One Hour In
I found last week’s tutorial very easy and fun, but I expected this to be a little more intense, as it says on the tin. However, it did take me about 3 hours to get through the first hour of the tutorial. Most of the extra time it takes me to get through these is spent researching terms I don’t understand like “voronoi”, “vex”, “VDB” and “voxel”, going back to repeat the step when it happens too fast, or going even farther back to figure out why my results don’t match his. While the process makes sense to me overall, I often don’t understand the significance of many of the little steps or how Mehdi is able to tell that they are necessary. I’m also only about 80% confident that I understand the goal of our work in the first hour. I know that we’re creating a realistic fracture of the objects, but is exploded view the end result of the destruction or simply a way to review whether or not the fracture seems realistic? Despite this, I am able to follow along, and often understand it better towards the end of the tutorial, so perhaps it will all make more sense soon.
Side note- here’s a video I found that helped me get on the same page really quickly.
Hour and a Half In
Somehow, this took me even longer, and only for 30 minutes worth of tutorial. I was just about ready to give up for the night when I finally got to see the product of my work- this beautiful destruction- for the first time, and regained motivation.
I feel that, as with the last tutorial, it helps it come together for me to be able to visualize the product of the long line of work.
After a couple Houdini crashes on my slow computer, I figured out how to get my boolean fracture linked up to the DOP network for an even better effect.
I got the rbdmaterialfracture to run, but it’s incredibly slow and not really doable on my machine. I’m going to follow along with what Mehdi is doing in it so I can learn but I’ll have to keep my Houdini on manual update.
Day Two
Before plunging back into the tutorial, I took a mini break to smash something else out of sheer curiousity as well as to test how well I retained the skill.
I also wanted to try a building complex, but these are not made of a solid material and I’m not sure how to do that yet, so I’ll finish the tutorial first.
2 Hours In
The polyreduce node was a big help in speeding up my simulation enough to follow along with Mehdi, in addition of course to keeping my work on manual mode. I will keep that in mind in the future as our tutorials continue.
Unfortunately, it looks as though this will be the first tutorial I don’t complete. I got to the point where we create and active and inactive point group on the cabin so that the entire object isn’t moved during the collision, but rather a small part breaks. I copied Mehdi exactly over and over again and my product was always the same- no change.
The only possible explanation for the problem I could think was that my geometry supposedly has holes. I couldn’t figure out where or how to locate these, though, and I was using the simple geometry that we made during the tutorial.