{"id":332,"date":"2011-12-13T00:16:51","date_gmt":"2011-12-13T00:16:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/faulknermano.com\/blog\/?p=332"},"modified":"2011-12-13T00:21:01","modified_gmt":"2011-12-13T00:21:01","slug":"houdini-rocketship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/faulknermano.com\/blog\/houdini-rocketship\/","title":{"rendered":"Houdini: Rocketship"},"content":{"rendered":"

About three weeks ago, I started learning Houdini<\/a>. Such a long time coming. I remember, back in 1997, just before I started learning LightWave, I saw Houdini included in some CD ‘collection’; I can’t remember the version back then. I fired it up, but my trusty Pentium 133 ‘workstation’ was not able to cope. I left it at that, and in retrospect, I suppose that I probably would not have picked up 3D had I persisted in Houdini. I wouldn’t have understood it.<\/p>\n

Fourteen years down the line, more than ten years later working in the CG industry, I seem to have gone back to that period of re-discovering Houdini. In the course of my CG life, I have learned to fit in the role of TD, and through a vast amount of trial-and-error I have learned to think procedurally. I wanted to learn Houdini because it supposed to coincide with it.<\/p>\n

However, I didn’t want to learn Houdini for the sake of its much-advertised effects features. I wanted to learn it like every other application I’ve learned: holistically. I wanted to model, shade\/texture, light, rig, animate, sim, and render in it. I want to be confident in the whole spectrum in Houdini. As I was pondering this, I remembered my first ever LightWave short called Old Rocketship, which I did in 1999 for three months. I did it while I was working for a non-CG company; I was frustrated and wanted to leave to find work in CG field. So the story is just about a ‘rocketman’ riding his rocketship out to the moon, and on the moon, he opens up a mailbox (?) and there he pulls out a piece of paper with a writing saying, “Have you done tried to leave yet?”<\/p>\n

Yeah, I know, it’s weird, and the original edit was over five minutes long. But this sparked in me some old love. I decided that I was going to learn Houdini by re-creating this short. It would be like when I first picked up LightWave; now it would be Houdini, and I’ll improve upon it. But I also decided, just like back in 1999, to work within some time constraints. I would have to haul ass, because I would only give myself a maximum of three months to do this, with or without other professional obligations.<\/p>\n

As of this date, I’ve finalised most of the rocketship (which is posted below), except that it’s not rigged yet. The rocketman’s design is still a WIP (sketches), and there is still the launch platform, the environment, and the rocket blast effects that needs to be considered.<\/p>\n