Week: 15 – 21 Feb

Throughout this week’s tutorial we used the Arnold rendering engine instead on the built-in Houdini’s Mantra. I headed to Autodesk website to download and install the trial version of Arnold. I then switched the rendering engine in Houdini to Arnold as I followed the Mehdi’s tutorial.

For this tutorial, I used the ‘rubbertoy’ as the subject and attached the ‘Attribute Delete’ node to clear any attribute of the 3d model. After that, I applied a new ‘Standard Surface’ material shader to the model. With the shader, we can change the object’s color, specular, roughness etc. But for this exercise, I just followed and used the same shader settings from Mehdi’s tutorial.

I added an ‘Arnold Light’ node into the scene which act as the ‘Key’ lighting. By default, the Light type is set as ‘Point Light’ which is omni direction.

Before going deeper into the lighting, I added a new camera node to add a camera into the scene to set the view angle of the render. I repositioned the camera until I got good angle of the subject (rubbertoy).

Next, I went back to the ‘Arnold Light’ that I created before and changed the light type. There are many option available for the light such as Point, Distant, Spot, Quad, Disk, Cylinder, Skydome, Mesh and Photometric. Each light has different parameters and settings that effects the render.

I changed the light type to ‘Distant’ first to try and see how the render looks like. The lighting has now became a direct light instead of omni direction.

I played around with the render settings and lighting parameters a bit to see how the render reacts to it. I also added a ‘Grid’ node to add a plane under the subject so shadow can be casted on it.

I added the second ‘Arnold Light’ and changed the Light Type to ‘Quad’. This lighting will act as the ‘Back’ lighting for the scene. In the next part, I tested and experimented several lighting parameters as well as reposition the lights to get the lighting I want.

I went back to the first lighting and changed its type to Skydome and applied a HDR texture that I downloaded from the internet.

I experimented with the settings several time but I didn’t manage to get the same visual as seen in Mehdi’s tutorial. I’m not really sure if I missed anything or was it because of the trial version of Arnold. I didn’t finish the whole part of the tutorial as I need to finish some other tasks in the collaborative project. I may revisit this tutorial again later.