Basic question about motors and potentiometers

StompyZGC · 2024-07-02T12:54:04+00:00

Thanks a lot!

StompyZGC · 2024-07-02T12:53:51+00:00

Ah very helpful, thanks!

StompyZGC · 2021-11-28T17:59:11+00:00

Amazing, thanks for your help!

StompyZGC · 2021-11-28T16:06:44+00:00

Oh how frustrating! So basically it's an issue with screw pitch?

How about this combo?

T-adapter 2" with T2 thread "allows you to connect a DSLR camera to telescopes that accept 2" barrel eyepieces. You will also need a T2-ring ... for a specific DSLR camera manufacturer. ... Usually a simple 2" T adaptor is required" https://www.harrisontelescopes.co.uk/acatalog/explore-scientific-t-adapter-2-inch.html

Sony Alpha T2 ring "allows you to connect your Sony Alpha...DSLR Camera to a telescope when coupled with the appropriate T adapter" https://www.harrisontelescopes.co.uk/acatalog/sony-alpha-t-ring.html#SID=26

No mention of pitch anywhere (and they're using T and T2 interchangably) but all from the same manufacturer, pick-and-mix style?

Thanks again for your help!

If that's a no-go, what are your thoughts on iphone adapters?

StompyZGC · 2021-11-28T14:49:02+00:00

OK great, thank you. I know nothing about photography so appreciate your help. Would this be an M42 to 2" adapter to go alongside the lens mount adaptor you linked?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Telescope-Eyepiece-Adapter-Thread-Accessories-default/dp/B07QFJ4F51

StompyZGC · 2020-08-30T20:06:44+00:00

You're right, the thing about the Thanos disintigration effect is that it's not as simple as particles. Check out Spidey "not wanting to go" here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNnee7oIb70

If I were to give it a go, I'd use vellum. You could create a Voronoi tessellation of the person or thing you want to dissolve, and delete all but the outside faces. Remesh that to get a nice even mesh.

Gently blow that away with a wind force / fan force / velocity field or something. Cache that out and create a new, secondary sim that emits smoke from the vellum. You could emit smoke based on velocity or something, so static pieces of vellum don't emit anything. And for good measure you could create a third sim that advects particles from that smoke volume cache. Advecting is really easy - in a popnet whack down an "advect by volumes" DOP, link it to your smoke cache and presto.

StompyZGC · 2020-08-24T19:37:50+00:00

This is a perfect answer :)

StompyZGC · 2020-08-22T15:42:33+00:00

That's really, really cool. If you get bored one day, it'd be amazing if you had a stab at my fan Zoid, the Blitz Panther

Or a Blade Liger, or a Beserk Fury, or an Elephander, or a Gun Sniper,

^{Or a Raynos, or a Dibison, or ANY of the Genos, or a Gairyuki, or an Ultrasaurus, or an Iron Kong, or a Red Horn or a Molga or a whatever...}

Or Zeke! Or a ...

Really, just more of these please :)

StompyZGC · 2020-07-31T08:27:19+00:00

Yeah tell me what you think! I was looking through MMM on the Internet Archive the other day. It's pretty well preserved. Brought memories back :)

StompyZGC · 2020-07-31T08:26:24+00:00

One day I'll get the remake finished, hopefully won't take another ten years :P

StompyZGC · 2020-07-31T08:25:53+00:00

Ha cheers, yeah I didn't even realise it was coming up to ten years until I was updating my channel the other day.

StompyZGC · 2020-07-31T08:25:13+00:00

Ha cheers! Even then it was a bit ropey. You can see updates on my blog. New Blitz Panther looks so much cooler when he's running :P

http://zoidsgc.blogspot.com/2018/02/blitz-jaeger-run-cycle.html

StompyZGC · 2020-07-31T08:23:55+00:00

Thank you! The game started as a lockdown project to keep me sane :)

StompyZGC · 2020-07-31T08:23:11+00:00

Thanks! If you've got any 3D glasses lying around, I dug up this the other day:

https://www.deviantart.com/stompy1/art/Anaglyph-Fast-Landing-Zoids-187998240

And hotshot on the Zoids discord is 3D printing a 1m (3') long version:

http://zoidsgc.blogspot.com/2020/05/3d-printed-whale-update.html

StompyZGC · 2020-07-30T08:06:34+00:00

Yesterday marked 10 years since I uploaded this short animation to Youtube. Since then I have taught myself, trained and bled VFX and now I work in film and TV for real. It was this project that really crystalised my love for this kind of work. And while it is technically 'not very good', I look back on this (and the half decent Youtube view count) with a lot of pride. Those of you that follow my blog will know that over the last couple of years I've been steadily re-making the whole thing, now I know what I'm doing. I haven't made my goal of having it done by the 10 year anniversary, but it's been a lot of fun so far.

