Creating music for group project
I needed to get the sheet music into MIDI to be useable within the music software, this took a while but once it was done I could then seperate the parts of the song into their seperate instruments. With these seperated insrument channels I could then talk with the group on what ones we wanted to use. When the desired instruments were chosen I could then go in and move the notes around on each instrument to achive the desired sound. With all the notes playing at the same volume it sounded very robotic, to fix this I changed the velocity of the notes to mimic the randomness and building volume that would be present when played by a real instrument.
Sound design
When creating the sounds for each instrument I started with orchestral samples, these are recorded from real insturments and played back when the corrisponding note is played. I tweaked the values on these instruments and added effects based on feedback from the group to achive the desired sound.
Houdini Terrain
I wanted to refine my terrain skills I learned ealier this year so I made a simple heightfield and scattered some foliage onto to, I then used the Houdini HDA system to import this into Unreal Engine.
Houdini Flower
I followed a very helpfull tutorial on creating flowers in Houdini. This was created by starting with a 2D petal that was then rigged. Next to create the points where the flowers petals would be I used some vex code to create the phylotaxis, this is essential two spirals that follow the golden ratio, the vex code allows for this to be edited into the desiered shape while still following the phylotaxis rules. The single petal was then copied to all of these points using a series of nodes and a for loop. In order to make the flower bloom two poses were made, one for the bud pose and one for the bloom pose. These poses were then blended together and animated. To add more realism I created a vellum sim on these petals, this invoved setting up some warmup frames where all the petals were deintersected so they didnt overlap at the start of the sim. I spent a lot of time editing the values of the simulations wind and pin & cloth constrains to get the look I was going for. Finally to add more detail to the petals I added some noise with VOP nodes, and also created materials with displacements and subsurface scattering.