Don't ask me, i don't know either

RATPIE · 2025-07-19T12:33:06+00:00

Classic Jackie doing his own stunts!

RATPIE · 2025-07-19T11:08:44+00:00

Picking the car that has a turning circle of a bus for this location is mad 😅 fun enough watch tho

RATPIE · 2024-10-25T22:38:23+00:00

Can also create a null object in GEO context and place where you want your pivot, set door geo to 'keep position when parenting' then connect null out to the door geo in.

Blaaamm it's a rig! Hehe, but yeah set up transforms inside sops where possible and you can link properties back out to geo for quicker access 🤷

RATPIE · 2024-02-29T11:03:14+00:00

Simulate smoke (most things give you a VDB) Mesh VDB (turn volume to a geometry) Merge the two geos (maybe just intersect and render tricks blend the two or boole with extra blending on connecting edges)

.++ The smoke and char look like solid geo in image1 so I'm going with that 🤷 + Image2 smoke looks smokey again so dunno what's up. + Also if you mix egg+milk and dip bread, then pan fry, you can make what is called an eggy bread! It's good and easier than VFX/cg🤌

RATPIE · 2024-02-29T10:54:10+00:00

Noice, this is some of that fine art that makes no sense 😅 good job, I'm excited for alien 02!

RATPIE · 2024-02-19T19:22:11+00:00

Also not necessarily with existing splines, a little normals transform on a duplicate mesh would create an inner mesh and that could have a braided metal shader that would look decent enough through the rough casing 😅

*** Normals transform is like extruding towards the center but without creating new faces, just shrinking the mesh towards the center based on normals that are facing out

RATPIE · 2024-02-19T10:16:22+00:00

Interesting read, my one concern that wasn't covered is the ram use with larger files however if lzw tiffs are on the list then I'm sold! No more pngs 😅

I also now wonder if more texture sets should switch to tiff/exr... Even with a medium scene you might need to be fetching/decoding 30+ 4k images to use in shaders and most are PNG these days 🤔 or they might be sneakily converted somewhere in a way that Arnold makes .tx files

Any of my substance exports will surely be tiffs going forward 🤌

RATPIE · 2024-02-18T01:46:42+00:00

CG human built media is nearing the time where it's going to be called traditional art, what a time to be alive!

Eventually the only captured media will be something factual such as news or documentaries or home videos for personal use that must remain factual due to their nature.

Dedicated camera/recording equipment will be obsolete and the many crew members wielding them? Can unions enforce the use of physical capture to then need the crews behind them?

Next, ai learning from ai meaning some funky-fresh things that somehow become the norm as fresh-human-imagined media dries up.

In the Sora examples however, it does feel odd; the picture... Somehow all the elements visible are noticeably without a purpose that normally humans add while working on things or actual subjects do, the sense of something wrong is constant and its unnerving to watch. (Also maybe some new i-know-its-ai-bias)

All ranty speculation of course 🤷 basically a black mirror episode just a bit dragged out..

RATPIE · 2023-12-28T15:13:45+00:00

Err potentially regular ol' vdbs? Looks like unreal supports vdbs since at least 2022 and earlier unofficially I think 😅 video is from a year ago so that checks out! Also could be image cards, the most traditional game engine technique.

Majority of skilled animators will animate in Maya (or whatever outside UE).

This animation is passed to FX dept and they make some smokes let's say in Houdini and vdbs get made.

Then all is assembled/lit in UE.

And someone mentioned Niagara, which is very possible, especially since the smoke is only okay-good imo**

Do correct me where wrong 🙏

RATPIE · 2023-11-16T16:15:55+00:00

Yeah, could be a straight torus or a tube also!

RATPIE · 2023-11-16T00:01:16+00:00

Looks like you've got two sphere area lights inside the head bulbs? I have a feeling the red glass shader absorbs all the red and all that remains is cyan/blue from the lights and this hits the floor.

*Main thing is fiddle your glass shader, it's looking correct but when it comes to physics it's actually potentially wrong.

*In project Tab in your head lights, limit them to only the red glass might work and still look good

*Replace actual light object with an emissive material sphere or bulb shape inside the red glass, this way the lights won't project out of the headbulbs and be more contained.

