Week 8

Update 1 05/13/2024 Class 15 Delivery

I'm encountering some challenges with the grooming process. Achieving the desired result has proven difficult, as there are some minor clumps appearing on the top of the head. I plan to reach out to Professor Tim Steele for guidance and suggestions.

Feedback:

Add more movement to the upper body, such as subtle head waving and finger tapping.

The outdoor scenes could be some Japanese maple trees, a fence with bonsais, cherry blossoms or Japanese Bonsai Zen Garden.

Update 2 05/15/2024

Today, I met with Professor Steele for guidance on my grooming session and shared my workflow with him. He mentioned that he hasn't seen this workflow used in the industry. Based on his experience, exporting the Hairgen file as an Alembic file into Maya involves a significant workload, and the files may be too large to handle effectively. He suggested that I either stay in Maya using Xgen or export everything from Maya to Houdini for simulation and use Arnold for rendering.

I also visited Professor Hannah Kuehn's 8 PM class for additional suggestions. She recommended bringing everything into Houdini to avoid having to learn a new workflow in Maya. However, she noted that Arnold's render settings will still differ from Maya's.

For me, either way, learning new processes at this last moment is frustrating. I am still deciding which workflow is the best option for the current situation. My last alternative is to give her a static hairstyle without any simulation if I encounter further issues.

I decided working on the environment texture first, to make sure I have any progress.

Update 3 05/16/2024

Update 4 05/18/2024

I'm trying to learn the Arnold render pipeline in Houdini; however, the render viewport often fails to generate the render when I assign a material node. The strange thing is that sometimes it works, but other times it doesn't. I've been troubleshooting for half of the day and still can't figure out where the issue is coming from.

The render sometimes works; when I changed the camera angle, it stuck on generating...text.

Update 5 05/19/2024

Started working on cloth simulation. Although bringing hairGen from Houdini to Maya is not feasible, Professor Steele advised that it is better to work on cloth simulation in Houdini, as it is faster than Maya.

Simulation Render Test with wind blow.

Rendered with textures, and I also added more motions to the head and hand fingers.