cmiVFX – Houdini Python WeaTher Widget

cmiVFX – Houdini Python Weather Widget
Genre: eLearning
cmiVFX has been leading the forefront of Visual Effects Methodology And Training for the last decade by creating unique video titles that can’t be found anywhere else. Our videos are an extension of heavy research and development as well as experience. Recently, we suffered a major weather event that destroyed our town as well as cut our power for days leaving us in the cold as fires and flood waters ran rampant all around. We are still recovering from this devastation, and are thankful to all the supporters out there. We appreciate your loyalty and demeanor during these hard times. One of our mentors living on the west coast sought out an opportunity to potentially help others seeking weather information by creating a brilliant Houdini Python tool that lets you have live weather graphics for Motion Graphics work. With a little imagination, you could potentially turn this into a way to reconstruct weather events based on data given by government and satellite agencies.
This is a full feature video with a personal touch. Varomix keeps his video live in a window while he records so that everyone can meet him on a more personal level. We would like to extend this new type of service as a way to better see what you as the consumer might want from us in the future. We are really proud to be able to produce this entire video during the Hurricane Conditions and aftermath with extremely limited technology. It’s actually quite amazing, an testament to how efficient the cmiVFX production workflow really is.

Short Description
Having Python inside of Houdini gives us the ability to connect it to anything. Python being so amazingly versatile allows a whole world of possibilities. A world in which you can at least detect weather patterns and build new data and animations from that. Imagine reconstructing real events from recorded data. The future is here, .now!

Chapter Descriptions

Introduction
In this video we’ll take external API’s and represent that data in a great visual way to create a weather widget all inside Houdini.

Yahoo Weather API
Getting Parameters From The Weather API
Modeling
In this section we’ll build all the 3D elements that will represent our weather data, we need to take advantage of the 3D space or it makes no sense to do it in Houdini, so we’ll make use of the high-end lighting, shading and rendering features of Houdini to make our widget look really interesting.

Final Touches
Since this could be used all around the world we need to make this work for different systems. This will also affect the kind of textures we will get by finding if the location is either at night or day comparing data from the RSS response. We’ll also add a few presets and animate the city name procedurally so it works in any case, no matter the length of the name.

About Varomix
Special Thanks
For Chris Maynard and all the people that fought nature, this video is for you.

Project Contents
All cmiVFX videos come with all the training materials you can need right from our website. No matter what time of day, your location, or how your feeling, cmiVFX will be there waiting for you!

Special Note From Editor
This video is a pretty special video for us. We were knocked out by Hurricane Sandy, and still managed to get a video out with limited power and resources all while feeding and helping out other guests with our gas generator back up. It was a cold couple of nights, but we all came together united as one. There were no savages, no thefts, no murders, instead.. just great people rising to the challenge of survival despite politcal agenda from our leaders. The people controlled the government, like it should, and things go done fast. This video is a memorium to the victims of Hurricane Sandy and the victims around the world suffering from global climate change in general. -Chris Maynard