Effects Update

Alright so I've been hard at work trying to figure out how the hell am I going to get all my effects done by next week.

So after a lot of thinking, I managed to sort things out. So what I intend to do is, render my drill in maya with the textures, lighting and animation, and then comp in the effects I produce from Houdini.

Here is the latest of the effects of the second shot of my project will probably look like.



What I did was export the camera out first from Maya to Houdini using the FBX format. I then created a low poly mesh of my vehicle and attached it to my high-res vehicle's rig, that way, if I animate the high res, the low res poly follows exactly.

After that, I animated my vehicle in Maya, then used a plug-in I found online to help me export the low-res poly (with the animation) into houdini as an OBJ file. Once that was done, I built my ground in houidni, voronoi-ed it, and made the drill interact with only the areas I wanted it to.

Now my only problem right now is, I want the area where its suppose to crack not to drop down as fast. I tried animating my grouped points in houdini to become active at a certain frame, but it didn't turn out as I had planned. Then I tried using attributeTransfer and animating the distance threshold, but sadly, it didn't work as great for me. So for now, I will stick with this and refine further.

Now all I gotta do is texture the ground reference my backplate for accuracy of placement. Oh boy.