaurants permanently. I no longer have a paid job, and remote accessing CU Denver's VPN has proven relatively inconsistent, partially because my home setup of PC and WiFi alike are lackluster - the PC's, VR equipment, licenses and even monitor setups that I pay so much tuition for are now gone or incredibly difficult to access. Like everyone around me, I'm in some economically and educationally challenging times. I understand that it will also show as people decide to keep pushing or give up as this constantly shifting situations presents massive challenges to motivation and productivity. Some will shine, some will fall, and I am anxious to see which I will turn out to be. I have confidence in my group members and am grateful that we've figured out methods of continuing to be social and productive, as both friends and team members. We got this. Things are rough right now but I am remaining as optimistic as possible.

So, now to the short. Because of all of the above, my productivity did drop and therefore I don't have as much to show but I do have a couple of things. I've been pulled away from particle and Pyro FX in Houdini as our group has asked for more focus on hair and leaf (yes, leaves - I'll explain why) simulations. So first off, I solved the issue we saw in my previous post - turns out my hair was being put on a static mesh, and so the hair was not following the animation. It clips out of existence when the animated mess passes through the points of the static mesh. So, after some node network changes, I was able to push out a full render rather than a Flipbook of our dear Roberto with electric blue hair.

Doesn't give us the best look, but it shows that the hair texture works, the hair and clumps are simulating without any strange collisions, and the physics follow the animation quite well. The group was happy, and asked me to continue R&D for making it dirtier, having clumps and debris, greasier spots in the hair, etc. Essentially, making it look less smooth and shiny. I feel like part of that is texture work, but already have ideas and R&D going for making those things happen.

Another request from the group was a collisions test. They wanted to make sure characters' hair could interact with other objects in the scene without too many issues. What you're about to see is not pretty, but it was the best I could do at the time as this was the midst of COVID-19 chaos.

So the pom-pom and the grid ball... I made sure to generate clumps and frizz and other noise to the hair to make sure interactions worked with hair that was more than the basic shiny hair gen. As you can see in the first video is that even seeing through the ball you don't see any hairs coming through it. The collision was relatively simple to set up and even with pretty low settings (due to my PC), they worked! So it's at least good proof of concept, and enough to start with and prove capacity to my group.

Finally, I have a human hairstyle. I hesitate to post this video, but I suppose we're here to see the good bad And ugly so here goes...

This is my bro dude hair style. We wanted our main human character to have rather curly crazy hair that goes up on top and maintains shape, and so while I had to absolutely crank the simulation passes down to less than 1/5 their usual capacity to get 24 frames on my PC, even with such low settings I got this bounce to prove that the hair would maintain shape. I do not know if the overall Jello feel is because of my low settings, though I assume it is. I also quickly learned that while I'm not too shabby at setting up the node networks and troubleshooting, I'm no hair stylist. So I figured out a setup where I could only make a couple of nodes editable and have someone else do the groom that I could then simulate and network out. Basically I make the tool and let someone else make the hair pretty.

So the groom has begun. The hair maintains its shape and the groom is relatively easy to change and brush and shape for someone that I were to just hand the file to. The simulation is going to be a challenge to set up, and collisions with this new network (shown in the bottom right to demonstrate its current level of complexity) will be potentially challenging, but it certainly isn't anything I feel I can't handle.

In other news, our group has decided to have our yeti character have leaves instead of fur - he is now a bush man. I am still trying to fight for hair, but in the meantime I'm going to try and help R&D making a good looking leaf simulation as proof of concept. I'm currently thinking I can use Houdini's vellum solver and perhaps instance leaf geometry rather than the hair splines that hair gen. automatically makes. TBD.

Meanwhile, the rest of the group has been making huge strides on script development, character design (we're finally reaching an end point for our 'smart' bat monster, which is a relief as it's proven to be the most challenging), and color palettes. I've added all of their names and websites, as well as a link to our most recent animatic on the right of these blog posts - please go check them out, as they have made so much more!

Here's hoping my slope of motivation stays on the rise despite the practically hourly news updates, and that we all get through this crisis as ideally as possible.

Until next time!