Meeting with mentor.. Week 3 Day 2

The Houston (Jalapenos, pepper jack cheese, iceberg lettuce, fresh tomato & spicy sauce) & salad with blue cheese

 Here I've taken the earlier asset and refined it further, allowing the user to break up the strands from before into even more strands, achieving two levels of spiraling.

The add node creates a point at the origin, which is then transformed and copied just like the circle cross-section in my previous version of the tool. The transform offsets the curve from the center, creating the spiral when copied and the copy node uses an expression in the translate to keep the distance from the first to last point the same as the input curve. The second add node creates a polygon curve from the points given. This then goes into the foreach, which contains basically my entire previous asset. 

 A single "major" strand.

The contents of the foreach node.

Controller for the Digital Asset

Annnd it's weekly challenge day again! This time we had to model and light an object in Houdini for compositing into a photograph. Unfortunately no one could figure out how to get a the ground to be a shadow catcher, so we're going to continue it next week.

Test comp without render passes

We also met with Charles again today, and I further refined the scope of my project. I would increase the screen time of the jellyfish to focus on and showcase procedural animation instead of spending the time modeling the arm (nothing especially really exciting and special). The arm would now only be a rough model, with the majority in shadow. And apparently Charles was an intern at SESI only last year! And since then he's worked on Halo 4's trailer and Wrath of the Titans! Wow!


Dennis Blakey (Dennis Blakey - IMDb) from Digital Domain also came by to share some of his history and give an informal talk to us. He says that if we find our passion, the area that excites us most, and focus on it, doors will magically open.. :D