Maya Particles.. My thoughts. 2005-05-06 - By Schoenberger
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The complete Houdini is flow-based, If you create a scene, it looks like a big
Fxtree. You just add one node after another. You plug
together your whole scene, a bit like scripting. For geometry it can be
compared to plugging your constuction history together node
by node.
Perhaps a simple example of the advantage of Houdini. Do you remember this
render tree example (Dave created this?). He plugged a
lambert node into the thickness of a grid shader. A lot of people never thought
about pluggin an illumination into a parameter of a
texture. But you can do it. The lambert was not build for that, but it works.
Same in Houdini. You can combine a lot of things, if
you know how.
E.g. you remember the shot in "The day after tomorrow", at which the wind
breakes a tower(hollywood sign) into small pieces. The
just put a fractal texture onto the building as displacement, evaluated the
lines at which the object remains at its original
position (50% gray in the texture) and used this lines as break edges for the
simulation. If the director/superviser wanted bigger
parts, they just changed the texture.
The advantages of particles are that you can combine a lot of nodes, and you
can do a lot inside the particle nodes. If you have
something like a collision, then you can add the affected particles into a
group. You don't have to emit a new particle type after a
collision to change the color or that stuff. It is the same particle, but now
it is a member of a group. After that you can add a
node and affect only partciles of a specific group. E.g. a set color or a force
which affects particles of that group.
An easy example I have done is: Imagine somethig jumpin on ice floes. You have
a cube breaked up into nice pieces, then you create
particles based on this geometry (one partcile on each center od an object).
Then you do your particle animation, how they would fall. You add a "stop" node
that they won't fall, animate an object that jumps
on the ice, the collision re-enables the fall.
Then you get the particle movement back to the objects. You get ice falling if
the objects collides with the ice.
Not possible with XSI. Not in one worklow without scripting. And if you does
not like one parameter, just change it in Houdino,
cause everything is a whole construction history.
Disadvantage:
You have to use instances to render nice particle clouds, the shading is not
that easy like in XSI.
|> -- --Original Message-- --
|> From: owner-xsi@(protected)
|> [mailto:owner-xsi@(protected)] On Behalf Of Matt Hollingsworth
|> Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2005 8:27 PM
|> To: XSI@(protected)
|> Subject: Re: Maya Particles.. My thoughts.
|>
|> Just watch me!
|>
|> ;-)
|>
|> So, compare them for me! What's the deal with Houdini?
|> I hear it's
|> the best at that particular one subset of the software.
|>
|> -M
|>
|> Schoenberger wrote:
|>
|> > |> Anybody ever play around with Houdini?
|> >
|> >Jup, they have really cool features.
|> >But I think you cannot compare Houdini particles with Xsi
|> or Maya particles...
|> >
|> >
|> >Holger Sch�nberger
|> >Binary Alchemy - digital materialization
|> >
|> >
|> >
|> >
|> >
|> >---
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