ABOUT ME

I live in a camper van with a West Highland Terrier for company.
My passion is creating images but it is a work in progress.
I am always willing to share what knowledge I have and can be contacted through the comments on this post or e-mail ADRIAN
ALL IMAGES WILL ENLARGE WITH A LEFT CLICK

Saturday 10 August 2019

A HARD WEEK.

I have achieved the sum total of zero this week.
I was advised by Microsoft to accept the big Windows 10 update and stupidly went ahead. I usually leave it a month or so to give them time to patch it and make it fit for purpose. This update is about average. I have to reload the drivers for the graphics card and also for the sound card. It's a pain as it will have to be done every time I start the machine until the dumb clucks get around to sorting it.
I have been trying to find my way around Houdini, I am still lost but will get there eventually. It is a beautifully slick bit of software though very expensive. I have the free Apprentice licence. As far as I can tell the only thing I will have to put up with is a watermark on the render and a maximum render size of 1K or 720 pixels. I think I can export .obj, collada and alembic file formats which Blender will accept. 
The reason for wanting to try it is mainly to use scripted maths functions as many of the posh fractals have been produced in it. It is also professional level VFX software.

Stuff like this.
This is the default workspace. Next time I post I will hopefully have had some work through it. I am at the everything going tits up stage.......Very frustrating it is.
Enjoy the coming week.

6 comments:

  1. Don't think much of your knitting skills, Adrian, if that second image is anything to go by! ;-}

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    1. Richard, were I to knit a jumper it would turn out similar. Usually these are just used for background. The VFX folk fly a camera through them.

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  2. I had the same thought as Richard. Things have really gone tits up when you resort to knitting - or is it crochet?

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    1. Pauline, it's a nest made by a special needs Weaver Bird.

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  3. Amazingly complex patterns. The first looks like some form of microscopic virus.

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    1. John. They are Mandelbulbs but they are sharper when produced in Houdini. I think these are still volumetrics, not meshes so can't be easily sharpened. I also notice that Houdini can stop the computer very quickly. I did see on a seminar that one render was soaking up 128GB of RAM. This pro stuff is getting silly. It also seems common practice to sub out rendering to specialist folk. Not that it is necessary for YouTube. The other minor problem is that expressions are written in VEX and not Python. I am rubbish with Python so it's not a big deal for me. Single line code is contained in square brackets, which appears to save writing multiple lines for vectors.
      I will get there but I have to do a bit at a time as my head threatens to explode.

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