I thought I was done with the procedural glyphs project but it occured to me there was another approach I could take and I had to give it a try. The results are a bit closer to feeling handwritten. What would be really interesting would be to develop a continuous cursive-like script with some form of punctuation.
Update: Cursive writing GET.
I recently was working on an effect which needed some mystical “runes”. I was going to draw some when it occured to me this was the sort of thing Houdini does well, why not generate some? It’s the kind of thing that’s been done before in various ways, but it made for a fun little project. Here are some results.
https://80.lv/articles/using-hooke-s-law-to-create-vfx-effects/
I wrote an article for the game-and-vfx website 80 Level a while back, and it’s gone live. The topic is Hooke’s law as implemented in Popcorn FX (and Unity’s VFX graph.) It’s brief but has been well received, I appreciate the feedback I’ve gotten. A second article for 80.lv centered around Newton’s universal gravitation as implemented in PopcornFX (and Houdini this time) is in the works.
PopcornFX is a great tool for realtime applications in that it brings to developers a ready-to-integrate particle system which can be used to author sophisticated effects in a nodal/visual style akin to Houdini, ICE etc. I find it much more intuitive than Niagara while easily being as powerful, and it’s integration into After Effects brings those users a level of sophistication with particle effects they simply haven’t had access to before. That said, when I push the limits it understandably can’t chew through the millions of particles Houdini can handle.
For example in PKFX this frost-like propagation effect, which is admittedly computationally expensive, tops out in usefulness at about 50,000 particles. The in-editor framerates are still good (relatively speaking) at 220 ms, comfortable enough for cinematography work in After Effects for example. But when you push the number of particles up beyond that times go up exponentially. By 100k particles (for this particular task, which involves getting neighboring particle information) the editor becomes increasingly likely to crash.
But to be fair this kind of propagation effect is waaay beyond what most realtime engines are engineered to handle. Other effects in PopcornFX can get into the realm of millions of particles without too much trouble, which means those After Effects users have a system which lets them perform most particle effects they are likely to need extremely efficiently… and only need to go to a package like Houdini for the really intensive stuff.
And at the moment these computations are only on the CPU as PKFX is still implementing its GPU support. There is a lot of improvement on the near horizon for these kinds of intensive effects… we may see sph fluids and the like running realtime soon enough.
(It’s also worth mentioning that there is a LOT of room to optimize the effect as built, both with regular settings and as one of the PopcornFX devs points out massive increases in efficiency should be possible by only performing spatial queries on the particles changing values and depositing stable values into a static layer.)
It’s significant that those integrating PopcornFX into realtime tools get a system sophisticated enough that a comparison with Houdini is even possible.
In all, I’m pretty impressed with PKFX and as an effects guy would welcome jobs where it’s integrated into custom pipelines dealing with realtime media even over Niagara and certainly over Unity’s particle system. It is elegant to use without sacrificing power, and it’s universal nature means one day artists might be able to share and use particle assets across multiple engines and custom pipelines.
A stylized render of data from Shanghai. Just a test.
I’ve released 25 terrain/landscape maps for the unreal marketplace. These are intended to act as starting points for environmental projects, hopefully people will find them useful. All heightmaps are of course made in Houdini, and tend to be several miles across.
The most interesting thing about this project was creating the procedural material in unreal which textures large environments based on criterial like slope, height etc. This project is over 10 gigs of assets!
In all, this was a very fun project, and very rewarding work. I can’t wait to see what people do with these heightmaps.
I did a little job for a studio in Prague recently which consisted of a series of “spell” effects for a RPG. I can’t show any of those effects of course but along the way I made a number of other interesting little Niagara effects, here are a few:
The images below are a mixed bag, design wise. But they were fun to make. Oddly the brief was to make effects which were baked down into spritesheets, for a mobile release. It was strange, but it did allow me to up some particle counts and rely less on billboards in Niagara. I’m not sure I like the look but it was nice to be able to explore Niagara in this way.
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/vector-field-collection The collection of 109 vector fields I placed on Unreal Marketplace for Cascade and Niagara is now live and response has been really gratifying, thank you! If you’re using this pack, please send me links to what you’ve made, I can’t wait to see what people are doing with them!
Here’s a first look: a procedural (generated) shape from Houdini converted into Niagara particles using SideFX Labs .hbjson cache and animated to “collapse” in real-time.
