I often find that Houdini wants to cook at inconvenient times. To stop this you can enter Manual Mode which is located in the bottom right of the UI. To make toggling between Manual and Auto mode easier and quick it can be scripted and dedicated a hotkey. Googling brought up this feed http://www.vfxoverflow.com/questions/toggle-update-mode-in-houdini which
Sky Q picked up a couple of Silver Awards for VFX and Animation at the LIAs this week. Gold went to the fantastic work created by the guys and girls at The Mill, London for ‘SSE Pier’. http://www.themill.com/millchannel/945/the-mill-wins-10-lias-including-post-production-company-of-the-year-2016
The Mill has, this week, released a blog post interviewing Dan and Francois (Creative Directors and 2D/3D Leads) on the ‘Sky Q’ job. With a nice ‘Making Of’ video to boot. The Mill’s blog post, with interviews, can be found here: http://www.themill.com/millchannel/663/crafting-cg-fluid-viewing-for-sky-q
Sky have also uploaded a little Making Of for Sky Q to give a sense of what was involved in this project. The video shows some of the slow-mo macro fluids we recorded for reference. It was a delight watching those videos over and over and over again. Fluids at macro-level is some seriously cool
So, here it is. The first in a campaign for Sky for their new “Sky Q” service. This job was mammoth, I spent 6 months working on this bad-boy, my first foray into the crazy world of FLIP fluids in Houdini. Things of note: gas surface tension, viscosity and particle separation are very important and
Lipton “A Revolution in Tea” has been nominated for “Outstanding Effects Simulations in an Episode, Commercial, or Real-Time Project” https://www.visualeffectssociety.com/14th-annual-ves-awards-nominees Well done to Tom and Christos who lead and designed these beastly sims.
The Mill have posted a fantastic “Making Of” showing the huge amount of work that went in to making “A Revolution in Tea” for Lipton, from the initial practical FX RnD, to the rotomation, sims and seamless compositing. Full descriptions and explanations can be found here: http://www.themill.com/millchannel/617/behind-the-scenes-of-lipton-‘the-revolution-in-tea’ Here’s the “Making Of” Behind the Scenes: Lipton
Having begun the switch to Houdini, I’ve been learning how to implement my Python knowledge into Houdini. My first tool is an incremental saver (something I find hugely important), which accounts for files that already exist and warns if a naming convention is not adhered to. This .zip contains the .py script, the code for
This was my first job working with Houdini, creating smoke and dust for this commercial for Lipton. Using setups from my Leads we used Houdini’s smoke solvers and advected particles to create the powdery, inky effects seen in the red and yellow shots. Here’s a “Making Of..” from Lipton, too.
My Lead on this job, Alex, has been interviewed by Solid Angle about our use of their Arnold renderer on this ad. Find it here: https://www.solidangle.com/news/sse-maya/
