Welcome to part II of our interview with Andy Boyd. If you haven’t read the first part yet, then read it here first.

od[force]: An area getting lots of flak here on od[force] is Houdini’s Cloth. The general consensus is that cloth is not exactly “ready to race” right now. What do you think about Houdini cloth? Where do you place it in regard to Maya’s nCloth which gets lot of praise generally?
Andy Boyd: I have not tried it, but heard it’s not the best cloth solution.  I have had a play with nCloth in Maya and it’s super easy to use, very fast and when I have a job that needs it I will go the nCloth route.

od[force]: What improvements would you like to see most in Houdini?
Andy Boyd: I want to see Mantra keep improving, no matter how good the software is, it’s the rendered images that count the most. I want to see Mantra beat Mental Ray, I think it’s almost there.

od[force]: What does it lack compared to Mental Ray?
Andy Boyd: Speed when it come to multi proc rendering. In fact on my Windows machine it’s broken! I can only ever preview with one proc while the other 3 do nothing.

od[force]: I’m not happy with it on my Windows install either, but on my Linux install it screams.
Andy Boyd: Yes, I have heard Linux is better.

od[force]: What is the place of Houdini at Method? How much of the overall 3D production is done in Houdini?
Andy Boyd: They only started using it when I started 7 months ago. There are 12 3D artists and 3 of us use Houdini – but all the others are very interested.

od[force]: That’s interesting to hear. So there is potential for growth
Andy Boyd: We have budgeted to have 2 Masters and 2 Escapes for April onward. Then when big jobs come in we will just rent, works out cheaper.

od[force]: Based on your experience, what do you feel the generic “Houdini user” is lacking? Are they too technical as it is generally considered? What do you recommend to someone who chooses Houdini as his primary package and is looking to find a job at Method?
Andy Boyd: I find advanced users are very good at all things – but character setup seems to be low on Houdini users “to learn” list! However as our team grows and I interview for junior 3D positions I found that most newbies who start using Houdini just know how to do particle effects, or some cool DOPs setups as they think it is an effects tool. Please learn to light, render, build shaders with VOPs and read Craig’s book (Houdini on the Spot). This will make you more useful in production.

od[force]: That’s good advice
od[force]: Tell us a little about the squirrel in the Bridgestone commercial; how did you approach the fur? Was it the built in toolset or some proprietary stuff?
Andy Boyd: I used the new fur procedural in H9 and CVex for shaping the fur – worked very well. Busy doing it again on a kangaroo!

od[force]: Any simulations? Wire dops?
Andy Boyd: Yes the workflow is paint attributes onto geo > comb normals for groom > copy curves (guides) that are shaped by attribute and groom > guides run though a DOP wire solver > new simulated guides are pasted to fur procedural
There is a video with the Mandrills from a commercial I did at Framestore
The fur procedural renders great in mantra, was handling a million plus hairs with motion blur and depth of field.

od[force]: Great! Thanks for that.

od[force]: What was your role in the “End of innocence” short movie?
Andy Boyd: CG supervisor/TD. I created all the environments 3D – everything but a few shots on the grass was filmed blue screen. Biggest challenge was creating the 3D forests. I rendered them in one go, not in layers, using the new delayed load in H9. The individual trees were created with L-systems then written our to disk to be read at render time.

od[force]: Fantastic, thanks so much for the interview.

Interview by Dragos Stefan

Tags: andy boyd, framestore, Interview, method, squirrel

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