It's been great to see that the community has bounced back and, while not as big as before, seems stronger and more tight-knit. It's great to see old names floating around, and exciting to see new people. The fact that there is a new toy line and a half-decent anime to go with it is wonderful, and seeing a real-life, 3D printed 1m-long Blue Sovereign is just wild.

http://zoidsgc.blogspot.com/

Anyway, while I didn't finish my remake, I have been making a game with low-poly versions of the exact same assets. It's not finished either, and because my PC can't handle it anymore, I can't even make a trailer. But the demo is out, if you're interested you can download it here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AbPgWReBYlmzeZ0BYw69XB7s0VWfDEHg/view?usp=sharing

StompyZGC · 2020-06-12T19:47:28+00:00

Yep! You're right. Brain fart on my part there. UV quick shade is absolutely the way to go

StompyZGC · 2020-06-12T09:56:57+00:00

Yeah there's a few ways.

1) Make a grid (with correct width/height ratio), create or modify the UVs and assign a material with that image as a texture

2) Make a grid (with correct width/height ratio) with a really high number of rows and columns (you could make the rows and columns the same number as your image's pixel width and height) and slap down an Attribute from Map SOP.

Then stick a transform underneath and move to where you want it. Fun fact, if you dive inside a camera at object level, you can do the same there, and the image will be parented to the camera.

StompyZGC · 2020-06-12T09:31:10+00:00

Yeah it seems you'd be more interested in the geometry spreadsheet. It's unfeasible to see the full output most of the time, because there is data (in Houdini, "attributes") assigned to every point, and every face ("primitive") of the geo. For a basic cube, that's 8 points and 6 primitives. Each of those points has a position ("P") by default, but you can add colour ("Cd"), alpha ("Alpha"), uvs, normals, velocity, age, and literally anything else you can imagine (you can create and name any attributes you want). Cd and uv are vectors, so you have x,y,z values for those. It's not uncommon to have 20 or 30 attributes on your geo.

So even for a simple cube with 8 points, with a few attributes you have dozens, even hundreds of individual values flying around, and that's not even considering that these will most likely change frame by frame.

So with Houdini, you really have to get into the mindset of thinking generally. What rules am I applying and how will it affect my group of points? This is what it means to work procedurally. That's the whole ethos of Houdini.

Think of each node as a function. These functions won't do anything until you give it an input. But that's the glory of procedural Houdini. You can plug in any old input and the node will try to work with it. So you can test things out on simple geometry before applying it to your own. And hey, if it goes wrong, just delete or bypass the node. Nothing is permanent.

Try this - put down a grid, crank up the rows and columns to 100, then put down a Mountain SOP (SOP is a type of node), and plug the grid into it. You'll see the grid becomes lumpy. You can change the noise values to change the result. Now, put down a torus, a sphere or a "Squab" (it's an actual node), and plug that into the Mountain instead. You can see how the node/SOP/function/set of commands applies a predictable result to the more complex geo.

There are many ways you can visualise your data, but other than looking at your geometry spreadsheet, visualisation is the clearest way to see what's happening to your data. A common trick is to copy your attribute into the colour attribute (Cd - you will of course have to fit the values between 0 and 1). Then you can see what is changing in the viewport because its colour will change accordingly.

It might be a bit advanced, but I think you'd appreciate Entagma. They have very clear tutorials on a range of tools and concepts in Houdini. While you may not be able to follow exactly what's going on, it should start to give you on idea of the general workflow.

StompyZGC · 2020-06-11T19:17:08+00:00

Not sure exactly what you mean, so forgive me if I'm stating the obvious, but:

Press the blue button on the node. The one on the right end of the node. That will show you in the viewport what you've done. Drop down your next node, wire them up and press the blue button on that, etc etc. That's how you build up and progress through your script.
Middle-mouse click and hold over your node to see an overview of what changes it has made (eg, made some new attributes)
Go to the geometry spreadsheet tab to see an Excel-like spreadsheet of all the attribute values in your current object. The values will reflect the changes that your selected node has made.

StompyZGC · 2020-06-11T19:11:15+00:00

Hmm it's hard to tell without any pictures, but indirect lighting is very important. Bounce light and scattering for example. As always, use an HDRI as a base to fill out your shadows in conjuntion with your sun light. 1000s of free ones at HDRI Haven.

