This is completely redundant in prman21 because of PxrDirt, but since our project was in 20 I wanted a way to procedurally add dirt to our assets. In the end it wasn’t used, but it was a great introduction to the new RIS API!
The code is available in the GitHub repo.
‘CONTACT’ is a near 3 minute long VFX sci-fi short, showing an astronaut’s state of mental decay after experiencing an encounter with a 5th dimensional being while in orbit. The team worked hard to create over 80 CG assets, 3 digital environments, and a bespoke fractal render engine for the evolving tunnel sequence at the height of the piece. Over 26 shots were composited into these built environments and costumes, fleshing out the narrative and blending together the live-action and the digital elements of the film.
Extending the Nishita sky model to simulate Skyglow.
You can view the paper here here.
The definitive version is available at http://diglib.eg.org/
For my 3rd year programming assignment I wanted to find something fun to build – soft body dynamics sounded like a great start :). I’ve also heard good things about Fabric Engine all year and figured I’d have a go at combining the two since (as far as I can tell) noone else has done so, besides the Bullet bindings inside Fabric.
The recommended workflow for adding new systems to Fabric is to create an extension that defines all the custom structures/objects/interfaces in KL. These can then be easily distributed and imported into other extensions or directly into Canvas, where they are exposed as graph nodes that can be chained together.
Although there are plenty of tutorials explaining how to do things purely in Canvas or purely in KL, I found it difficult to find thorough explanations of best practices for things such as writing extensions that will be used in canvas. A lot of time was spent experimenting with what Canvas can do, as it is the main entry point to doing anything in Fabric (and Fabric Splice is deprecated, so going KL only isn’t possible).
For the sake of time I’ve only focused on a very simple spring constraint setup that uses Verlet integration. Right now it only works properly on grid objects, I didn’t have time to implement the topology based constraint setup I planned to use.
You can grab the extension code here, it’s still in a rough state and is untested in anything above Fabric 2.1.0 but it should work.
The procedural disintegration effect I created in Houdini for the Dneg masterclass.
![Simulating Skyglow [Paper, Eurographics 2016]](https://i0.wp.com/blog.goto-tom.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/skyglow_preview.png?resize=479%2C515&ssl=1)
