WIP

It’s been quite a while since I started working on this animation, and I’m finally getting around to posting a WIP.

As I mentioned a few times when I posted the Zhao animation, the character animation itself has already been completed, with the exception of the simulations. I believe I also mentioned that I needed some extra time because I was studying a new rendering workflow that I wanted to try. I’d like to explain a little more about that today.

This is going to be a fairly long post, so you definitely don’t have to read the whole thing. I’ll leave a summary at the end!

1. What am I changing?

This part might get a little technical.

When I was rendering with Blender, I wasn’t really happy with the way the character fur looked. It might simply be because of my lack of knowledge, but no matter what I tried, fur didn’t come out quite as nicely as I wanted it to in Blender.

Up until now, I’ve been using lighting to make the fur look as good as possible. However, doing it that way comes with a lot of limitations and restrictions. I especially felt those limitations very strongly with this animation.

So I decided to use Houdini to create the fur instead.

Houdini is a program that is used extensively in the 3D animation and computer graphics industry. I believe it will allow me to create the more stylized, cartoony fur that I’m looking for, so I decided to give it a try.

I’ve actually used Houdini before, mainly for fluid and soft-body simulations. However, this is my first time using Houdini for rendering, so I have quite a bit to learn about that workflow. That’s one of the main reasons I’ve been spending so much time on this lately.

2. What are the benefits?

I’m not doing all of this just because of the fur.

Previously, my workflow was basically:

Animate everything in Blender → do the necessary simulations in Houdini → export the simulation results back to Blender → render everything in Blender.

It turned out to be a lot more tedious than I expected.

If I can handle the rendering in Houdini as well, I can simplify that entire process quite a bit. And as a result, I’ll be able to use a much wider variety of simulations in my animations.

Until now, every time I wanted to do a simulation, I had to export and import the models between Blender and Houdini. Aside from being tedious, it was also easy to get confused about which file was which if I didn’t keep track of everything properly.

Because of that, I’ve always tried to minimize the amount of simulation used in my animations whenever possible.

If I can get this new workflow working, I won’t have to worry about that nearly as much anymore.

3. Why is this taking so long?

Blender and Houdini use different renderers, which means their material systems work differently as well. So I have to recreate all of the materials in Houdini.

For most materials, this isn’t a huge problem. However, some of the more complicated materials created in Blender may be difficult to reproduce in Houdini.

And I also have to recreate the fur in Houdini.

That’s actually where I’ve been spending most of my time lately. I’m still learning how to make it work, and I’m really hoping I can eventually get the fur looking as nice as I have in mind.

4. Why didn’t I mention this earlier?

Trying something new doesn’t always mean it’s going to work.

Houdini is also well known for being a very difficult program to learn, so I honestly consider the possibility of this whole experiment failing to be fairly high.

I didn’t want to confidently announce that I was going to do this, spend several months making little to no progress, and then come back saying, “Yeah… I don’t think this is going to work after all,” before going back to my old workflow.

I’ve usually handled things like this by quietly studying and experimenting in my spare time first. Once I have a better idea of whether something is actually feasible, I tell you guys about it.

That’s basically what I’ve been doing this time as well.

To be honest, I still can’t say with confidence that this is going to work.

But I also felt that if I waited any longer to talk about it, it might look like I wasn’t doing anything at all. So… here we are.

TL;DR

I’m currently learning a new program in order to create better-looking, more stylized fur.

The problem is that this program is ridiculously difficult, so there’s no guarantee that I’ll actually succeed with this new workflow.

I need a bit more time to work on it, but in the meantime, I’ll occasionally post some Zhao animations and continue preparing the next animation.

So please wait a little longer for the Umb animation.

Thank you!