Week 09: Artery Material

Started bringing assets into Unity, created a procedural skybox in Unity.

Exported the HBV particle and baked texture maps from Houdini, created a transparent material in Unity.

Close-up of capsid with material, texture, and flat color applied. The arrangement of surface proteins isn't totally technically correct, but will do for now. An instructor and fellow student are helping me develop a technically correct T=4 icosahedral capsid, which is pretty much a rectified truncated icosahedron. The vertexes in this shape will serve as points to duplicate the surface proteins.

I began developing this material in Houdini for the inside of the artery walls. So far, I haven't been able to figure out how to convert point color to vertex color in a way that would allow me to bake the detail here from the material node as a color texture map. If I could figure out how to do that, then I would have the color map, then I would generate geometry displacement from the procedural texture in the material node and bake that in normal and ambient occlusion maps. 

So, I decided to continue development of the artery wall in an Attribute VOP node instead of a material node. Below are a couple of variations of the results I have achieved so far in VOPs applied to a half pipe. This geometry detail can be baked to texture maps and a lower resolution model.

These are the sample branching arteries developed last week by using a polywire node on a curve.

Here is the Attribute VOP applied to the sample branching arteries. The polygon normals have been reversed, and the view is from the inside. It's a good start, but needs some serious tweaking.

Development will be continued on the arteries and HBV particle next week.

Week 08: Arteries

This week, all I really did in Houdini is create some curves, fuse them, then polywire them. Here is the resulting node network:

As one may see, there is a high-poly version, and a low-poly version to bake to.

Week 07: HBV DNA

The first couple of times I attempted to create a double helical strand, I would have been successful if I continued, the only problem is that I would not be able to control them via a curve because of the methods I was using.

Here, I can control this strand via a curve, and it has ladder rungs alright, but it does not have that characteristic double-helical twist that a strand of DNA has. Creating a poseable double-helical shape has proven to be far more complicated than I originally thought. This will have to do, for now.

Week 06: HBV Particle Capsid

Here is the icosahedron, the base shape of the capsid that all other components of the viral core are built upon:

From this, the protein coat was created:
High-poly:

Low-poly:

Low-poly with textures baked:

The model has been kept fairly simple at this point, because it has not yet been determined what the exact needs for the thesis project are. It can be easily adjusted because it was created using procedural workflows in Houdini.

Week 05: HBV Particle Envelope

The Houdini asset scheduled to be completed this week was the hepatitis b viral particle envelope. It has been completed. The overall shape is driven by a sphere with smaller spheres duplicated across it's vertices. The overall shape and amount of surface proteins can be easily adjusted or totally changed.

 This is the high-poly model.

The low-poly model and it's topology can be seen here below.

Here is the low-poly model with the texture baked down.

Week 04: Terrain

So, this week was an amalgamation of failed experiments to texture assets in Houdini. Any attempt to export some type of color map from Houdini failed. Ambient occlusion and Normal maps were successfully exported for the rock assets. They can be seen in the images below. Instead of creating terrain in Houdini, I decided to use World Creator because of limited time, and it is a powerful tool for procedurally generating terrain. I was not able to yet disperse my rock, tree, and grass assets across the terrain.

Textured terrain:

Untextured terrain:

Rocks with textures applied:

Wk 03 Grass and Trees

Creating grass and trees in Houdini was no simple task. Here are some renders, demonstrating the grass generation asset I created, and the types of variation of grass blades I am able to create with it:

The next three shots below show the nodes and the parameters that control the shape and form of the grass blade:

The grass generator took some trial and error, a few iterations in order to get an agreeable result. Here are a couple of examples of assets that were precursors to the grass asset.

This grass blade looks nice, but has a problem.

It may be difficult to see in this shot, but the problem with this asset is that it is double sided, meaning it has 2x more polygons than necessary.

This is sort of a root/branch asset that is meant to be controlled by a curve, sticking out of a wall or the ground. This type of asset is too manual, and not ideal for populating an entire scene.

I was able to create a tree generator, which was by far the most complicated asset to create.

Here is a shot of the entire node network.

Here are close up views of the nodes:

Here are some additional examples of the variation that can be achieved with the asset:

I had an idea of a tree bridge asset, that could act as a bridge in the scene. I was able to acieve that with my tree generator asset:

I couldn't find a way to export procedural material color map textures from Houdini, so I  I took real life reference textures of rock and tree bark. The idea is to use those to generate geometry displacement in Houdini, then bake those as texture maps. I thought that it would be most interesting to use real-life textures for the assets where it would be noticeable. I can still use material builder and attribute VOPs to create cool geometry effects which can be baked out in texture maps, then hand-paint in Krita. So, for master's thesis project work, I may have to hand paint over normal/displacement maps in Krita.

Some of these are better than others, so texturing of the trees is still in progress. The grass texture was created in Krita, hand-painted.