Episode 10- Jake gets in over his head but learns a TON.

This week, on “Jake Gets in Over His Head” we have a fun guest appearance from both “making realistic rain, splashes, and wet maps” and “L-Systems”. Look, I tried out shooting a little higher than my pay grade on this one, and it didn’t go well. That’s ok though, because I learned a lot of really cool things along the way. I’ll circle back on both of these topics at some point when I ACTUALLY get to learning them, but the short version of what happened was: 


I wanted to know how difficult it was to make realistic rain in Houdini.


 I found a tutorial on the topic and by about the 3 minute mark I was totally lost. Though, to my credit I did watch the entire 25 minute tutorial, because it was fascinating seeing a total pro at work. 


Honestly, next I watched another tutorial on a random topic because it had a thumbnail on YouTube that caught my eye. L-Systems. It had a super detailed and realistic looking tree and I thought it sounded really interesting. I checked it out and quickly fell down a rabbit hole that I may return to in the next couple of weeks because I think I can wrap my head around the concept with some simple memorization a few rules to make some super cool automated pieces of…something? It’s basically a different way of working in Houdini that allows you to write expressions using a few simple variables and then control the number of “generations” or times that the code repeats itself. This is super cool because you can write like, 5 lines of simple code and essentially have the ability to make plants and trees that grow over time. 


I digress. 


I did make it all the way through one last tutorial this week, and it was on creating fun geometric patterns using loops in Houdini. Basically, Loops are a node in Houdini that’s kinda unique. When you drop this node, it looks like this (the 2 orange nodes): 

Screen Shot 2020-03-08 at 11.17.22 PM.png





And it’s different because it requires that you connect some other nodes to it in order for it to work properly. Without getting too into the weeds technically, from what I understand, this type of node effects a certain thing in your scene that you define, and it allows you to affect a large area of things with a single change



So when I made this, I basically had to animate like, 2 variables and the camera and I was DONE. I’m not totally sure where knowing this particular skill will come in handy outside of making a few rad clips to post on instagram, but I’d bet at some point I’ll be glad I learned this. 



Anyway, here’s a fun thing I made using this concept. It took more than 15 hours to render which is WILD, but I guess I just need to get used to it because that’s the gig with 3D. Also, thanks to Nathan Guyer for recommending I render things overnight, it’s saved me a lot of time.

Metal Flower Unfold V2.gif



Jake-out.

Jacob Sullivan