tmdag'z blog

Effects for “Essential Killing” by Jerzy Skolimowski

tmdag — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 09:40:27 +0000

Here is some work done earlier this year (2010) – I was responsible for part of smoke/fire effects created in PyroFX (Houdini) and FumeFX (3dMax).
I will prepare personal breakdown later and meanwhile, You can watch official makeing off:

We are pleased to inform you that Platige Image has produced special effects for Jerzy Skolimowski?s Essential Killing. The film will premiere at the 67th International Film Festival in Venice, which begins on the 1st September. It will be shown as a part of the prestigious competition section of the festival.
Here is a brief look at the making of the film. The most spectacular part of the effects was preparing a special, very rare version of a Black Hawk helicopter (with hellfire missiles attached to its bottom), filling it with crew members and creating a realistic chase sequence that opens the film.
[READ MORE FROM PLATIGE IMAGE SITE]

Visual Effects Supervisor, lead compositor: Jakub Knapik
TD: Adam Wierzchowski
Dynamics effects and simulations: Łukasz Sobisz, Albert Szostkiewicz
Compositing: Tadeusz Chmiel, Juliusz Zenkner
Modeling: Marcin Klicki
Mattepainter: Jakub Grygier

yet another ‘zubr’ commercial with Houdini Fur

tmdag — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:58:02 +0000

Yet another polish ‘zubr’ commercial with my custom Houdini Fur tool.

My job was to create fur, shader and and render it out.

Click ‘Read More’ for credits

Agency: PZL
Postproduction studio: PlatigeImage
Director: Iwo Zaniewski
Supervisor, compositing: Jakub Knapik
Fur, Shader, Rendering: Albert Szostkiewcz

[RF] Look out for parents!

tmdag — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:32:04 +0000

Small tip for coders and TD’s – always check if there is no parent!
This might be quite obvious but in fact, this is very common mistake.
If you allow user to use bounding box, bounding sphere to control your code or you need to get a position information from object, check if it is not parented! otherwise you will get wrong data!.

Below You can find few useful functions like getNode(str) that is unfortunately missing in Realflow. I have also attached sample scene describing this common problem.

Sample file:
parenting

No matter what position has this object, for RF it is 0,0,0. Position is affected by its parent – Null in this case.

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cube = scene.getObject("Cube01")
null = scene.getObject("Null01")

def matrix(obj):
pos = obj.getParameter("Position")
rot = obj.getParameter("Rotation")
scl = obj.getParameter("Scale")
shr = obj.getParameter("Shear")
piv = obj.getParameter("Pivot")
scene.message("\n\n" +"position: " + str(pos.x) +" " + str(pos.y) + " " + str(pos.z) + "\n" + "rotation: " + str(rot.x) +" " + str(rot.y) + " " + str(rot.z) + "\n" + "scale: " + str(scl.x) +" " + str(scl.y) + " " + str(scl.z) + "\n" + "shear: " + str(shr.x) +" " + str(shr.y) + " " + str(shr.z) + "\n" + "pivot: " + str(piv.x) +" " + str(piv.y) + " " + str(piv.z) + "\n\n")

def getParent(obj):
par = obj.getParameter("Parent to")
if len(par)==1:
return par[0]
else:
return False

def getNode(node):
nodes = scene.getNodes()
for n in nodes:
name = str(n.getName())
if name == node:
return n
else:
pass

#sample usage:

parent = getParent(cube)
if parent:
scene.message("parent found: " + str( parent ))
node = getNode(parent)
scene.message("type: " + str( node.getType() ))
matrix(node)
else:
scene.message("object has no parent")

parent = getParent(null)
if parent:
scene.message("parent found: " + str( parent ))
node = getNode(parent)
scene.message("type: " + str( node.getType() ))
matrix(node)
else:
scene.message("object null has no parent")

H11 is officially out!

tmdag — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:00:54 +0000

Final version of Houdini 11 is finally out, beta tests are over!

