To achieve the "i'n and out" in the rows of cubes, I thought of a few ways to do it. First was to use Bryan's terrain generator, a otl he use in the final year project. The terrain generator, what it does basically is to "displace" the black portion of the file map the user puts in. I tried putting a checker picture as the file map. The result was not too bad but the drawback was it was slow and laggy. The next method I had in mind was to use the checker picture as a displacement map. This method was fast, very fast also lag-free but the disadvantage was that it looks quite weak and has black artifact. After that, I tried the polyextrude method. Using this expression on the Z-axis of polyextrude: rand($PR) It will create the "in and out" effect nicely.
TERRAIN GENERATOR METHOD
DISPLACEMENT METHOD
POLYEXTRUDE METHOD
I went to Odforce to find out more ways to do this. I wanted to explore more and play with variations, to optimize my scene, find something that is fast, manageable and above decent-looking results.
While on it, Ari showed us how he did his tornado sequence. He let us see the break-down(anatomy) of the tornado, wanting us to understand the concept behind the formation of tornado before going straight into it. After which, he told us the two key node to make the tornado. A metaball as attractor and FORCE to drive the direction of wind. He explains stuff on the way, one of the examples was what's the difference between Rand and Noise.
Rand : No history of its last position (a non-predictable movement)
Noise: Moves in a single translate, + or - its current position (a predictable movement)
After getting the shape and the force done, the next step was to get its look. A particle sop to copy sprites onto it.
Once finished, we went back to our work. I went to Houdini's mailing list and checked out the posts on toon shader. Played with a few hip files but was quite advance for me to understand.
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