Hello and welcome back in this lecture, we are going to be checking out this image a little more.
This was the select that I decided to use for the lecture to blow this building up.
There's a couple of things you have to do in order to create the image that we need to project on to
our geometry.
We're going to be doing a technique here where we model this building based off of the image.
So we're going to be bringing this image into Houdini, setting up a base, a camera that is in the
general position that I was in when I photographed this building in the parking lot.
And then we're going to use that to then place a lot of different tubes, and we're just going to be
duplicating a lot of things over and over and over again doing a lot of billions.
It's actually quite boring, but it has to be done.
I'm not going to record the entire creation process because it took me about four and a half to five
hours to model this whole thing out, and it would be extremely boring and uninteresting to check that
out.
You won't typically be responsible for creating the model for something like this anyways if you're
working for a production company.
You'll be the dynamics artist.
It'll be your job and only your job to do the dynamic effects you have the model created from the modeling
department.
The camera will be set up from the camera department.
You will not have to take care of these things, but I am going to step through the scene file just
to show you the general idea of how it was done.
And I'll also be included so you can look through it on your own if you want to just check out all the
nodes that are used.
It's truly just a lot of cubes and billions is basically all.
It is lots of billions.
So what we're going to do here, though, is camera projections.
So what that means is, like I said, we're going to model this thing out.
You're going to see the model.
It's going to line up perfectly or as perfect as we can or as perfect as it's needed to be to the elements
in this image.
So we're going to build a little pillar here and it's going to line up.
We're going to move it back, line it up, everything on the line up, nice.
And then we just project the image doing a camera projection.
So that'll make it look like this image is actually on the geometry.
Now, everything is great about that.
But if you think about it, let's try to draw on this thing here and just see what happens.
So.
OK, I got a I got a brush on here that's not going to be too good for us because it's a textured brush,
so let's just do this.
Let's try to get a different color here, colors.
By the way, this software is called affinity.
You're going to need some type of layered editing software in order to paint what we need.
We need to do a clean plate.
I'm going to explain that later, but you're going have to have something that's a layered ED.
Anything from free software like -- will work just fine if you have Photoshop.
Even better, if you don't have Photoshop and are tired of using free --, you can buy this affinity
software.
I think it's only $50 the last time I checked, and I think with that $50, you get upgrades for life,
so that's very nice.
You never have to worry about paying any more money to get the better version or the newer version.
OK, so let's now start drawing here.
We're basically that's not a big enough brush hair brush.
16.
I'm going to pull out my tablet here just to make it a little easier to draw on this thing.
Sorry if there's any noise here in the background.
And OK.
So let's start here.
Basically, we're going to have.
A model looks like this.
And it's going to come down like this.
Can I have a little bass here?
OK.
We're going to project this texture so that we will see this exact texture on this pillar geometry.
It's a very simple trick.
It's very effective.
It makes it so you don't have to set up any real shader networks or anything.
It's just the lighting is baked right into the image, and it makes it very easy to get a photo real
image on geometry because you're actually using the photograph here now.
Now we're going to have this thing blast out.
So just to draw this quickly here, if we have another pillar here, sorry for my squiggly lines here,
but you get the idea.
Let's say we're going to break this all up and this is going to crumble.
Let's say we break this out like this.
What's going to happen then?
When we blow out this pillar, we're going to have pieces shooting out, OK, and now we're going to
not have a pillar anymore in our scene file, OK?
It's going to blast out.
We're going to have chunks laying all over the ground here.
So what's going to be behind this?
Well, we're going to have this back wall.
OK.
That's going to be in the model.
And that's going to get the exact same projected image.
So when this pillar geometry breaks out, you're going to see the pillar again on this back geometry
because it's all getting projected to the same camera.
And that would completely ruin our effect.
We wouldn't have any, you know, ability to make this work if you blasted out this pillar and the pillar
is still there because it's on the background geometry.
It completely ruins our effect here.
So you got to do something called a clean plate.
