09/19/25 Blog Post 2

Back to back blog posts this week and next week is diabolical, things take time.

I started a new water sim for the opening sim that is built for efficiency and accuracy. I got pretty far learning how to separate objects from an imported scene from Maya to Houdini. I was able to put separate sims on 2 out of the three objects I brought in. I'm not sure if I was able to fix the issue before 09/19 because this is being written on 09/27, but it was fixed within three days at most, now I can either continue building this upgraded version of the Sim or wait for the layout to be done and work on the new stylization method in Maya. (Due to a tragedy within our team I will be exclusively focusing on the stylization method in Maya.) I am still occasionally researching wood collision sims on the side and networking to try and find a mentor.

Production Pass Review #1

Honestly didn't know this was an individualized thing. I thought it was a state of things like last semester where one group member just wrote everyone's states and turned in one thing, so my bad. That's why this is so late.

My goals for Prod Pass 2 as of 9/11 were the following.

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.

09/05/2025

Currently still making progress on the sim for the production pass since school started again. I'm making a video that details everything, so this post being due before the production pass next week is irking me a bit.

Anyways.

Our assets being true to their real life scale has caused me numerous issues because in Houdini their size gets multiplied by 100 and in Maya they aren't visible without using new clipping planes settings.

I initially made a temp scene to port to Houdini for the beach sim but realized that I had made a mistake and the og layout wasn't as broken as I thought. I had forgotten a step and blamed my group. Turns out I missed a step, I apologized to everyone.

Some of the OG scene still isn't workable because of incompatablity with the sim. I ported Cassie's lighthouse to the Sim and will slowly try and update the layout I made with the OG assets as I continue editing the sim.

We made some big story changes and finally nailed the pacing for about 2/3rds of the film. Rose truly cooked with the editing with what she was working with.

I'm a bit scared about the timing because we need new models and rigs of all 3 characters. Motion data is crucial for an accurate sim so until the new characters are finished I have to work on the sims for all the scenes that the characters are obscured.