CG Integration – 4 – Plan B is Well Underway

Since my last post I have been doing some material and texture work in Houdini on the splattered viscous FLIP Sim. Here are some of the basic renders.

I have gone through the materials node and isolated certain areas of the “temp” attribute to create different effects like when is less viscous it changes color or roughness. This is all very straightforward inside of the material node. This can however be extrapolated to all of the different attributes of a single material or a mix between materials to completely change how the mesh reacts to being squished over.

I have also been able to transfer UV attributes from the original mesh, to the points, and back again to the remesh. This has left me with quite an awesome result, now I can plug in a textured model and still retain all of its color data. Not only that, but now as the mesh gets squished the texture will squish with it.

Things to do :
-Smooth some kinks in the pipeline when it comes to lighting and rendering between Maya and Houdini

– Create a system that ‘burns’ the material, so that the areas that are extremely viscous get a new attribute that determines its new material and behavior

– Bring in brick model with texture and get that correctly working with the sim

– Get finalized materials for the squished object – before, during, and after viscosity changes

Questions :

– How to create the burn system, I’m thinking of comparing the values of temp and saying if it is really high, just burn it and make it hard, if its above 90 make it turn black, if its above 50 make it slightly darker, and return is any less than that. I would be able to take the current state its in, map it to a ramp to get the subtle variations in each section. This attribute would have to store the highest value a particle gets at any given time during the sim, so something like a wrangle that says if the value of temp now is greater than it was, rewrite it, if not, it stays at its own value. This might be really hard to implement but I think it could create some extremely wild effects and look really amazing.

Final Thoughts :

– Starting to feel the pressure, but couldn’t be more happy with it. We have done some basic comps and they look so awesome, I’m extremely excited to get a serious simulation out and check out how this will look in the end. The materials are going to be so much fun to put together for this too, I’m just ready for a great looking final product!