Episode 6- The Rendering Reckoning

I gotta say, this week I had high ambitions that have been somewhat tempered by the rendering process.

I started following along to a super interesting basic tutorial series on youtube called “Houdini isn’t scary”. (A name I find somewhat encouraging, other people struggle just as much as I do! Misery loves company I guess?). So I watched about a quarter of the first video in the series of 5, (that they’ve uploaded so far) and this guy knows how to really put things into context, which is incredibly helpful because that’s my current largest stumbling block with learning the basics of Houdini. So…I skipped ahead a bit. I watched videos 3-5 in his tutorials and felt like I was really jivein’ along. I learned about several different ways that I can setup dynamics simulations and the basics of taking objects that I’ve created and having them interact. Actually, check this out- The series is about making a doughnut and having sprinkles fall down onto it. Sounds simple right?

It wasn’t.

But it WAS super cool. So basically there’s a number of different ways you can accomplish this, but what we did was take the model he created, texture it, light it, and apply dynamics that essentially generated these little sprinkles and had them populate above and fall across the doughnut. Then, you have to make the doughnut a surface that can be collided with, and apply some other dynamics that create the “Stickiness” of the icing, and you’ve got yourself a really cool little scene! I even went above and beyond and animated the camera to do a camera move that rotates around the doughnut as the particle simulation of sprinkles falls.

But alas, this is where the tutorial ended. Since it’s a very new series, he hasn’t made the next video on rendering yet, so I have no choice but to wait until that comes out.

This did not however, stop me from attempting to figure out how to do it anyway. 2 1/2 hours of fishing through youtube videos, forums and other tutorials later I thought I had cobbled together the solution. I hit render to disk. 58 minutes of suspenseful waiting/dinner prep later, it appeared to have finished and…

The file was corrupt.

Oh well. At least I learned a solid way to NOT get a correct render, so I know now to try something different in the future.

Pretty solid week though, I got a new tattoo yesterday, so that was pretty cool. Here’s a few screenshots from this week of (attempted) rendering. (Click to cycle through them)

Jake-out.