For the first week of Houdini, it was only an introduction, getting used to the interface and knowing a bit more about the program and its capabilities, as it was a completely new program for us.
For that we did a rock from a tourus geometry using some nodes like noise and subdivide.
I always wanted to learn Houdini, and to be able to do that as an extra is an incredible opportunity.
Smarts vectors are a way of tracking the image that in some cases makes the job a lot easier if it works properly. We are going to use it for a few practice to learn it, we are going to make a person look younger and also remove some tracker markers from someone.
The first practice is going to be beauty work. I will make a person look younger using smart vectors to track the video and after that, I’m going to create a clean plate that with smart vectors is going to move with the video. Here is the node editor:
We first reformat the plate since it was in 4K and for this exercise, I will work in 1080 then I denoised the plate, and after we create the vectors. This is the first time using this feature so here is how it looks. We can see the vectors on the viewport and the attributes that we can change. I left it to default for now.
I’m going to create the patches with a rotopaint node, using cloning and blur tool. I created a grade node, so its easier to see if the track works well.
Here we can see the difference between the original plate on the left and the modified one on the right.
Here you can see the parts the I modified with the rotopaint:
And here we have the original plate:
This is the end result:
UPDATED AND LONGER VERSION
At this point I modified a little bit the patch I made and also created a few more to make the video longer.
An this is the final result with different passes of the process.
For this unit we started creating a boot to learn organic modeling but we switch fast to a more good looking idea. We decided to create a mask using Maya and Mudbox.
We started by importing a head asset, where we would then learn how to do retopology using the quad draw tool.
Once we have completed half of the face we proceed to mirror the geometry so we have both sides identical. And we end up we a full-face retopology. That now we could send it to Mudbox and start building up our mask from there.
Before going to Mudbox I had to do some research and decide what I was going to model. At the time I was playing a game called Ghost of Tsushima and the main character wears a mask, and I decided to model that mask. You will see one mask different from the rest, that is because we had to model a full face mask, and the one I wanted to model was only half of it. So I research and found a good fit that would go well with the othermask.
Now we can dive in to Mudbox. Is a similar program like Maya but specific for sculping models. This is how my mask looked the first weeks.
I was focusing more on the lower part of the mask, at the same time that learning the program, because even though I had experience with Maya and other software like zBrush, Mudbox had a different way of working than zBrush.
At this point we were ready to put some more detail to the mask, what we did was go back to maya, to generate with basic shapes the horns and teeth of the mask.
So here we created the horns and the teeth and now we are ready to send them back to Mudbox and dive into all the details that we want to add to the mask.
We can see on the right image that it was the first reimport from Maya with the horns and teeth and on the left a more detailed mask with some work on it already. It starts to look how I want it to look.
Here it has already a bit more details and for the last step of details I’m going to add some more and we would be ready to paint it.
So, now that we have our mask painted and finished, we can send it back to Maya and start playing with the lighting and render settings to get a real good looking mask and have some cool renders.
We set up all the lighting and settings and now we are ready to render a small animation, that took about 12-15 hours of rendering.
And for the final result, here is the video of the small animation: