Shot 1 Full Render Preview
The first shot of A Dragon's Desire is now complete! This shot was a lot of fun to work on lighting wise! The environment was also a LOT of fun to work on as it's a theme I haven't really covered before.
Vertex Groups as Masks in Shader Editor
Vertex groups are actually a great way to create masks that both work for shaders and scatter systems. A vertex mask is essentially just a float value from 0 to 1 that normally is used to control a bone's influence on geometry. However, those values can be used outside of rigging, like for separating materials in a mask!
The pathways shown above use a vertex group to mask out the grass around the path and for a separate shader for a path.
To be able to use the ve
rtex group in the shader editor, you must throw down an "attribute" node. This node can pull from any attribute listed in the "Attributes" menu as well as vertex groups.
You can type in the name of your vertex group (it is case sensitive) and use that as a mix factor.
Back to EmberGen
Setting up smoke simulations in Houdini can be time consuming and annoying. Sometimes it's best to go for a simple, quick approach, and EmberGen offers that for quick sim setup.
EmberGen allows you to make sims as complicated as you'd like, but the setup for this project is relatively simple. This effect can be easily achieved by mixing noise with a flat plane. This allows for easy control over the look and location of the fire.
The sim can be then brought into Blender as VDB files for scattering around the scene.