Importing render AOV’s into Nuke
After setting up my render settings in Houdini I had a useful set of AOVs such as diffuse, reflection and shadows, this allows me to edit the look of my render in comp without going back into Houdini and rendering out 700 frames every time I want to make a change.
Adding grain, blur, colour and lightwraps
After editing my AOVs and doing a first grade on the CG render I then added motion blur, grain and lightwraps to try and match the CG as closely as I could to the plate then merged them together.
Houdini commercial work
With my more refined skills in Houdini I was able to gain a small freelance role creating some shots for an advert. I was tasked with creating a milk thistle flower with animations and a water dropplet sim. I started by using the same core structure I learned from my previous flower project. Unfortunately as this was a very complex flower I had to do a lot tweaking and research into Houdini and the flowers structure, and go through many itteraions and feedback loops with the client as this flower has a lot of different varieties and stages. To create the water dropplet I blasted a single petal then created a sphere that would be used as the water, I then had to animate the petal moving and bending as if there was water flowing down it, I also used a CHOP network to add realistic bouncing and blend my animation realisticly. I transfered these animations into Solaris and rendered out first pass motion drafts to get feedback from.