These past days, when playing with Houdini, I was somehow really frustrated because I could not use the previous frames as input to create some faked dynamics inside my geometry block. Of course, since it’s basically for creating dynamics, I could take a look at DOPs but I don’t feel quite ready for that yet …
Author Archives: Nicolas Nghiem
Quick Columns with Revolve
I presented in my Houdini series a whole paragraph about building columns. Fact is, it was somehow complicated and performances are pretty bad as we accumulate for-loops in VEX wrangles. If you just want the shape of a column and do not care at all about all the flutes and stuff, here is a super …
Modeling the entasis of the column
In the previous post, we managed to build something that started to look like a Greek column. However, I somehow spoiled that it was not enough and mentionned the ‘entasis’. Let’s see in this post what it consists in exactly and how we are going to model it. When I tried to model this entasis, …
Naive Doric Shaft
Let’s start simple and do ‘naively’ the modeling of the base column! We will improve it later in the next post! Let’s first review what we need to model before diving into Houdini. As you can see the doric one is the most simple one and managing to do the shaft seems to be the …
About Salient Poses
When conducting my research on Keyframe reduction, my main starting point was the algorithm Salient Poses from a SIGGRAPH Asia Technical Brief (Optimal and Interactive Keyframe Selection for Motion Capture, Richard Roberts, J.P. Lewis, Ken Anjyo, Jaewoo Seo, and Yeongho Seol, SA 2018). In this article I will explain briefly what it is and how …
Interpolating: Choosing the interpolation?
In this article, I’m gonna speak a little about interpolation. And why we mostly choose an interpolation scheme rather than another. So, as you would have guessed, the topic will be about mathematics in the first part and animation on second one (jump straight to animation if you do not care, but I promise, even …
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Managing the camera when animating on two’s
With the success of the recent Spiderman Into the Spiderverse, animating on 2’s is becoming quite trendy. While it is quite an easy technique to do when the camera is not moving, it can become an horrible mess when the camera is moving and you do not know how to deal with it. There is …
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Let’s overlap!
Overlap is quite a common principle that brings a nice organic feeling to the movement! It is particularly efficient when dealing with extremal limbs such as arms, tails or animals’ ears… With no more talking, let’s get started! A first basic example! As I said earlier, overlaps is especially efficient when working with tails, so …
A few precisions about Computer animation
In this article, I will briefly talk about the basics of Character Animation in Computer animation so that we can quickly get an idea of how animators work inside their animation software! This talk is slightly more technical than the one about animation but nothing really crazy. It’s not totally exact either, but it is …
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Short brief about Character animation
The goal of this article is not to give a complete explanation about what is animation or how to animate, it is a way too broad topic and a lot of people already covered it way better than me (if you want, check Richard Williams’ book ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’ which is a reference amongst …
Before it gets messy 