So this is what our clean plate is going to look like.
You can see here there are no pillars, I've painted them all out, OK?
It's very simple to do this.
I'm not going to go through the process of creating this entire clean plate because once again, as
the dynamics artist, you won't be required to do this.
But I can show you very quickly a general idea of how you do it.
We want to create a new layer.
You get something like a rubber stamp tool clone tool.
Depending on what software you're using, it's going to be named something else.
We're going to want a fairly large brush here.
All right.
Let's try to reenact that, sorry.
Get this bigger brush that's too big of a brush.
Don't want to go crazy now here.
I should be right.
Harness, that's fine.
It's typically will hold down your alt key and then click somewhere with your left mouse.
Click to pick an area for duplication.
It's not like that in all software, but most of it is you would just do this.
Well, out here, we've got to get one more thing source current layer, you're going to want current
layer and below.
So that means on this pixel layer, it'll still be able to sample anything below it.
I think Photoshop has the same type of set up there.
Now you can see wherever I move this mouse, it's going to show you what we're duplicating.
So, you know, if you painted this like this?
You would have a new window now.
Now, obviously, you wouldn't want to duplicate this pillar here, this this part of the concrete,
you know, I'm just using a very large brush just to give you a general idea.
But that's what you would do and you would do it over and over again until you've got something like
this where you're going to have a fairly cleaned up looking background.
Now, for this example, it's not exactly crucial because, like I said, we're going to be completely
replacing these windows anyways.
You can see, obviously from my clean plate that I've painted, we have a duplicate of the same light
here over here.
You know, we've got this feature you can see is in here.
This reflection is the same as here, so it's kind of falls apart.
It's not perfect, but it honestly doesn't matter because we're going to be replacing this window glass
altogether.
It won't have any other reflections coming from this image.
We couldn't leave these reflections in because think about it, once you crack this glass up and blasted
out of that window geometry, those shards of glass are rotating and spinning.
The reflections should be changing.
If we were projecting a texture map onto that reflective geometry, you'd see the same reflection no
matter how it was angled, and that would not be correct at all.
So we're going to be replacing all this glass.
It doesn't matter all that much.
What you do need to do is just make sure you paint the clean plate and have these pillars because,
you know, we're going to need that geometry to be there.
And it would look like I said very funny if we blasted out a lot of these pillars here and saw Pillar
behind it.
So you just need to make sure you paint a clean plate.
This is all going to be included in this setup.
You're not going to have to paint anything.
It's all going to be good to go for you.
The point of this series of this course is the dynamics aspect of it, not the modeling and texturing
aspect of it or the the painting of clean plates that typically wouldn't be your role as a dynamic artist.
If you're working at a small company, you might have to do a lot more than a dynamics artist would
do in a large company.
There might not be separate roles for artists if you're in a small place.
So it's good to know how to do it.
It's very simple, actually, when you get the concept down.
Once you get the idea and know that, OK, this geometry is going to be gone.
So I have to have something to project on the geometry that will be behind it or else will still see
this geometry.
Once you understand that, it's very simple.
Again, I also cropped this image to be the correct aspect ratio.
Just remember, if you're doing your own photography, you're going to have to crop that image down.
I suggest you paint the clean plate on the full image and then just crop it down to whatever camera
you want to be using in Houdini.
Typically, it's if it's an HD framing like a 1920 by 10 A.D., it'll be that one point seven seven
eight aspect ratio.
So as long as you get that same aspect ratio, it doesn't need to be the same resolution.
In fact, this image is much larger than 1920 10 80.
It just needs to be the same ratio, so one is projected it'll project correctly and you'll have everything
lined up as you want it to.
So in the next lecture, we will open up the actual geometry file and we will start checking out how
I model this scene.
We're not going to look at a step by step or watch me doing it interactively because it is extremely
boring watching me place cubes and doing volumes for four and a half hours straight.
So we'll just step through it so you can see the layout and how it's done.
All right, I will see you in the next lecture.