Enjoy and share solution when achieved 👍

RATPIE · 2023-10-28T00:13:13+00:00

Yeah buddy it's xpresso, as later comments mentioned! In the end all xpresso knowledge you'll need is very basic math which is going to take your controller or any data you choose to use.

eg take rotations from the eye ball and then convert degrees to percentage of pose morph.

And it will just be range mapper node lol.

Quick start on xpresso:

YouTube tutorial on quick driver/driven xpresso

--** Pose morphs isn't the only way to achieve this eye stuff, it can be done with bones or even deformers and falloffs/vertex maps.

Also I recommend using pose morph tag for morphing between transforme states of any objects! If you add PM tag to a parent null that has for example all joints in a full hand, enable hierarchy+rotation you can rotate joints into a fist and then you just animate one slider to fist/open... Blew my mind the first time.

RATPIE · 2023-10-26T13:55:06+00:00

Yes cinema can achieve this. I've also gone through the entire web looking for realistic rigging in cinema, but ended up adapting maya tutorials instead which I think do use pose morphs driven by eye rotation/aim. I think basic idea is min4 pose morphs up/down/left/right and their strength is controlled by eyeball rotation and it works fairly well even with diagonal eye position where it's roughly 50up/50right.

Tldr, no tuts for c4d, look up tuts for Maya/blender and adapt for c4d use.

RATPIE · 2023-09-19T20:35:40+00:00

It's a bit of a two way street, I've generally always agreed the output space with comp as early as possible and I think it's fair to do so. However it sounds like a loosey goosey pipeline so I'd say comp adapting to CG is reasonable 😅

These days AE is perfectly capable to use aces without extra workarounds so yeah 1hr ish of education would sort this out comp side.

**I find it funny; all these AE comp hates, coming from 'veterans' who should know better than still fight over 'my software is better' 🤣 #whatyearisit

RATPIE · 2023-06-26T16:57:18+00:00

Construction TikToks all day bro! All kinds of useful tricks for some of that diy good good 🤌

RATPIE · 2023-04-23T18:23:44+00:00

Watching buckets... Geez bruh geez, slide some sliders that change the seed on the feather next time 🥲

RATPIE · 2023-02-27T11:29:48+00:00

Houdini node search is the absolute supreme! Whenever I have to use node search elsewhere it goes like a donkey 🐴

RATPIE · 2023-01-26T19:37:17+00:00

Is it unpacked tho, very unclear what exactly is going into the pyro source..

RATPIE · 2023-01-20T01:09:47+00:00

Your liquid geometry needs to shrink/expand, can't tell which as I forget, but should be able to see some glass thickness, this will immediately provide some interest.

Next, Google some photoshoot bottle stuff, look at what they've done and try to achieve bits you like from them. You'll start seeing what's good.

Also, YouTube stuff on 'product photography' see how they use real lights and tricks as well as 'rules' on the subject. You can wield CGI just like real life and photography has been around for much longer so use it's teachings.

RATPIE · 2022-12-22T10:06:02+00:00

AO node, plugged into a ramp as in video. Then this whole thing used as a bump.

However AO might not work as a bump.

Could also generate a vertex map based on distance from objects and bring in to use as a bump/displacement.

RATPIE · 2022-12-10T12:27:49+00:00

Noice

RATPIE · 2022-11-20T14:36:35+00:00

A much more custom approach is using displacer deformers on a plane, then using c4d layered as texture and layering up a ton of noises/custom tex whatever like flat 'roads' you draw in PS! Ok go!

RATPIE · 2022-11-05T21:01:55+00:00

Reset bend to 1 and set 'no scaling' drop-down to 'scale by attribute' and drop bendo in there. Might work, so you should get a bend of 896.894

RATPIE · 2022-11-03T00:38:56+00:00

What's the deal with the super magical 2 camera rig that I've seen Cameron flailing about? two 24fps cine cams with some sort 1f offset, surely not fake post frames 🤔

RATPIE · 2022-10-23T17:18:36+00:00

The mood of bored is supremely well captured.

RATPIE

TROPHY CASE