In the past week, I have been focusing on finalizing the scene and the animation of the character and camera before I can start the simulations. I am pretty happy with how the camera and animation turns out and moving on adding rock cliff mountains in the background with heightfield.
Animation
Since I am not really an animator, I used a very quick way to animate the bike. I just project a curve with the ray node onto the ground plane in order to get up and downs of the hills and then keyframe the carve node to animate the point the bike is going to be copy onto. Finally, I animated the bike’s up and tilt movement and added noise to the motion to make the motion looks more natural.
Height Fields
This is my first time really dive into detail on how to use heightfield other than the one time I use it for the 3D Catan project. I have been following along with this tutorial series from Houdini’s YouTube channel.
Here are some reference photos of what kind of rocky desert cliff that I am going for.
I just finished creating the heightfield mountains. I will be working on texturing them in COP network next.
Thruster Fire
In addition to finalizing animation and adding mountains, I’ve also added the thruster fire to the bike. I was originally trying to do a pyro sim, but I realize that it is very small in the scene and not going to be very visible. Therefore, I followed this tutorial which is a very fast and easy solution.
With this method, it is very easy and customizable what it looks like and the shapes of the shock diamonds.
What I will be focusing on this week:
- Finishing up mountains with textures
- Starting texture and light the scene
- Starting portal simulation
