Sunday, February 22, 2015

Jupiter Ascending - what's up with it?

I honestly think my tastes must be at some perpendicular angle to most people. What's wrong with Jupiter Ascending? I absolutely enjoyed every minute of the show! For some reason, it gave me very familiar feelings, similar to that when playing Final Fantasy - to be brought into another world. And I really enjoyed my visit.

Spoilers Ahead:

Loved the ship designs, loved the detail inside so many of the sets, loved the otherworldly architecture. It's quite a universe. The technobabble at some parts just gave me a big grin.

On the flip side, there were things I that were poking in my mind like: why didn't the processing plant or whatever it was inside Jupiter like collapse like paper when wolf-dude cracked through it? The gravity that deep inside a gas giant has to be crazy. Even if the main structure is able to survive, I do not see how regular people could survive - the atmosphere should have vented near-instantaneously.

And what's more, what's with that processing plant doing inside jupiter? Like the bad guy wasn't supposed to harvest earth for awhile longer until he learnt about Ms Jones. Or do such processing plants just standard operating procedure when a planet for harvesting is seeded?

The story also felt somewhat rushed, I thought the idea of 3 siblings trying to figure out what to do with the re-born empress was quite undeveloped, and generally just not very cohesive. I get what's going on, but maybe more time could be spent developing it.

Defo would love to watch it at another time. Don't think I got my name in the credits though. Boo....

Houdini Random Dungeon Generator

Title says it all :3 My long term plans are to use this to generate some kinda data as input into Unity.

Monday, February 16, 2015

Houdini - Unity - Vertical Cross from Lat Long map HDA

Bit of fun this evening :) Writing out vertical cross maps from a lat long map input. Have a few times I've been needing to do this, so might as well create a Houdini Digital Asset to streamline stuff to one-click.

Friday, February 13, 2015

Houdini OpenCL kicking butt!

Spent some of this evening moving stuff to my new laptop, and also got the latest production build of houdini to play with. H14 now runs absolutely smoothly on osx 10.10 - previously on 10.8 houdini would crash when I select a point! According to forums this is a open gl 3.3 thingy, not available on the older osx. Should have upgraded, but I had too many fun mini-projects going on to deal with a major os upgrade.

Last I did major upgrades of osx... nothing happened. But you never know, and dealing with os upgrades and stuff like that - I avoid it if possible.

OpenCL also works a treat! Running a smoke solver with openCL make a tremendous difference in sim speed. On the flip side, in order to get that speed, we're not supposed to use caching and other things, which affects workflow. Perhaps simming at mid-res on the cpu + cache will be good for judging the performance, then running the full sim at high res with OpenCL...

That said, my gfx card only has 2gb of ram; it's not going to do sims as large as what the main cpu memory can handle.

EDIT: OMG Grain solver runs pretty swift on opencl! RAR RAR RAR!

Big jump, houdini 14. Can't wait for Unity 5 to be released then I can play with Houdini Engine :3

Monday, February 09, 2015

Houdini + Unity FTW

Testing out how a character in Houdini can be brought over in Unity. Appears to be quite straightforward, and once inside Unity, the rig is picked up automagically! Afterwords, setting up an animation controller to retarget some random animation clips into the imported rigged character is very straightforward.

No idea what I'd do with this info hmm.

Sunday, February 08, 2015

Spring Is Here!

A short piece I got inspired with last night! Harpsichord doing some good 'ol alberti bass, and I've taken the cello up to its highest register. Yum!