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What are the houdini VFX guy's responsabilities day to day? I imagine this changes from project to project but big general guidelines.
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Oct 30, 2014 20:29
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Odddzy posted:What are the houdini VFX guy's responsabilities day to day? I imagine this changes from project to project but big general guidelines. Well, you can do a lot with Houdini aside from the simulation / FX work it's best known for, so it would depend first on where that artist is in the pipeline... lighting, rigging, modeling, animation, etc. If you're asking specifically about an average FX TD, a big part of the job would be making custom tools (Digital Assets in Houdini lingo) within Houdini for junior artists to use based on whatever the demands of the specific production are. More than likely some scripting / pipeline development tasks as would be part of the job as well.
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Oct 30, 2014 23:11
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 Polycount Thread
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Oct 31, 2014 09:04
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Fixed my biped problem, it was a patch for Max 2015 
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Oct 31, 2014 12:09
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 First test bake this morning. Polycount Thread
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Oct 31, 2014 12:18
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Nice looking pretty good. You might want to make some of your chamfers a bit wider though, they're looking a bit pinched.
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Oct 31, 2014 12:26
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concerned mom posted:Nice looking pretty good. You might want to make some of your chamfers a bit wider though, they're looking a bit pinched. I don't quite understand what you mean, could you specify what parts you're referring to?
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Oct 31, 2014 12:57
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Here's something I've been working on for a class assignment. We're meant to take a character/creature from concept to fully rigged and somewhat animated in UE4. Working on the textures now, haven't gotten to do much PBR stuff before so it's been pretty fun, our limits were a set of 4k textures and 30k tris, which I tried to make as much use of as I could. The thing's meant to be snake-like when animated hence the you know, tail. Direct link
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Oct 31, 2014 17:29
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SebastianK posted:Here's something I've been working on for a class assignment. We're meant to take a character/creature from concept to fully rigged and somewhat animated in UE4. Working on the textures now, haven't gotten to do much PBR stuff before so it's been pretty fun, our limits were a set of 4k textures and 30k tris, which I tried to make as much use of as I could. The thing's meant to be snake-like when animated hence the you know, tail. Lookin' really good, but overall I think your color choices are TOO brown. Meaning that a lot of the model detail and structure gets lost in a sea of earth tones. Not that you'd need to make anything primary, but I'd vary up the tones on certain parts to highlight features.
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Oct 31, 2014 17:33
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That's really cool SebastianK. I'd like to see it animated, or at least in a natural pose.
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Oct 31, 2014 18:14
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SebastianK posted:Here's something I've been working on for a class assignment. We're meant to take a character/creature from concept to fully rigged and somewhat animated in UE4. Working on the textures now, haven't gotten to do much PBR stuff before so it's been pretty fun, our limits were a set of 4k textures and 30k tris, which I tried to make as much use of as I could. The thing's meant to be snake-like when animated hence the you know, tail. I like the deus ex thing you have going on with the black back muscles, and the shoulder pads/arm port. But why does the tip of his tail end in a Mass Effect gun?
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Oct 31, 2014 19:01
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One other thing is that the face profile feels awkwardly flat. It may work animated, I'm not sure...but in profile it gets really lost.
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Oct 31, 2014 21:29
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Cyne posted:Well, you can do a lot with Houdini aside from the simulation / FX work it's best known for, so it would depend first on where that artist is in the pipeline... lighting, rigging, modeling, animation, etc. If you're asking specifically about an average FX TD, a big part of the job would be making custom tools (Digital Assets in Houdini lingo) within Houdini for junior artists to use based on whatever the demands of the specific production are. More than likely some scripting / pipeline development tasks as would be part of the job as well. but what kind of thing would a junior be asked to do as an example? I ask because I kind of consider myself a generalist and like the technical side of things in the industry but don't know much about scripting. I understand simple expressions and am interested in learning houdini and lower level approaches to 3D. Unfortunately, I have a hard time understanding what kind of custom tools would be considered useful and could demonstrate ability and value in junior applicants.
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Nov 1, 2014 09:25
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A friend of mine from Sheridan got hired right out of school at MPC doing Houdini stuff, so if you're looking for what level to aim towards for a junior position his demo reel might be a good indication: http://www.cgstudentawards.com/jreviews/videos?m=KlLTL Ccs fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Nov 1, 2014 |
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Nov 1, 2014 15:22
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Ccs posted:A friend of mine from Sheridan got hired right out of school at MPC doing Houdini stuff, so if you're looking for what level to aim towards for a junior position his demo reel might be a good indication: Was that his student reel or post hire reel?
