Blending geometries using Levelsets

I have returned to researching on interesting techniques. During my research on Volumes I came across an interesting technique which could be implemented and used in some of my projects. Since I have some time now I thought of giving these a try.



This technique uses levelsets to blend and fuse two geometries together.
Its based on a paper by Daniel P Ferreira which is:
Levelsets in Production, Spider Man 3

Following are some better tests (a bit upres volume):






I'll be posting some of my other research works as soon as I can get some more time.. :)

Erosion..Eroded..Eroding..

education eroded me brains :D (I intend to study further..please don't take offense of this :P )

I had recently seen Peter Claes's erosion effect and was pretty much inspired to do the same....

I did know about the SOP Solver solution which was very well illustrated in the Houdini's Help docs in "Denting With Particles" example..

However I wanted to try and keep the things out of DOPs as it could slow things down a bit...(I did use OdForce's Attrib sim accumulator which is very handy but ended up doing the stuff using POPs

I used VOP SOPs, POPs (which could be optional), and ..well thats all I guess..

I said the use of pops was optional as the only thing I used them was to decide which place will be eroded and thats about it....This could also be done by say painting colors, attribs based on primitive numbers etc.

The Heart of the effect was in the VOP SOP which used the normal to manipulate the point position and fake the erosion of the geo....

Since this was implemented in VOP SOPs it can also be easily used as a displacement shader which would drastically improve rendertime....

PS: this is a low res video of the effect..

until next time,

TO INFINITYYYYYYY AND BEYOOOOONDDDD..

ODE Solver..and some fun! (ode to ODE Solver!)

this is flipbooked sequence of a Rigid Body Simulation with in Houdini using the ODE Solver..

Actually this is more of a Hybrid..using POPs, VOP POPs, SOPs, and DOPs in Houdini..

There were 2 DOP simulations used for different purposes..

The Particles were also Advected to get a specific movement.

Main intention behind this was simply my NEED to work with the ODE Solver. ODE is mainly used for Dynamics in gaming and cant work with complex geometry..So I made up a Truck (sort of :P ) using simple primitives and used that for the Dynamics..

Though ODE Solvers are much faster than Houdini's RBDs, there's a lot of difference between the accuracy and the ability to handle Complex Geometry within a simulation.

SESI implementing ODE in Houdini is awesome! Now we have a choice in case we want just a Pre-Vis or if we are working with simple Geometry types.

The simulation for DOPs took no more than 4-5 seconds per frame..(sometimes lower than this)

POPs and VOP POPs was almost realtime..

Specs:

500 different RBDs simulated together.

DOPs Sim time: 4-5 secs per frame. (max..sometimes lower than this)

which is amazingly fast considering my system configs:

2GB RAM,

intel core 2duo, 2.1GHz, 32 bit, WinXP