Your first impression after installing H11 is graphic user interface. It is completely rewritten and you get interactive HDRI view (and color bleeding), Ambient Occlusion, soft shadows, high quality volume preview and much more! This really speeds up your working process (specially when you want to set up HDRI position).
Render view, render region and many other things like particle simulation is much faster.
Voronoi fracture asset is now added as default and of course check out new Flip solver

Some features listed on SideFX site:
User Interface

New, bezier-style connectors in the network editors
New tool palette in the network editor offers a gallery of nodes which can be dragged into the network.
Seamless integration of particles into dynamics networks and dynamics into geometry networks. This makes it easier to focus simulations on particular networks instead of simulating everything at the same time.
Enhancements to bundles to strengthen light-linking workflow
Z-up support

Vertex Normals

Support for vertex normals in OpenGL

Network Rendering

Network-distributed IPR
HQueue for Windows and Mac
Gold release of Houdini Cloud rendering tools

Volumes

Support for multi-resolution volumes with merging, feathering and surfacing tools

VEX Volume Procedural

Volume Quality setting in viewport
Camera frustum volumes with tapering values.
Higher quality viewport visualization of volumes

Texturing

Support for Disney’s “ptex” format

Point clouds

New point cloud surfacer with adaptive controls (generates a better surface than the existing particle fluid surfacer; ?more applicable to games)
New point cloud functions

Fluids

New Fluid Shelf tools ? target smoke, source from surface, resize voxel grid
SPH particle fluid solver up to twice as fast
Ability to rotate voxel grid to create non axis-aligned fluid container

Fur

More shelf tools for hair grooming
Control over guide hair distribution for faster interactivity while grooming
Combing direction can now be controlled by skin shaders
No need for rest attribute
Distributed wire solver output node

Cloth

Support for cloth pinching and layering
Direct support for non-stretchy cloth (stretch/shear/bend constraints)
Ability to simulate 0D cloth particles and to attach 1D cloth strings to 2D cloth surfaces – this provides as unified cloth solver for particles, wires and cloth surfaces.
Distributed cloth solver output node

Crowd Control

New CHOPS (foreach, iksolver, objectchain, transformchain, vector ) ? for crowds and more
New python module that lets developers easily embed C++ code into python code

[READ MORE]

[RF] Send Mail script v1.2 for RF5

tmdag — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:36:43 +0000

I have updated “Send Mail” script for realflow and now it is compatible with RF version 5. Unfortunately as a Unix user I haven’t got much time to test it on Windows machines. I have heard that some of them returns “Home” environment as “None” and that means – plugin will not work. If it does happen to you, please let me know, drop me a line on e-mail or just write your machine/system details in comments. I will try to recreate this problem.

DOWNLOAD FROM RF SCRIPTS PAGE

Description
=========
This script will allow You setup SMTP server, and will send You an e-mail with attached screenshot from Your simulation when it’s finished.

Installation
=========
1. Copy script file (.rfs) wherever You want
2. Open Realflow with Your scene file
3. Open menu scripts / Add
4. In Add Script window, Name field enter “SendMail”
5. Choose BATCH_SendMail.rfs in script field
6. Choose BATCH_SendMail.png for Icon
7. Press “New Folder” (bottom left) and create folder for scripts
8. Choose created Folder and press OK

History:

1.1 – ‘home’ directory for cfg file should be now proper on all platforms

1.2 – Found one typo and corrected image folder for RF5 and new icon

Houdini to Realflow – BIN mesh exporter v0.1

tmdag — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 08:40:29 +0000

My next small project, Houdini to Realflow – BIN mesh exporter

Beauty of this plugin is that You have all importers (for Max, Maya, XSI, Lightwave) already provided by NextLimit (for registered Realflow users)
Sometimes it’s good to mesh something in Houdini which creates nice quads, and with attributes you can control look of your fluid in every detail. Problem was in connection between other softwares like Maya. Of course there is OBJ sequence importer written by Framestore guys but with Hi-poly meshes it was too slow.
So here comes my exporter for Houdini which speeds up the whole process.

