Sunday, January 22nd, 2022 11 am - 1 pm PST

Sunday, January 29th, 2022 11 am - 1 pm PST

Please note: If you purchased the class before it starts and can't make it, you can see the recording of it after. In addition, the course will be available for purchase on-demand once the live class is over.

In Build your Brain…we build a brain! We will use 3 different techniques for doing this depending on how far in the building process and then seamlessly transition between them to create a convincing single-shot growth setup.

In the closeup section of the shot, we learn how to split our soft body objects in a vellum sim, which gives us the most detail. Here you learn how to split objects while your vellum sim is running. For the medium shot, we learn how to split cells using POPs and make them look similar to our vellum cells with some SOP-level magic. In the final section of the shot, we will use VDB advection to complete our growth into a brain. Then we will blend all of these sections together into one smooth animation. Finally, we will render everything in Solaris (LOPS) that was used redshift to render the sequence but we will also discuss how to do this with Karma and materialX.

Upon completion you will have a good understanding of how to tackle a complex shot in Houdini, combining various simulation and SOP-based techniques to mix it all together, as well as rendering a scene in Solaris using Redshift or Karma.

We will learn how to build the first section of the animation with vellum. We will learn how we can split our geometry during the simulation and continue simulating it without vellum breaking. With the time left over during this class, we will have a look at creating the headphone geometry for our brains.

For our midsize shot, we will be using POPs and grains. For this class, we will discuss how we can do a pop-sim that behaves like cell division and add some SOP magic to make the resulting geometry look like cells as well. We will then learn how to do a transition between our vellum and POPs using various SOP techniques. 

For the final part of our sequence, we learn how we can take the resulting geometry and use it in a SOP solver to do some VDB advection to get the final formation of our brain. We are then left with the task to stitch these parts together seamlessly and write it all out so we can render it in Solaris.

Here we bring it all together. We start lighting and shading it in Solaris. You will learn the basics of Solaris and how to build materials. We will also be using Redshift but will discuss some details about Karma and how you would approach this if you choose to use that instead.