Ben Spensley Blog

Houdini ball sim & animation

This week I wanted to incoporate animation and simulations. I started by creating a sphere then adding detail to one panel, I then used a for loop to apply this to all the panels. I used the same method as the previous project to create the falling balls sim, I then got a single ball and used and expression to link its rotation value to its world position so that it rolls when it moves through the scene. Once this was setup I could manually animate the ball bouncing and squashing.

Houdini rigidbody sim

I decided to progress onto doing a rigidbody sim. To start I modeled a simple cup. It was quite weird to get my head around the way modeling works in Houdini but this helped me understand it a lot. I then made collision version of the cup, spawned some balls on randomly scattered points, and put those and the collision into the Houdini bullet solver in order to create the sim. This was then rendered out in Karma, once again giving me more knowledge of the Houdini rendering system.

Started learning houdini & USD

Over this summer I want to learn a lot more about Houdini and USD workflows. I had plans to learn these for a while but after having a talk with the Framestore head of CG and hearing how important knowing the software is for my desired role, I decided to try and learn as much as I could over summer. I will do this by mainly following the tutorials on the Houdini website provied by SideFX and the Houdini community.

I started with going over the workspaces and basic nodes such as SOP, DOP, COP, within Houdini and created a basic render withing Houdinis USD render stage, Solaris.

Started music production and more planning for group project

Our group looked at different genres of music and eventually decided on what we wanted for our video. After this we found sheet music for a piece that we would use to create our version within the music software. We then started to do more planning on the shots and flow of the video.

Collecting Equipment

I rented a Blackmagic 4K kit from ORB to do my filming on location.

Final filming

Once I had the kit I went to the location at Alexandria Road to start fimling. Because I allready scouted this location and tested some of the shots I was able to get the needed shots efficiently.

Rented camera from ORB

Testing camera setup

Testing Tracking

Individual project final storyboard animation

I got the images I took from my first visit to the location and created a storyboard of the shots and camera movements I wanted in my final video.

I then put these images into Nuke to make an amimatic to view and adjust the movement and length of the shots so I knew what I needed to do when I goto film the final shots.

Group project music setup

CG101

This week I went to the CG101 conference. I was able to get a behind the scenes look into major vfx productions such as the production behind Andor, Lighting on DNEG’s projects and FX on Wicked. I was also able to meet lots of interesting people within the industry and get a portfolio review from the CG lead at Framestore.

Unreal Engine

Fliming pt2

Nuke retime

Group project planning