Category: Mehdi Workshop

Week six started with a small practice to make something cool. From a test geometry we scatter points to do an effect like if the geo is vanishing.

With the vop attribute we are able to randomize witch points are being affected by the simulation and also its used to make the geometry disappear when is very small, so it would stop simulating on those particles that we can not see.

Then we create as always the dopnet for the solver. Adding some wind resistance and also modifying the direction of the wind. In this case, we make them go up, against gravity.

Here is the final simulation:

After this small simulation, we learn how to make geometry follow the path of a smoke simulation. We create a smoke simulation like we did previously on different occasions. In this occasion, we create a null at the end of the smoke sim called VOL ADVECT that we are gonna use to make the geometry follow the same sim.

After this, we proceed to create a dopnet for the particles that will follow the sim. And we connected to the VOL ADVECT with the node popadvecbyvolumes. This connects it to the previous volume simulation.

After this, we just have to create a sphere and with copytopoints we replace the particles with spheres and then merge it with the previous sim, and we have the spheres following the smoke sim.

Week 04 is dedicated to render with arnold in Houdini. We used the simulation we did of the test geometry smashing the hammer on the floor.

Arnold in Houdini works as it works with Maya, you just need to make sure that the materials you apply to the objects are arnold materials.

For the particles, we create a material that over time changes color and becomes more transparent. This is the result of the render.

In this week we focused on procedural modeling. The idea is to build a wood cabin to later on destroy it with simulations.

We started with a box to do the basic shape of the cabin. Then we deleted all the faces but the ones on the bottom and top to extrude them and like this we create the floor and ceiling. At the end I merge it with some supporting base.

We do the same for the wood planks that are gonna build the walls of the cabin. We create a simple box that we transform and position, then with a copy node we copy as many times we need, and with the node transform we put it in place.

Then with we create the windows and door and with a boolean node, we subtract it from the geo that we already have to create the doors and windows.

Then we merge it all together and create a simple geomatry to fill the wholes created for the door and windows.

And with the node rbdmaterialfracture we prepare the geometry to be destroyed. We can see how is it gonna look with an exploded view.

We create a group of the selection called inactive that we are gonna use to set those primitive selected to not be destroyed by the simulation.

Before proceeding with the simulation, we separate the differents materials so they destruct in different ways since we have wood, concrete, and glass.

And after that, this is the end result.