Elementary....

I have been working on Naiad for some time now and testing few things on the go.
As of now, most of the tests have similar principles as I need to check all the possibilities for one of my projects but as soon as I can get over with this, I guess I have all the time to work on some better/interesting effects.

This is a test where a water character is running on a pavement and sort of disappears from the scene towards the end. At the moment I have just stopped the emission at a particular frame (as an alternative) but I guess I could make it behave in a different way for that.


I guess I'm slacking off..the idea of writing another post doesn't really excite me for now(lots of work left)..so thought would probably add in another naiad test here..

Naiad..Meshed and Rendered ..

In this setup the body is levitating in air mimicking the movements of an animated torus and spills only if the velocity is greater than a threshold. Simulation done in Naiad.

Here's a test with a meshed out render.
Rendered out with Houdini's Mantra renderer.


The Catmull-Rom filter gave me best results for this. I have started to prefer it over the gaussian 2x2 which slightly smoothed out/blurs my renders a bit.

test with Naiad!

Well, I have been doing tests on naiad to get a hang of naiad workflow and operators.
this is one of my first usable tests (had a few which are not really worth putting up!)
and since there have been plenty of water based storm effects, I figured it would not
really hurt if I added one more in the count :)



I intend to implement the animation driven simulation setup I did in houdini in Naiad
but I haven't really reached there.
So until then, happy simming :)

animation driven fluid dynamics....atlantian toroid!

This is just a part of RnD I was doing on fluids for making them Art Directable while still preserving their fluid nature. Sort of creating a water body which has a consciousness of its own.



A torus was animated and the objective was to try and get the fluids to move the way the torus was moving while still behaving like water/liquid. This animation drives a water/liquid body while its still simulating thus creating a fusion of both the effects to an extent.
(I will try and get this rendered in half HD as soon as I get some more time.)

The whole setup is procedural and implemented in Houdini using FLIP fluids.A custom setup was built to get rid of the recursive nature of the split pop which was then used to process the fluid for splashes.

Now I am trying to implement the same system in Naiad. I am really happy to see its performance and solve quality. So far I have been able to control the movement of the water/liquid body using velocity fields and Field NEL NOP (Naiad Operators) so its sort of suspended in air and moving as it should be but I'm clearly missing something here. Will put up the results as soon as I get some more time.


PS: I really hate it when I cant seemingly preserve the render quality while converting image sequences to movs in Linux. But thats another story..
HD video now uploaded on vimeo :)

chao.. :)

Fluid Simulation....(of a Viscous and thick fluid)

This literally ate my head off....the simulation was pretty straight but what actually took time was retiming entirely and deleting the stray particles..since i needed the mesh to also stretch I lost the luxury of "Exclude the Lone Particles" option :(

this is a low res version..the original simulation turned out to be very fast but the movement of the fluid was pretty good....so I retimed the entire simulation using a custom Retime node (scripted in Python by Michael Rice) further there were quite a few stray particles which were deleted using ID attributes using a customised setup within Houdini. This could also be done using one cheap solution but its very heavy on the processing side..(sounds so Ironic....haha).

Also, I'm working on few other effects..will post updates once they are finished.

few of the experiments with the color and look can be seen in the pictures..please note that these were low resolution test render pictures

The Biblical Flood..of CHOCOLATE :D (fluid simulation)

hhmm..things moving pretty good and fast this once..(is it because my college is over??..hmm*thinking* hehehe)

orrighty..so here's the Fluid Simulation I had posted last time....just few changes though

I made it lot more Viscous..I wanted to give different look kinda like a chocolate..

I am facing some issues though..as is always the case..things tend to get nasty with me....good thing is..i'm nastier than them hahaha

Ok..lets move on..

I have some Self Shadowing artifacts as you can see in the picture. Issue is if I increase the bias and raytracing intersection distance..I'm losing a lot of shadow detail..

Wanted to see both the pics (i.e. with and without Motion Blur) just for fun of it..

I have thought of some camera movements and stuff but nothing specific as yet.

PS: well thats enough about 'the Biblical Flood of Chocolate' :D

The wetmap implementation is still not complete..but its almost there..(trust me guys I know it..I have done it before :P )

(yeah i know..still not there with the ART of cracking FUnnY jOkES )

flood in the bathtub??

i'm getting terribly restless..reason??

one of the most frustrating thing for me is no longer there to eat my head off.

Since I had worked on Realflow (which I really liked), I could not really get my grasp on the particle fluids in Houdini.

I cant really blame Houdini for this....its all my misunderstanding. I was trying to work on Houdini the way I used to in Realflow. Having said that I must say, Houdini and Realflow are very much alike if some of the things are cleared when you switch. In a way Houdini gives far more control to the user as compared to Realflow.

I'm not taking anything away from Realflow because I simply cant. Its made for fluids and dynamics....I do also feel its faster than the fluids in Houdini.

I use Houdini fluids for the simple reason: MORE CONTROL.

Realflow did not have a official Houdini export until now (there's a beta version Realflow plug-in for the same..for more details on this please cheack Odforce.)

And since I have been working on Houdini primarily for everythin, I cant really use RF fluids.

Also there's a lot of control which if leveraged properly, can get you amazing results.

Anyways, I used to be really irritated because of lousy and stupid looking meshing of the Particle Fluids....which I again confess was my lack of understanding.

Finally while working on this personal project the solution dawns upon me.

Its got to do with the Particle Seperation.

If you have a high seperation (which I used to keep high to get better speed) the partcles will be farther away from each other and thus when meshed, the mesh turns out to be entirely stupid. (come on I could draw up a better mesh on paper than THAT).

This once, I kept the separation lower, keeping sure it not unnecessarily slowing my system (a value lower than 0.1 but higher than 0.01 usually gives good performance/quality ratio) I tried to get the desired look changing parameters like Bounce, Friction etc.

Once I got something similar to what I wanted, then I would try to up the resolution.

Well to be honest, I also cheated a bit as far as resolution of the sim is concerned.

Ok, its still in a Work In Progress image so I have got a screen capture and a quick test render done (which is nothing fancy: no motion blur..no texture etc).

almost done with the wetmaps implementation. (Houdini doesnot generate wetmaps straight out of the box..but to learn how it could be done is even more fascinating!)

Will update later :)

PS: please ignore the title....it's another side effect of my self imposed isolation haha :D