HMP Contest - Stiffler

Stiffler

My submission to the Mixamo/Houdini Costume Contest is influenced by Art Nouveau, magical fantasy, 1920's and 30's couture, as well as contemporary black lace dress designs. This first pic is a quick comp/sketch to flesh out the image I had in mind to showcase a complex yet delicate cloth simulation. My design goal is to do unique lace patterns and more 'wearable' dress shapes. I intend to add lace 'wings' to the shoulders for an exaggerated silhouette. I have a lot more research to do!
Good Luck to all the entrants and please comment/critique with any suggestions you might have!

alicja

I like the idea and the headpiece makes her look like some delicate insect. I can't wait to see where you will go with it!

Stiffler

Here is the first pass on a lo-poly block-in. I am still playing with design, so any suggestions would be welcome

Anais

Cool concept! Welcome and best of luck.

Eggbert

I really like the butterfly like wings effect

Stiffler

Here are some old updates (I've been doing more Houdini research than modeling!). Skin tone tests a more detailed body sculpt, and some layout designs for the lace patterns. Any suggestions welcome!

Stiffler

Here is more detailed Diffuse Map on the face showing a few poses.

Stiffler

Here is the 1st anim test I've done with the wings attached. No cloth sim yet, and i'm thinking the final will be a walk cycle. The wings are a little tricky to get working with the auto-rig/controller scripts (involves a lot of re-uploading of fbx's to mixamo), but if anyone's interested I could walk u thru the steps in maya.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HstBis38iBI"]BWQ_Idle_WING_ANIM_test - YouTube[/ame]

Stiffler

Here's my plan and 'order of operations' for the cloth simulations. The more time I have the more I can add (ie.. dynamic hair). I think with each simulation cloth layer i do in Houdini, I am going to have a lot of: cache - re-simulate - re-cache - export-import-........rinse repeat.
I think this is the only way to get cloth, on-top of cloth, simulation (?)

Stiffler

Here's an update on the animation cycle. I'm trying to get motion in the wing joints, but havent' been able to bake the movement out to an fbx with original skeleton using Mixamo's controller script (for maya). This is the final anim. sequence i'm going with though, i think. If anyone can think of something that would look better with this character, i'm definitely up for suggestions.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjPsoC8aQDo"]BWQ_FINAL_WALK - YouTube[/ame]

Jim Crafton

Depending on how much tim you have you could add the wing bones in Houdini. You can import the fbx into Houdini as usual, and then add the extra nulls and bones, and then adjust the weighting in the geo node as needed. If you want to try this and need more info, let me know. I did this on mine and added a couple of extra things.

Stiffler

Thanks Jim. That's a good suggestion. I don't know enough about Houdini's internal joint/ geo node hierarchy, but I'll give it a a try. My problem has been with mixamo's auto rig controller script. I want to get animations i have added via controllers baked down to joints. The script will do this, but each time I export from maya to .fbx, i get no animation (yes its checked in the output box) just motionless geometry. Worst case scenario I will have to do w/o the wing animation and the subtle stuff i added to the body animation.

Jim Crafton

Sorry to hear that, I wish I could offer a suggestion? It sounds like it's some weird issue with the Mixamo script within Maya? Does mixamo offer any help with their script? I didn't go this route, I just brought everything straight into Houdini and adjusted it all there.

Stiffler

I'll check with Mixamo on the script. If I had the knowledge, I'd use Houdini for animation tweaks, but i'm SO much more familiar with Maya's animation suite.

Stiffler

Here's a simulation test. I had to detach shader nodes because they are not behaving.
http://youtu.be/pr7t-mr99OU

I'm haveing problems with my mantra surface shader node. I only get diffuse color on the model on the 1st frame of my rendering, then the shader turns pinkish-totally ignoring the the color map.......any suggestions?

Stiffler

Here's a flipbook example of the shader error I'm having. This is not a full render, but I get the same result when I do......diffuse map displays only the 1st frame of the sim. I have no idea what the root cause is. I'm not really familiar enough to 'troubleshoot' houdini. Is there some time-frame related shader node for maps to display? Gotta admit this might sink my final

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StwDGssiA8o&feature=youtu.be

Stiffler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWv2zIs2mnE&feature=youtu.be

I can't say this is a 'final' submission, but at least this render illustrated my shading problem better. I have a map on the 1st frame..then pink(?).
My plan is to refine the cloth sim until the Houdini license graciously provided by Side Effects expires. Anyone who has insight into how i might resolve my render problems would be greatly appreciated.
I enjoyed the challenge of this contest, and I learned alot. Thanks to all, and good luck to the submissions, there are a lot of cool entries.
-stiff

harmless

You can animate just about anything in Houdini. It looks like you have animated a few properties that you did not intend to, like the checkbox of the diffuse map and the base color of the diffuse. You can select your material instance and open the animation editor to look for key frames (which in your case are on frame 1 and 2). Delete the key frames or place down a new shading network and mimic the settings of your old shader. Good luck!

