This project creates shadow effects with Houdini Digital Assets (HDA). The aim is to generate shadow geometries on given models and eventually consume it entirely. Shadow geometries are created by the first HDA, users could select different patterns and manipulate the parameters to create a variety of looks. The second HDA generates particles that create the consuming effect on the given model and swirl decomposing effects after consumption.
A realtime procedural creature generation system built in Unity. The aim was to create a more open ended generation system than had existed previously. A base body is created using free form deformation, it is rigged and skinned automatically. Limbs are then attached to create one of three creature types swimming, flying or walking. Animations are all driven procedurally and adapt to the creature generated.
This work demonstrates the usage of voronoi fracture extrusions for creating a procedural city blocks. The user is able to control 4 stages of the creation the flora such as trees, bushes, waters like rivers), buildings (city centre, residential area, administrative buildings) and roads with pathways.
This project presents a modular rigging pipeline that enables user to create rigs using either Python API directly or via node-based interface. The system aims to be extensible, allowing rigger to add new custom rig components or extend already existing ones. In order to be tool-oriented this pipeline utilizes metadata concept and component to Python class bindings which leads to consistent functionality for any additional tools.
SDF raymarching algorithms have been typically slow for real-time use until today. And no matter how optimized and efficient they are, real-time and interactive usage of these algorithms, once the CPU-GPU communication occurs, can be quite resource-intensive and expensive, which may lead to low performance and stalling the application. This thesis describes a Vulkan-based implementation for SDF Raymarching in real-time aiming to provide a proof-of-concept, as a mean for creating efficient solutions that simplify runtime evaluation of complex data through the GPU with a low-overhead CPU to GPU abstraction.
The nature of this project was to design and implement an interactive shader editor that is equally accessible to both programmers and artists. The tool provides users with the choice between a code or node editor, to develop fragment shaders. The former requires previous GLSL experience, with users expect to code their shaders from scratch. However, the latter requires no previous programming experiences and takes advantage of a node-based editor, using a pre-implemented Ray Marching algorithm.
This project documents the procedural simulation of rotting and decay, which is a natural phenomime many have seen. It can be simulated to add realism to a scene. Several papers relating to this topic have been discussed, highlighting some of the commonly used techniques. A custom-made solver was developed in Houdini18.5 using the Pyro Sop Solver and predominantly the VEX Wrangles and VOP networks to simulate this process. This report outlines the framework to create a rotting simulation of several fruits; apple, banana and orange. This digital asset will allow the user to input their modelled fruit and set various parameters to create the desired rotting effect they wish. Further development is required to add further realism into the simulation
Based on the SIGGRAPH paper "Synthetic Silviculture - Multi-scale Modeling of Plant Ecosystems" I created a plant-growth visualiser in Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) using C++ and Blueprints. This could then be extended in the future to implement a fully interactive forest generation tool that can be used in any UE4 project.
This pproject demonstrates the generation of a Houdini Digital Asset for ivy growth. This procedural tool can generate a variety of different scenes based on user defined parameter values. The ivy is generated using a sort of particle based method first introduced in 1985 by Reeves and Blau (1985). Using this as the basis for the growth algorithm, the HDA also simulates external tropisms such as gravitropism and phototropism. Along with the ability to automatically generate ivy, this tool allows the user the more stylistic approach of drawing ivy directly onto the environment geometry. This highly art-directable procedural tool demonstrates an easy way to generate climbing ivy.
This is an implementation of the smoke fluid settlement based on the BiMocq2(2 levels of Bi-directional mapping of convective quantities) method to obtain a more detailed, more precise and stable fluid simulation. This implementation is done using houdini so that Houdini users can easily apply it in their daily work. This implementation is slightly different from the original paper. The order of the algorithm steps is slightly adjusted, and the final method of affecting the speed variable is changed to better fit Houdini's original smoke simulation.
Vulkan is a low-level graphics and compute API which aims to provide users with faster draw speeds by removing overhead from the driver. The user is expected to explicitly provide the details previously generated by the driver. The resulting extra code can be difficult to understand and taxing to write for beginners, leading to the need for a helper library.
A custom MPM solver created in Houdini using mostly VEX and gas microsolver nodes. The ten step process presented in 'A material point method for snow simulation' is implemented. A tool to create custom snow scenes in Houdini using the solver is also provided.
This project developed a physics game toolkit, created in Unreal Engine. The toolkit combined both Blueprint scripting and C++ programming by prototyping new systems in Blueprints, then re-creating them in code for added efficiency. These code systems were then exposed to Blueprint in the form of key variables and functions. This created an interface for an end user to use the toolkit while also allowing for future expansion, entirely in Blueprint if desired. Finally, the finished toolkit has been showcased in the form of a demo puzzle, utilising all systems in the toolkit and displaying how they could work together to generate puzzles in a physics-based game.
This project implements the ODE-based C2 continuous surface creation technique to recreate two models in the same topology with different expressions. Besides, it blends the surface creation method with geometric and physics-based skin deformation approaches to show, (1)the advantages of the ODE-based surface creation technique,(2)the more realistic result of physics-based skin deformation approach,(3)the feasibility of blending this two approaches together
Thesis A Fluid Implicit Particle (FLIP) Sovler Built in Houdini
Abstract The following thesis presents the research and implementation of a Fluid Implicit Particle (FLUID). A literature review is included in order to highlight the most commonly used techniques for simulating fluids in the Visual Effects and Computer Graphics industries as well as critically analyse and compare them.