Since the art tests were still ongoing, I kept on working on reaching my learning goals and working on exercises which will later on help me create value for our product. Per general my plan of approach on learning is to allocate 2 days per week on learning Houdini, 1 day on learning shader creation and 1 day on learning real time effects. Ideally I would spend 2-3 hours per day on learning to be able to create quality assets for our product.
Houdini
This week was focused on learning volumes(a type of 3D geometry that is used for creating effects such as explosions) and their different types and use cases. At the end of the week I played around with the volumes and the Houdini nodes(a "code container" that allows for an artist friendly way form of coding; Houdini works based on a node system) that help manipulate them in order to seal the knowledge and get some experience working with them.
My understanding of volumes is essential for being able to create simulations(a time dependent change to 3D geometry) such as fire or smoke which I can later on use to create effects for our product.
Shaders
This week I learnt the logic behind creating shaders such as "scale manipulation", "rotation" and "flipbook"(a rendered animation stored in 1 texture for optimization purposes). The flipbook shader was especially helpful to learn since I will use it for animations that I will export from Houdini. Additionally, I found out how to create material functions, which are a way of packing multiple nodes into one for simplicity and visual declutter of the shader workspace. My goal with this learning process is to be able to understand the logic behind shader creation rather than just replicating shaders from tutorials. This is crucial for being able to create specific shaders necessary for our product.
Real time effects
This week I started learning more about real time effects creation. I started learning on this topic last year during Minor Skilled. I still have a lot of knowledge gaps on this topic so I considered it necessary to use multiple courses and sources to fill in those gaps. My main guideline on learning is a Udemy course on VFX creation. Whenever I feel like there are parts that are missed on in the lectures, I search YouTube for more information on the topic. The biggest find out of this week was that I could use emitter parameters in order to create variation in the effects once they are duplicated. These variations can affect any of the effect's properties, such as color or speed.
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