Stiffler

Thanks, harmless! That helps a lot. I had figured something got mis-keyed, or I had to attach some sort of time based node to to the shader network. I check for keys on my shader, & couldn't find any. Also any new mantra shader I apply does the same (pink) thing. Its taken a lot to wrap my brain around node based rendering/compositing.

harmless

it could also be a light that animates, a point attritube, etc...

Skyerzz

I was having the same issue and i just figured it out. I think if you image file has a number at the end of it Houdini tries to play it as an animation, and since there isn't anything after the first frame it disappears. Try getting rid of the numbers. Hope that works for you.

harmless

Houdini will not treat a file name that ends in a number as a variable unless that number is part of an expression or local variable such as $F

Skyerzz

Because of all the crashes and file corruptions that happened to me during this contest I saved things incrementally just in case something happened. During the time my object was vanishing my colour files name was "Val_Body_Diffuse1". When I changed the name to "bodydifuse" my object no longer disappeared, that is how i came to my conclusion.

Stiffler

Skyerzz.....that's IT! I owe you a beer (or 20) I definitely name my maps with numerical value. I renamed, and now I get them on all 348 frames of the simulation! I will render this f'er out yet damnit. Thanks for the help! Its such a small, stupid issue, but it really threw a wrench into my work flow....very frustrating.

Skyerzz

Yah I really dislike that aspect of houdini. I never had to think about that before so when I was bringing in my cloth layers which where numbered so I knew which was which and I was having so much trouble until I realize that even geo is effected by that. I renamed them by alphabet. I'm glad I could help.

harmless

fwiw that sounds more like a bug than a planned behavior, but I am glad it fixed your issue !!

Stiffler

I renamed all my maps so, Here is a render that illustrates the diffuse and alpha channels on the shader I was intending (still have to add the spec and normals).

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC5yCz3_Ess"]Maps_RENDER - YouTube[/ame]

ChewyPixels

I was also having the same problem with my maps. For example, I had a map named something like "suit_diffMap_4k.exr" which would not work. I finally realized it was the way that houdini was trying to read the file. It was using the "$F" in place of the number. I simply had to rename the file by removing the "4k" and it worked. Very frustrating but good lesson learned. I wish I could have been there to help you out sooner but I was just too busy trying to get my entry done in time.

Great to see that you are still pushing on. It would be nice to see some of the other participants continue with their unfinished entries even if it's just for the learning experience.

Keep it up!

-Chewy

Skyerzz

I'm still working on my entry. I'm trying to get the cloth working before the Houdini trial runs out. Only a few days left on mine.

harmless

Oh I think I know what you guys did... By default the Houdini file explorer shows files as sequences, so if you pick your texture map in that mode it will indeed make an expression out of the numbers in the file name. In the Houdini file explorer simply UNCHECK the "show as sequence" checkbox in the bottom left, then select your map. Cheers!

Stiffler

Thanks for the feedback, chew, harm and sky. Yea, I don't know when I'll get another chance at rendering in Houdini so I might as well squeeze as much outta this licence as I can! I dont know any other program that will read the .bgeo format either. There's a maya plugin that i'm gonna try....we'll see.

ChewyPixels

harmless wrote: »

Oh I think I know what you guys did... By default the Houdini file explorer shows files as sequences, so if you pick your texture map in that mode it will indeed make an expression out of the numbers in the file name. In the Houdini file explorer simply UNCHECK the "show as sequence" checkbox in the bottom left, then select your map. Cheers!

Ah, that makes perfect sense. This has to be exactly what my problem was. Good to know. Thanks!

-Chewy

Skyerzz

I had to uncheck that option in order to bring in my different layers of cloth. So I dunno lol lol But anyways the problem has been solved and I don't want to fill Stiffler's thread with this since we found a work around and the contest is over XD But thanks!