It is a automated digital asset with triangulation (because, unfortunately RF accepts only triangles, so Houdini quads are only for meshing process where you can smooth them etc. ) and it is already working, need to finish some details, cleanup and provide nice gui.
At this moment it is platform independent, will work everywhere (Win/Linux/Mac) but in near future I will provide compiled versions dedicated for all platforms separately.

[RF] Copy transformations script

tmdag — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:15:12 +0000

Another one small script, simple as it is but might speed up your work.

This script will only copy transformations from chosen node into another. It was very helpful in my case so maybe it also would for someone else

Download:
[RF Script page]

[RF] Realflow Marking Script

tmdag — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 23:27:03 +0000

This script will help You with selecting and passing on particles between two emitters without any collision or link between obiect-emitter.

It has two equations, plane equation and simple radius of a sphere.
It is better to use sphere (with sphere equation) cause it will be much faster then plane equation.

Plane equation is for simple objects like cube, cylinder, cone, capsule but less triangles are used the more speed You will gain.

You can also use simple triangle or plane – it will act as infinitive plane and remove particles that are in back of it (use normal display to see which side it is facing)

Usage:
Place script in “Event Script” window (just replace existing lines of code).
Script has also nice gui, on first start it will ask to pick a nodes (which emitter you are going to cut particles from and where to put them so it’s good that second emitter will have speed of 0) after that You will have to choose an object that will act as marking tool (cube/cone or sphere).
Last step is about choosing an equation so if you have choosen a sphere, select sphere equation, if other object then select plane equation.
You can also choose to forget those settings or save them (just in memory) so if you fire up simulation second time you will only get a form of previouslly choosen nodes or again a picker as it was on first start.
Script comes with attached example scene file.

Compatibility:
Realflow v4.x and v5.x

Feel free to post comments, suggestions,problems or whatever you like (besides spam )

ps. animation runs little bit crappy because I have created it and recorded on MacbookAir that probably is not the best workstation during summer

DOWNLOAD:

RF Script site

RF5 is out

tmdag — Fri, 28 May 2010 11:37:01 +0000

Everybody already knows that RF5 is out. I was one of lucky alpha/beta testers for about a year. Just to let You know that all scripts written in RF4 will work without any problems in RF5.
Also I will upload some of unpublished small scripts I wrote a year ago so please check back later

If you have any problems, questions about realflow 5 or some exciting projects that involves fluid simulation feel free to contact me anytime.

I’m posting less than previously because I’m still testing next version of another very exciting program ….
Besides that, there is a lot of work right now, and I cannot post anything until it’s officially on air / in cinemas so please, be patient.

FMX 2010

tmdag — Sat, 08 May 2010 17:05:18 +0000

The 15th Conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Interactive Media

(Photo taken by CGSociety, with me on the first row )

FMX is the leading conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Interactive Media in Europe and has grown to become one of the most important international conferences in the industry during the past few years.

I had big opportunity to personally meet great people like Jeff Wagner and Janet Fraset from SideFX also Gustavo Sánchez Pérez and Rosanna Thomson from NextLimit. For sure you can meet me at FXM2011

Platige Image (Polish animation studio I’m currently working at) had big opportunity to present visual effects done in their studio.
The presentation shown the most recent technical challenges the studio faced preparing VFX (“Antichrist” dir. Lars von Trier, Katyń dir. Andrzej Wajda), special artistic projects (“Animated History of Poland” dir. Tomek Bagiński, “The Kinematograph” dir. Tomek Bagiński) and commercials.

Platige Image presentation on FMX 2010

Jeff Wagner and Houdini Masterclasses

ScanlineFX recruting desk

Realflow booth