Day 16 -- 28/6/2011 Tuesday

I checked my mail, kind of like the first thing I would do went I settled down in the office. I received a email form Steven about toon shader on Houdini mailing list. "What is a Houdini mailing list?" I thought. I replied asking where can i find this Houdini mailing list, only to be given the task to find out what is it. The first thing in my mind was somewhere in Odforce or in Sidefx website itself. I couldn't find the Houdini mailing list but found some threads on toon shading on Sidefx forum though. I downloaded some of the hip file provided and played with it. Most of them has the outline of the geometry darken/thicken, with layer of color ramp to mimic shading technique.

While at it trying to test the Vex network, Zack, a intern, began his lesson on basic rendering/lighting. The speed of the lesson was just nice and covered all the basics with great detail.

These are some of the things I learned ; 

>Hold alt key to set the height of the light when click on the shelf tool.

>Use a null node to control the translate of the light with its look at option set to the null node.

> Hold shift+drag on an area in render view for render region.

>Cone delta, cone angle & cone roll-off is similar to the lighting decay of spotlight in Maya.

>Area lights like the disk & grid light option have more light sample thus having softer shadows.

>How and when to use geometry light.

>In render view, hit the render button to regenerate depth-map shadow(if using).

>Using three point light to light a single object with variation of light intensity.

>Spotlight as key-light, Environment light as fill-light and another spotlight(place opposite key-light) as rim-light.

>sample quality to remove noise, larger = less noise + longer calculation.

These are some of the things, there is more but I don't want to go on. Overall, I learned how to do basic lighting after this lesson, did not know how to do this previously. After that, I continued on refining the previs. Jiabao showed me how Daniel, the previous batch intern, did a formation of object. I did it and applied what I learned from the lighting class into this scene.

Trans-former from Tanner Caelum on Vimeo.

Fun

After work, we get off early by 10 minutes to follow Lu Sheng to get his cough syrup at CVS pharmacy, if I'm not wrong, its at 7th street. While he is at it, Bryan and I checked out the same comic store we went a week ago. The store was beside the pharmacy. After spending some time looking for a good comic book to buy, couldn't get any as it was quite expensive. We went next door to get our dinner at Jack-in-the-box, a Mexican burger fast food outlet.