[ Houdini Cookoff ] 01

Project time! More or less recovered from my last project (Deathly Hallows Part 2), so I thought I'd tackle this little project that SideFX has got running.

The competition's supposed to be about creating a food related project in Houdini - I know tea is not strictly food. I'm not in it for the prizes, more like a challenge for myself. Plus, I've always wanted to do it :P

So, the video above shows what I hope to achieve with Houdini, brown tea getting lightened up with a fair bit of milk.

Currently, I only got the reference above, and still plotting how deep I want to take this. For one thing, I do not plan to spend my waking non-work hours on this, so I need to keep it down to quick sims and tricks. What I definitely will need includes a backplate, with an empty cup. The plate will be basically a hand stirring the spoon, which means I'll need to track a cg spoon into place.

Thankfully, the spoon only shows the top tip of it, so I do not need to like be uber correct. One thing I noticed with the spoon is how the meniscus reacts to it when laid down to rest; I will probably have myself remove the spoon after stirring in the plates; one less thing to worry about.

The milk bottle I have two minds about it - half of me is thinking go full CG, get a HDRI env map, let PBR handle the rendering. The other half says, use practical, and get someone to track in the milk carton/bottle. That's still up in the air, and I need to get it locked down before I shoot the plates.

I'll still want a HDRI map of the scene for the top surface of the water. I also need to keep this short, as the machine I work on at home has very little hdd space left, and only 4gb of ram :P

Simulation wise, I think I will be looking hard at combining both the ripple solver and fluid solver *and* smoke solver. My gut feel (and experience) from running the fluid solver tells me that it will be all splashy when the poured liquid hits - not like the ref in which the surface stays pretty calm.

So I'm thinking using voxel fluids to get the shape, then merge the SDF volumes to create a single geo surface.

Smoke I'm thinking would be used below the surface, and we can trace into it. Or, pre-render, then project onto the water mesh. 6 weeks to go, got to get the camera track and even animation done in the next week and a half, then I can focus on simulations, the last 2 weeks would probably be final renders and comp.

Note to self: the cup moves when being stirred; recommend blu-tack to keep it locked down. I do not want have sims inside moving geo :D