New Job!

So I've been pretty quiet on here lately - basiclly all my extra curricular 3D work has been art tests and one of them came good - in October I'm going to be starting work at Ubisoft Blue Byte in Dusseldorf!  I don't know exactly what I'm going to be working on yet but it should be a great experience.  :D

Long time no posts!

So it's been a while since my last post, but I've been pretty busy.  I carried on with the Houdini tutorials for another week or two since my last post, sadly things get pretty complex pretty quick when you're working with dynamics and fluids etc. in Houdini so I wasn't really able to do much of my own work after following the tutorials.  It's great to have a base knowledge of the workflows but realistically Houdini is a very complex piece of software and I'm not going to becoming a master overnight after just a few videos!  I'd really love to sit down and really get to grips with fluids or fire or something but without someone to really learn from (video tutorials just aren't that great, especially since they've changed the workflow quite a lot between Houdini 11 and 12) it's just not going to happen.  I might come back to it in a bit if there's something specific I want to try out though.

After Houdini I moved on to doing some tutorials for Substance Designer - a nice texturing tool I picked up over Christmas while it was cheap.  It seems like procedural textures are going to be pretty popular in the future so it seems like a good thing to start developing some skills in.  Again I just did the basic product tutorials on the Algorethmic website so didn't really have anything to show but watch this space - I might try and combine Houdini and Substance Designer into a project creating a few totally procedural weapons, if I find the time!

Lastly I've been doing an art test!  I won't say who for unless I get it but it's for what sounds like a fantastic job so fingers crossed.  I've just submitted today so hopefully should hear back sooner rather than later and, if they let me, I'll post up what I worked on.

That's it for today, sorry for the lack or video/images.  I'm also doing a bit of freelance work at the moment so there's probably not going to be any updates for a while, but I'll definitely post something up when I know about the job!

More Dynamics

More dynamics this week, starting to look at fluids, particle effects, the pyro solver and combining them all together. just following tutorials for now but seeing how they all interrelate is pretty cool. the step up from following tutorials to working things out for myself is going to be a pretty big one though...

 
Waterfall from thomas harle on Vimeo.

DustDevil from thomas harle on Vimeo.

both of them could use some work but they're a good start I reckon.

Intro to RBD

I've been looking at some of the dynamics tools in Houdini this week - nothing too extraordinary, just simple keyframing into a simulation, constraints, dynamic fracturing and pre-fractured objects, and also using a control object to dissolve a glue network:

Dynamics Fall1 from thomas harle on Vimeo.

Dynamics Hanging1 from thomas harle on Vimeo.
Dynamics Bullet1 from thomas harle on Vimeo.

Dymanics Glue from thomas harle on Vimeo.

Digital Assets

Ok!  So I've decided to start a blog to record (and hopefully motivate me) in my continued learning as a VFX and video game artist.

I thought I'd start the year with something nice and simple:  learning Houdini!

I've been through most of the first steps tutorial videos : http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=202&Itemid=361 and think I'm getting the hang of it.

Here's a couple of digital assets I've created just to get my head around the workflow (can you tell I used to be a structural engineer!)





I Beam from thomas harle on Vimeo.





RC Slab from thomas harle on Vimeo.