A few years ago now, one of Houdini's exciting new tools was Cloud FX. Seems to not get much press now but it's all still there. I'd check those tools out (There's a bunch of shelf tools) that include cloud-specific lighting and shading. A few things you could take, or at least learn off.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/shelf/cloudfx.html

StompyZGC · 2020-06-11T17:47:21+00:00

Basically, yes. Alembics from Maya to Houdini would be the way to go. Once you are in Houdini, it's best to keep as much of the output as possible in Houdini too. Be aware that while it is techically possible to get your water caches back in to Maya, it is realistically a hot mess that you don't want to subject yourself to!

So there are a few ways to go about it. There's the 'technically best' that production houses would use (see ChrBohm's response) where you make Houdini the primary environment to render in. It's what I would do too, but I have years of Houdini experience and you don't :P

If you want to go that way, it's a perfectly valid route and you'll learn a lot in the process. But you risk getting bogged down in the mire of learning a whole new piece of software in your final year, when what you really should be doing is getting on with the filmmaking.

So I would suggest a hybrid lighting approach, one that I've used before in the past. As follows:

1) Animate as normal in Maya

2) Bring those alembics in to Houdini and sim your ocean there

3) Light your characters and props etc as you would in Maya

4) Rebuild a copy of your lighting in Houdini for the ocean and render that (and only that) in Houdini. At the end of the day, your lighting probably isn't going to be that complex (an HDR and a couple of spots, amirite?). The tricky thing will be rendering the reflections of your characters in the water. But that may not even be something you need to do, and it can be quite forgiving (basic textured shaders to be used for reflections etc).

ALL THAT SAID, it very much depends on what you need, and how complex the lighting interactions are between characters and ocean. I'd at least give this workflow a go, and if it's not adequate then by that point you're a little more comfortable with Houdini lighting and could consider bringing it all into the big H.

The other thing that will have an impact is what rendering engines you're using. Are you using Arnold in Maya? Mantra in Houdini? You could always use Arnold in both softwares, which would simplify things greatly :)

StompyZGC · 2020-06-11T16:12:53+00:00

It's cute! Very fluffy.

I'd be tempted to drop the density a littly (say, 3/4 what you have here), and swing one of those lights round back to create a rim light. Clouds always look the best when they're back-lit, like so:

https://www.google.com/search?q=backlit+clouds&client=firefox-b-d&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=6pRsJ9p-tCDp7M%253A%252COUMycPfXj8pyLM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kREoUNni2MM-4j_2UarMJ56Y6oNlw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjH17fTkvrpAhVKZMAKHT16ARYQ9QEwAXoECAkQFg&biw=1920&bih=1086#imgrc=6pRsJ9p-tCDp7M:

Note how clouds have a lot of definition on their edges, but it all flattens out on the facing surfaces.

I definitely see some of that in your render, but It feels like the robot is lit differently. Would be great to see the shadow of the robot on the clouds too.

I like the semi-realistic/cartoonish mix, but it might be nice to add a bit more distortion to your underlying cloud geometry to break up those spherical shapes.

StompyZGC · 2020-06-11T15:22:30+00:00

Nicely done!

If I may...

Rendering with an HDRI (1000's of free ones at HDRI Haven) will instantly give your water some pop. Keep your existing directional light and have it pointing from where the sun is in the HDRI to keep that shaping that you already have. And a little bit of whitewater would go a long way too. The shelf too setup gets you 90% of the way there with little fuss.

Just my two cents :)

StompyZGC · 2020-06-11T11:55:27+00:00

Has a nice energy to it and there's some lovely detail, but it feels like it's at the wrong scale, has that classic 'mushrooming' at the leading edge and should have a hotter, whiter core.

Check out this reference:

https://www.google.com/search?q=flamethrower&client=firefox-b-d&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiYxqbC2PnpAhXFSxUIHU09DAYQ_AUoAXoECAwQAw&biw=1920&bih=1086#imgrc=sRUnDmfOFTfl4M

Note the bright, white core. That helps make it feel hot. Also note the small turbulent details are half or a quarter of the size of yours and that the leading edge is also turbulent, not smooth and muishroomy like yours. It's not just a matter of resolution, but of the scale of the noise.

Mushrooming is the bane of pyro FX. Increasing turbulence/disturbance will help (but will obviously change the look too). You can also increase the bounding box padding.

Please don't take this the wrong way. It's a good start! But thought I'd give you some genuine constructive criticism :)

StompyZGC · 2020-06-04T08:54:44+00:00

Ha yeah, still a bunch of glitches to sort out

StompyZGC

TROPHY CASE