Posts Tagged ‘Interview’

“Solomon Kane” is a film directed by Michael J. Bassett based on a character from pulp author Robert E. Howard, who is widly known for “Conan the Barbarian”. The fantasy movie was produced by a consortium of French, Czech and British Companies and was mostly filmed in the Czech Republic. The opening title was designed by Benjamin Cuénod (scripted reality) and done in Houdini by Christian Kelch (Rebels of Design). He spoke to us about the production pipeline, advantages of Houdini, and future plans.
by Lauren Kozak and J.-E. Burkert

Please tell us something about yourself and when you started to use Houdini for your work.
Hi! My forum name is calix, I’m 33 years old and living in Munich/Germany. For more than ten years I have been working as a freelancing 3D Artist for different Companies, mostly in the field of Product Visualization and Commercials. Unfortunately for my daily work, I still have to use Softimage, but two years ago I started to spend more and more time with Houdini!

Why did you decide to work with Houdini on this job?
Simply because I didn’t know how to handle this job in another software on one workstation. Houdini is extremely scalable, so it was easy to write every part of the simulation reliable to disk. It was very straight forward to work on small steps, the modeling of the broken letters, the RBD, and Smoke simulation. Another positive side effect of this choice was learning a lot about the procedural work flow in Houdini.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the production and the pipeline?
A company I work for told me that Benjamin Cuénod is searching for a 3D Animator to work on the 3D title animation for a feature film. I never heard about “Solomon Kane” before, but we got the first ten minutes of the film and started to work on the breakup sequence. I did many versions of the effect with RBD simulations until I asked Martin Matzeder (sanostol) if he could help me to do a more controllable setup. In the end, the breakup which the director liked most was a simple RBD simulation to the left with dissolving pieces. We worked for about four weeks on the title animation.

I started out modeling the individual letters in Rhino because I wanted more control on the bevels and insets. I exported it with a high poly count to Houdini to have a nice topology for generating the chunks with the Cookie SOP. The designer wanted the letters to have a sword slice through some of the letters so I had to work on it one by one, make groups for the pieces and write every character to disk. Now I was able to read parts of the logo into Houdini and start to work on the simulation. In the end, I added a dissolving of the pieces, which was a simple scaling with the help of the Foreach SOP. Finally, I had to simulate smoke layers for the pieces, but the fluids simulation was way too slow, so I replaced the chunks with simple spheres. The lighting was done with the environment light and a HDR image, and I used a slightly modified old metal shader from the material palette for the letters.

There really was no pipeline. I worked and rendered on a Mac Pro 8-Core workstation and delivered the final 2,5K passes to Benjamin, who comped everything in After Effects. The final grading was done by LipSync Post in London.

The rendering was done completely in Houdini? Please tell us some details about this.
I worked with the old metal shader preset, which already had image planes like diffuse and reflection defined, so I only had to render an additional Ambient Occlusion pass. Rendering was very fast with the Micropolygon Renderer, although the shader had displacement and I had to use high pixel sampling values because of the environment light. The smoke was rendered with the billowy smoke shader and a simple spot light.

Can you tell about upcoming productions and Houdini?
Sadly, very few Companies are working with Houdini here in Munich . A few users do monthly meetings with interested artists to build up a little Houdini community. It takes some time, but more and more people are getting a grasp about the possibilities Houdini has to offer, and the Companies are starting to get interested.

I already did a few little jobs now with Houdini, and I’m trying to get more and more projects where I can use the benefits of a procedural work flow. I’m also working on ideas for an animated short, which will of course be done with Houdini.

Information:

Solomon Kane: Official Site
IMDB: Solomon Kane
Wikipedia: Solomon Kane

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

(more…)

Part II of our interview with Jordi. If you haven’t read it yet, part I can be found here.

(more…)

Jordi Bares is the joint head of 3D and a VFX Supervisor at the Mill in London. Recently the Mill decided to use Houdini on a new Guinness commercial, and Jordi was kind enough to talk to us about the decision and what he thinks of Houdini and it’s future at the Mill.

Take a look at the commercial here (click on the Guinness link) and then come back to read the interview and see some making of clips.

(more…)