Blog post #4 10/10/2025

OMG I actually got the blog-post posted on time??

Anyways it's been tough.

For about a week and a half now I've been slowly trying to get the new layout for scene 1 into Houdini. I got it in yesterday. It ended up being a minor communication problem with a teammate because I thought the file had to be from October and that the old scene was from September. Turns out the updated scene was from Sept. 29th and all the October files were like horcruxes and were individual pieces of that file separated off. Definitely a bit confusing tbh.

Anyways, the new SCN_1 layout is in Houdini. I'm going to setup a spectra ocean and separate off the pieces, so that I can test the beach sim on the separate bits of geo, but can have a general ocean in Maya.

Production Pass Review #2 Fall 2025

Goals I wanted to achieve this Prod Pass:

1. Figure out how to port whitewater to Maya.

2. Make an actual simulation for what we need. The beach sim I was one day away from presenting was a literal beach sim, the waves are slow as they crawl onto the surface, done for an ocean, it doesn't really look like water because the beach sim is so slow. It's also incredibly inefficient.

3. Wait until teammates are done and use the actual beach layout instead of my placeholder.

4. Begin researching wood collision sims and how the pipeline for getting a boat to float works.

5. IMPORTANT, find replacement for Houdini stylizer, do my best to ensure that it can stack on top of David's texturing method to save time. Also take Prod Pass notes into account and make the ocean itself darker.

6. Get mentors to help me in Houdini.

7. If possible (if rig gets done on time) help with animation.

PROGRESS:

1. Complete✅

2. In Progress, would like to talk to Dan Finnegan first 🚧

3. Done and in Houdini, We as a group still need to figure out the canonical size and distance of the rocks/crash island✅

4. I did begin researching. Would like to ask Dan about this as well currently on the back-burner 🚧

5. I have found 2 different routes to explore, I built out the first one and need to do some tweaking, The second method I might need David and Jeremy's help with but I'll give it a shot. It's layered and might not be viable.

6. I interviewed Hogan and got his contact info, although he does work in Houdini it's mostly background stuff and our fields haven't overlapped so far.

7. Not sure about rig progress, I heard it was started last week.

Goals for next Prod Pass

1. Have a zoom meeting with Dan about the water shots in general and the boat.

2. Get new Spectra's into as many new shots are available

3. See if the layered texturing approach is feasible.

4. Tweak the mash planes to see if they can work as a texture method, otherwise use them to stick on geo like Unreal's Environment brush.

5. Experiment with bubble sim

6. FIND WAY TO PORT ANIMATED CHARACTER RIGS INTO HOUDINI THEN SEND BACK TO MAYA.

09/26/25 Blog post #3

After I finished applying David's textures to my bad beach sim,

I made some tweaks to align it better with the feedback we got. I was in rendering hell for a few days, but when it was done I could finally start stylizing.

I paid the $19 to get a stylization technique on Gumroad for Maya. It is technically finished, as it works and can greatly help us in the long run. Now I'm looking to interview people both for my work study and for advice, given how I'm writing this one day late, I actually had an interview with Hogan on the day this was supposed to be posted. I got a bit of advice like reusing frames and cheating the water when able. I have another interview with a guy on Tuesday to try and secure more VFX connections as well as office hours with Jeremy about reverse engineering a guy from LinkedIn's stylized texture. The best advice hogan gave me was to not stay lazer focused on having all my vfx on my reel come from the film so I'm planning to branch out a bit and learn other stuff in Houdini on the side to get better at Houdini. I'm still awaiting Dan Finnegan's reply from Thursday, when that comes back I can really start cooking on the water sim. I will still spend a couple more hours on it in the meantime.