First couple of steps were similar as had to create a geometry node with a sphere node inside – I’ve already started using new skills from recently learning Houdini’s interface through Lynda.com i.e. using the keyboard for quick transitions going in and out of nodes.
The image above is the beginning processing of me adding the geometry node, using ‘I’ on the keyboard to go inside the geometry and add a sphere. Adding a box node into the scene will be what allows me to dissolve the sphere
After changing the primitive type of both the sphere and the box to polygon mesh, I added a boolean. Before this tutorial I didn’t know what a boolean was however I now understand that I have to use the boolean in order to remove the geometry.
After adding a transform node and placing it between the box and the boolean, I learnt how to add key frames into the scene. The image above shows me adding a keyframe so that the sphere disappears after two seconds (frame 48). I did this by right clicking into the Y axis box and selecting add keyframe.
I added a blast node and connected it to the boolean, which means that when I create an ‘a inside b’ group in boolean and apply it to the blast node, it creates the image you can see in the scene above. This geometry is where the particles will be created from.
The following step was to merge the object together with the OUT_GEO node (image above), this way, the object that dissolves runs as a whole rather than separate entities. When the object was dissolving, it was very smooth and linear – which looks natural for a dissolving object. Therefore, the image below shows what the object looks like when a ‘mountain’ node is added in-between the transform and the boolean.
In the image above you can see that the sphere isn’t smooth round the edges, this is due to the box not being large enough which ultimately interferes with the sphere, to change this I went into the transform node and made the box slightly larger.
The two images above show me changing the way the particles move in the scene. The first image is the original particles moving with gravity force on approx -9 and the second image is when the force is changed to 1. It was necessary to add a ground plane so the particles have somewhere to land originally, but when I changed the gravity, I could remove the ground plane.
I added a POPaxisForce node as this allowed me to change speed in which the particles orbit around the object, this creates a more organic looking set of particles.
As I started getting into editing the particle nodes, I realised that it was easier to screen record my progress as that way I could concentrate on the work instead of screen shotting and explains the progress. In the video, you can see me adding a colour ramp to change the colour of the smoke emitting from the object. A binding node that allows the other nodes to coincide with the multiple node which fuses the other nodes together.
Time lapse of developing my particles :
Adding principle shaders to both the particles and the sphere allow the colours to be viewed in the rendered view. I then added a principle shader to the ground plane so that my final output would have a more professional look.
Final Disintegration Output:
This particular experiment took much longer than I had anticipated. I believe that it was down to the process of editing the particle nodes as there were many different elements that needed adjusting in order to make it look organic. This being said, I feel as though this was a good step into learning particles that are similar to dust/smoke as this is another experiment that I want to take forward for future and therefore ultimately have developed more skills
Initial Trouble with rendering video sequence after output left Houdini:
I had no trouble rendering out the ‘Disintegration effect’ from the software Houdini, however, when I went to put it into a video sequence and export it, the file kept crashing. Initially I thought it was fact that my laptop wasn’t advanced enough to export such a large file so attempted to render it out on a few other platforms, again each output failed. After explaining to my tutor what was happening, we decided to see if it would render out the video sequence in Blender. Originally, Blender kept crashing too. However, we experimented with changing the settings in Blender which eventually allowed the sequence to render out in a video.