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Nov 1, 2014 18:40
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Student reel. He's on his first MPC project right now so none of that stuff can be released on a demo reel yet.
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Nov 2, 2014 04:56
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Ccs posted:Student reel. He's on his first MPC project right now so none of that stuff can be released on a demo reel yet. Ah well that's a great student reel. No wonder he got hired right away!
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Nov 2, 2014 15:58
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Yeah, he was definitely the best in the program last year. Had a knack for Houdini and the logic behind simulations that took others months to grasp.
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Nov 3, 2014 04:22
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Gonna try Photogrammetry for a project this week. Using AgiSoft like most of you. It's my first time using it, so any pointers? Luckily it's for a small-ish hunting product (turkey decoy) and will be in a green screen soundstage so all of the variables are controllable.
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Nov 3, 2014 18:58
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take 50+ shots. (might be a bit much for a turkey decoy, but you get the point) Take them all in raw, and use camera raw or lightroom to lift the shadows/pull down highlights to make them much flatter (also remove any chromatic abberation/vignetting with the lens profiles) and save them all as .tiffs. Recently we tried doing some trees taking slightly fewer photos - 30, instead of 50, and the results were loving awful and it basically didnt work at all. the more the better seems to be a solid rule. cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Nov 3, 2014 |
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Nov 3, 2014 22:26
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cubicle gangster posted:take 50+ shots. (might be a bit much for a turkey decoy, but you get the point) Take them all in raw, and use camera raw or lightroom to lift the shadows/pull down highlights to make them much flatter (also remove any chromatic abberation/vignetting with the lens profiles) and save them all as .tiffs. Use the Nikon D5300 if you can. That seems to get the best results of all. Also - use a low ISO and shoot in a spiral. If not in a spiral, then shoot low, medium and high angles in consecutive circles. Sparta (point cloud sculpting project) looks interesting. This vimeo video shows how Sparta sculpts point clouds using proxies. https://vimeo.com/109688628 Here is what a poor scan looks like. Not enough pics, and wrong type of camera. 
sigma 6 fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Nov 4, 2014 |
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Nov 3, 2014 23:55
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Thanks for the tips! We'll be shooting on a 5D MKIII. (Or my D600, but probably the 5D). edit: Also later this month I'm going to try this with an entire school bus.
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Nov 4, 2014 00:24
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BonoMan posted:Thanks for the tips! Oh my gahhhh I just dumped 181 shots into it. Let's see how it turns out! Also of note, I opened all 181 RAW files in photoshop at the same time (by accident) and photoshop ran fine. drat.
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Nov 5, 2014 21:13
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 Started texturing. Polycount Thread
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Nov 5, 2014 23:27
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I'd ease off the weathering on the bottom of the slide, since it isn't an exposed edge.
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Nov 6, 2014 00:23
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So speaking of MPC, this article came out. The comments section is what to look out for. Apparently conditions suck there, despite the CEO saying otherwise. Oh VFX and animation industry... http://variety.com/2014/film/news/moving-picture-co-finds-valuing-artists-is-the-best-effect-1201346561/
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Nov 7, 2014 01:39
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Ccs posted:So speaking of MPC, this article came out. The comments section is what to look out for. Apparently conditions suck there, despite the CEO saying otherwise. commenter on article posted:“Moving Picture Co. Finds Valuing Artists is the Best Effect” Haha, ouch.
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Nov 7, 2014 02:56
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Ccs posted:So speaking of MPC, this article came out. The comments section is what to look out for. Apparently conditions suck there, despite the CEO saying otherwise. MPC is a poo poo studio. They are pretty much a student mill where most of their workforce in Vancouver are students getting paid $10/hr to slave on movies. edit: holy poo poo the comments are gold. 
keyframe fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Nov 7, 2014 |
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Nov 7, 2014 07:25
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I am working on a human character for university. I've done a lot of animals but not so many humans.  Doing the ears now, but human ears really can gently caress right off. (I'll get the hang of them!)
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Nov 7, 2014 23:10
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The good thing about ears is that people generally don't pay much attention to them when "reading" a face, so you can make them close enough and it'll work. Also you can make one ear and use it on every human model.
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Nov 8, 2014 02:07
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lol if you dont just put a white texture on dogpoo.fpx and call it an ear
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Nov 8, 2014 10:12
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 Pretty close to calling it finished at this point.
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Nov 8, 2014 13:43
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keyframe posted:MPC is a poo poo studio. They are pretty much a student mill where most of their workforce in Vancouver are students getting paid $10/hr to slave on movies. Almost sounds like a good way to pick up skills, considering how difficult it is to break into the industry. Would you recommend people just keep working on their demo reel on their own until they're good enough to work at a better studio? Cause at least at MPC you can gain some production experience while getting at least a little pay. Sucks for people who stay there for more than a year and have nervous breakdowns though. Sounds horrible.
