Baby Steps

Since I got back from Japan, I've been busy with preparing the curriculum for a specialist diploma in games development as well as an upcoming 5-day certificate course in PS3 visual arts creation. Finally, I managed to squeeze out some free time to try out some Houdini stuff.

I haven't really touched Houdini since Peter Robbinson's bootcamp 5 months back, so I practically had to start all over from the introductory lessons. Here I've imported a OBJ model created in Modo and Lightwave, scattered some metaballs along it's surface, and boolean'd them out to create huge chunks of holes that looks like she's been blasted with a high-calibre cannon.

The Cookie node's boolean function works, but isn't 100% clean all the time, often resulting in stray and broken geometry. Metaballs seem to work better than polygon spheres for creating holes, and a bit of tweaking can minimize the errors, but I still haven't found a perfect solution.

Also, I'm still trying to figure out how to automatically convert the broken up model into individual pieces of rigid bodies. RBD Fractured Object doesn't do it for me, so currently I'm using a Group Geometry node to manually select primitives and assign group names for the rigid body simulation. However, this is not a good solution because the simulation will break if I make changes upstream.

Other than that, I think I need a faster (multi-core) PC. My notebook turned sluggish when I added the DOP network, and this isn't even a complex scene.