I was playing with Houdini for the last 1 year, did a couple of jobs with it. It saved my ass a couple of times and I can say that I completely felt in love with it, and I really felt sorry for the years I spent without Houdini. Anyway, after a while later I decided to try to complete the jobs more and more with Houdini and try to go away from Maya a little bit. I'm not going to enter the valley of the differences of the two programs and how awesome Houdini is etc. but I need to say that it feels awesome.
Yet, there is another job that I need to finish up (the deadline is tomorrow). The job is about a tire brand etc. Lets cut the chase, the object was not looking good just because they've sent us the production model that they are using to produce the product in the factory, and you now this kind of nurbs models are a little bit too perfect, has sharp edges and a lot of details. In Maya, to break this perfection, I generally use the round corner shader to smooth the sharp edges and it works perfectly. But in Houdini you don't have this kind of already built in shader but you have the powerful VEX.
I've first searched for it on the web, there was microBevel from Simon Barrick but it was not working with Houdini 11 (by the way I need to thank Simon, for his fast and friendly responses to my e-mails).
Then I tried to find a paper about how to smooth edges of geometries in render time. And I found a document about the round corner shader in mental ray from Hakan Andersson (the famous master zap). So it was pretty obvious actually...
you can download the OTLs here:
tangent.otl
roundCorners.otl
Here are the results of my round corner OTL with different curving choices:
and here, the tire with and without round corner shader:
11 comments:
I really appreciate, that you put your OTLs online, but I have problems using them. I put down the tangent SOP after a box and connected a material with the roundCorners shader put into the normals of the lighting model, but nothing meaningful happens and the result doesn't change when I change the values.
sorry about my late response...
use the round corner in slots that accepts surface normals.
So with the new materials in houdini 11 create a round corner node and attach its result to the "surface normal" attribute of the "surface model" or just follow what is connected to it and try to replace any "global variables" nodes that has its "surface normal" slot connected to some other nodes with the "roundCorners node. Then increase the samples to 6 or more in roundCorners then promote the radius and bias parameters or just connect a constant to them, and set the bias to 0.001 to start and play with it incase you get artifacts, and then set your radius according to your objects scale... hope it is clear enough...
NICE, one fine bevel - never without anymore!
It was the BIAS - I never had it that low. It's always the same - I try every possible combination, but not the right one.
You made my day! It even works with NURBS. Thank you so much! :D
It is nice to hear that it helped someone. You're welcome.
Hi I want to download your otl but the link is dead. Can you share the otls again? Thanks in advanced!
ooh, yes, my site is down let me attach the otl to this post...
I've updated the links.
Hi Ozgur, thanks for fixing the link, this is a very interesting asset. May I ask which document you are referring to for the theory of the round corner? I try go to Master Zap's blog but don't find such document. Thank you.
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