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Nov 9, 2014 01:48
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 Here is another attempt at scanning a head. It was only 38 photos in a classroom environment but at least this time I was using a much better camera: Canon E5 Mk 3. Things I have learned from this: Zremesher is absolutely not appropriate for a final animatable mesh but isn't bad if you want topology to sculpt which isn't scan data -> dynamesh. Mosaic texture creation definitely gives better results than average texture creation. Also - high or medium dense cloud will often produce better results than the highest dense cloud will.
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Nov 9, 2014 02:37
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sigma 6 posted:
To get a final animatable mesh you will most certainly have to retopo the model by hand. Which is okay because generally it's better and lets you get loops in the right places, and ends up way lower poly usually (which you can then up the res and bake some more highres detail onto again).
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Nov 9, 2014 03:06
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If you place the loops using the zremesh curves tool you can get close to it though. And in a rush job where there's a ton of stuff with simple animations, it'll do. Not for hero animations though.
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Nov 9, 2014 03:25
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Ccs posted:Almost sounds like a good way to pick up skills, considering how difficult it is to break into the industry. Would you recommend people just keep working on their demo reel on their own until they're good enough to work at a better studio? Cause at least at MPC you can gain some production experience while getting at least a little pay. After grad school I went to a lab that had a very good reputation, and ended up in the 80+ hour, 7-day work week grind with horrible pressures. All chasing the carrot that it would make it easier to get into science. I don't know about how hard it is to get your start in CG fields, but in general it's a bad idea for a couple reasons, which I know from firsthand experience. First, the toll on your health is real. You may think you can do it while you're young, and the younger you are the easier it will be, but it's still there. I never had time (and sometimes insurance) to go to the doctor or dentist; my diet turned to poo poo because after doing 12-14 hours in the lab there either wasn't enough time or I was too tired to cook for myself; I never had time to exercise. That poo poo adds up, and the habits you form over working like that for years are hard to break; I'm still not getting the exercise I need two years out. Second, it devalues the labor pool overall. Despite the lab's international reputation, postdocs started at lower than NIH standard payscale. The rationale was that it was in a lower-cost-of-living part of the country. That's horseshit, they were just shaving off because they could get away with it, since their reputation was good enough that people would take a pay cut to work there. They got away with a bunch of terrible poo poo regarding their employees simply because people wanted to get into the industry and they were a ticket to that. I once had to take van training so I could shuttle a group of faculty candidates from their hotel to my boss's house. Looking back there was a lot of poo poo I should have said "no" to, but if you do, there's someone else that's willing to take your spot. It's a predatory way to deal with people but that's sort of the result of the race-to-the-bottom nature of a capitalist system that doesn't allow for labor to organize. Unless you can get into a union to protect yourself, the only other option is to simply not feed the machine. You may be new and inexperienced, but you still have a minimum worth. Nobody should be forced (or coerced) to work until 11 pm at night, or on weekends. I would highly recommend finding some other way to build experience than subjecting yourself to one of those kind of sweatshop experiences. In my last couple months in that lab, I literally was hoping to get hit by a car; because either way, if I was dead or in the hospital, I would have been free. That is a truly hosed up way to do any kind of business.
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Nov 9, 2014 03:57
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True. I guess my experience has been colored by friends of mine who worked in India and China and spent every night sleeping under their desks. That kind of lifestyle is considered totally normal there, just because there are so many people and not really any history of labor laws. Even now that some of them work in Vancouver, they still have to stay on nights and weekends a lot because the studios they work at are directly competing with their former studios overseas. And also by reading about the anime industry where Osamu Tezuka would expect many of his animators to literally go a week without sleep. That was right after WWII and I guess working at an animation company was easily better than the other poo poo people were going through. I sort of got the idea that to be a real animation/film person you need to sacrifice nights and weekends. Except that is crazy, from a western perspective. Plus the millennial generation is considered lazy and entitled by older people, so there's sort of an incentive to want to prove oneself and show we can do intense work. Though honestly, my job is easy compared to production coordinators who work way way longer hours. I might go home at 8 or 9, but they'll be there until midnight at least. Including weekends. Ccs fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Nov 9, 2014 |
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Nov 9, 2014 04:57
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And hence why, during any conversation about working conditions in the game industry, I always throw in a "... but hey, at least it isn't fx!"
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Nov 9, 2014 05:15
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Same, but I say 'at least it isn't games or fx'
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Nov 9, 2014 18:19
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