Software Used:
Houdini
Nuke
Arnold
Zbrush
Maya
Photoscan
Quixel
Tank vs Fluff
I worked on this project with Bryant Nelms. The idea was to create a full look development piece in Houdini. As a basis for our story we went with King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. We decided to take our on spin on the round table and create a discovery piece in a forest.
We used a variety of approaches to asset gathering and creation. In the end we had approximately 36 different assets. We started with photoscaning, in the scene some smaller rocks and twigs are photoscanned. The most clear example of the photoscanned assets are the two trees that frame the opening shot. The other approach we used, which makes up the largest portion, was Quixel Megascans assets. For the assets that were handmade, I sculpted the table and its seats in Zbrush while Bryant Modelled the main sword in Maya. The other swords kindly given to us by William Tanneberger. The last process was using Houdini to procedural generate trees. All the trees, other than the two scans, are generated using a space colonization based tree generated created by me.
Special Thanks To:
Bryant Nelms: https://www.bryantnelms.com/
William Tanneberger: https://willtvfx.com/
Assets:
These are just a couple of the assets that we created. Some were made by me some were made by Bryant Nelms
Workflow Tools:
A major part of making this project work revolved around making productivity tools. Due to the limitations placed on us by the renderfarm we had to find ways that would work seamlessly. I created all of the following tools
Tool 01: Job Setter
This tool was more of a quality of life tool. Whenever you would open the file this script would run, it would look at the $HIP variable, look for the project folder, and then set the $JOB based on that. This allowed any user to open the scene and have $JOB automatically set without them having to manually change it.
Tool 02: Asset Manager
Due to issues using OTL’s in our project I made a custom Asset Manager. The way it worked was that you would first create your asset entirely in its own scene using a lookdev rig that Bryant created and I packaged into a convenient tool. Once you were happy with it you would select the node and you would use a toolbar tool to create a CPIO file (this is the file used internally by Houdini to copy paste nodes). We used this to essentially trick Houdini into pasting these nodes into an Assets Subnet when we hit update. This allowed us to work independently on the assembly file and various assets at the same time while also retaining a fairly small footprint as the CPIO files were quite small.
Tool 03: Shelf Setup
This tool imported the required shelf tools. These shelf tools were the export tool mentioned earlier. The other two shelf tools had to do with a render farm issue where $JOB simply did not exist as a variable on the farm. To bypass this I created a shelf tool that looks for every instance of $JOB in the project and absolute paths it to our render farm
Tool 04: Camera F Stop Calculator for DOF
One issue when using Arnold renderer is that the cameras do not seem to use the conventional F stop value that most artists are familiar with when dealing with DOF. Instead it uses the diameter of the opening to set the DOF. This is, we found, a not so intuitive option. To ease this I created a tool that would transform an F-Stop value into the required value for Arnold.
Tool 05: Render Manager
Since we were rendering all our shots from one assembly file we needed a fast way to adjust render settings on all the shots without having to change all of the render nodes. This tool here is the AOV manager that sets all the AOV’s to be mirrored across all shots, The ai_base node controlled all the render settings for all the other render nodes.
Tool 06: Custom Point Transform
Due to the fact that we were using instance nodes to deal with Arnolds lack of support for packaged geometry we needed to have a way to transform a point. To do this I built a custom transform node