VSFX 428 Project
Week 4
Lastly, I adjusted the wind, originally the smoke stayed very still inside the ash tray. I adjusted the wind movement so it moves to the top of the cigar and ash tray. I also enabled viscosity but kept it at 0.01.
I also adjusted the shader itself to make it look more “Ashy.“ Before is on the left after is on the right.
I was now able to see the full video with a higher quality in the render farm and I realized that the shader needed some adjusting
In Week 4 I properly managed to get the COPS shaders to work in the renderfarm by exporting the shader through ROPS.
Week 3
After doing this I rendered a frame on my machine to see how it looked like.
I also added a wine glass in the background.
Wine Glass - By: Akshat
After separating the mesh of the cigar I made a COPS network that would be used for the shader. I decided to use a mixture of VEX and VOPS. The VEX code moves between redOne and redTwo slowly using sin()
The next step I wanted to do is create a shader for the cigar tip. This is so that the cigar would be lit up and then slowly fade away. In SOPS I separated the cigar into two different parts, the tip and the body, the body would stay the same, but the tip would use a different texture.
After making this render, I noticed some shortcomings of it, firstly the lighting was still not the best. The first thing that I did was create some spotlights to create some shadows on the cigar. I also added a texture to the table.
Week 2
Important Notice: The portable SSD was improperly formatted, when I saved in Rocky Linux and moved to Windows 10 my HIP file got corrupted. Luckily I was able to use a backup that while outdated worked well.
Test frame from Karma to see how it would look, needs a lot of adjusting.
I decided to add a wrangle node that will kill particles after 3 seconds of being birthed. An issue with the smoke not being killed after a certain amount of time is that the cigar would no longer be visible and it would take a long time to cache.
After converting the smoke into a vbd and solving it and with help of Alessandro Pepe’s hip file to make the smoke look more like that of a cigar. This is a simple test, but I realized that caching the file is now much slower because I forgot to kill the particles.
One issue I had with the smoke was that it looked like it was coming out of a sphere. So what I decided to do is use the clip node to cut the edge and use that as the base for the smoke to give it a unique shape. After adjusting it the smoke has improved.
Now that the base of the smoke is set up I wanted to move on to giving it proper movement, I started my experiments by modifying the wind through hscript.
Again, the Ash tray I was using needed more modifying so I decided to change it once more.
New Ash tray - By: Vivekpandya24
Looking at References.
For the project I have decided to do a cigar laying on an ashtray. The big focus on this project would be the smoke of the cigar. I looked up multiple references of cigar smoke, many of them only lasted a couple seconds. I wanted the cigar smoke to last an approximately 7-10 seconds. Many of the videos also didn’t have a very clear smoke trail and the size was too little. I was also not a big fan of the camera angles.
After looking for a while I found a reference video that had almost everything I was looking for. The part that I found interesting was where the smoke makes a swirl.
Chosen Reference
Starting a Houdini File
I grabbed some assets from Sketchfab and made a very simple scene in Houdini. I might change the assets at a later period especially the ash tray, but they will work for now.
Beginning with Smoke
Alessandro Pepe was a great source on how to create a cigarette smoke, and I decided to use his blog post as assistance towards creating smoke. There is still a lot to adjust however, firstly, a cigar is bigger than a cigarette meaning that the amount of smoke produced is probably more due to the volume. Secondly, wind is essential, so I must adjust it properly to give it the swirl effect.
First Flip
https://pepefx.blogspot.com/2022/01/cigarette-smoke-part-3.html
This is only using the base pyro solver, there was only a few modifications to the smoke such as the turbulence of the smoke. That being said, one thing was very noticeable and that was the ash tray had to change. This current Ashtray obstructed the smoke and cigar too much and overall created a somewhat ugly composition. I decided to make a quick ash tray as all of the ash trays I found were too big.