Visual Effects 2

During this month we worked on Maya, Houdini and we did lots of research and trouble shooting on the projects. They gave us the chance to experience the real world situation which is just researching and figure it out how to go around a problem. The first project was working with Maya Fluid. I import the bonfire in Maya. I needed at least two containers to create the fire in the reference video.  I used object emitter from different of wood geometries that I made randomness. I adjusted Buoyancy and Dissipation to get the speed of burning and the size of the fire that I want. I changed the Swirl to avoid the fire just going directly upwards, I added a little turbulence to the fluid container as well to get more random movements. If I needed more random movement I also can add a turbulence field to the all the containers so it will effect all at the same time.  Changing the temperature and Fuel section gave me the chance to make temperature more turbulent and more buoyant, because the hot air is rising quicker. For the color of the fire, I set the color in shading tab and put the input as density.  For transparency I tweaked the opacity section which has a density input. For render I chose mental ray I used point lights around the fire with an expression on intensity to get that random light changing in the scene.

For the second project, we supposed to create a fire in Houdini.I imported my house in Houdini with a geometry node. I imported the material in Material Palette tab. I assigned Mantra surface material because in Houdini we needed to render in Mantra instead of mental ray. I useed Targa as a format for diffuse map. I made 4 cubes geometry as the emitter, which cover the window from outside that creates the illusion of fire coming out from inside the house. I used Pyro FX- Explosion to start. For the fire to collide with the house I turn the house to be static object.  I added another smokeless fire to the emitter to create randomness for the fire size. I spent most of my time in pyrosolver adjusting the size, shape, speed, and etc. In shape tab I adjust the shredding. In simulation the timescale and buoyancy lift, I tweaked around to find the right speed. In addition, I change the direction of the smoke and fire with buoyancy Dir. I had a problem with smoke, which caused the smoke to grow in –Y so put the gravity node after pyrosolver node and I set the force to 20 positive Y. Getting a nice render was the hardest part that gave me a hard time.  In shop tab, I apply fireball material shader to the explosion; in smoke density I adjusted the field shape.  And for the color I used float. In fire tab I adjusted the float in density, which was kinda similar to opacity ramp in Maya. And I changed the color by the ramp in color tab under fire. In shading I changed the brightness Model to Match Mantra because I used Mantra as the render engine. I adjusted the similar setting for the other fire shader. For render, I had a hard time to get a nice image without noise. I found a Noise level under sample tab in render node which decreasing that helps a lot. I changed my pixel sample and tile size to get a better quality. For the lighting I used the default skylight. I just adjust the intensity and the color.

For the third project, we supposed to choose an effect that we have never done that. We had to do so many research and trouble shoot the issues that we get in to while learning and finishing the project. I used DMM plugin, which comes with Maya2012 for creating the glass shattering. I created two spheres on top of each other. I made one of them bigger than the other. The inversed the normal on the inside sphere which collides with smoke from inside. Then I combined these two together and turned them to DMM object. I created another small sphere and made that to passive DMM object. And I animated in a way so it pass through the other sphere and as far as it’s colliding it makes the sphere to break apart. I choose DMM material for the combined spheres as weak-crystal. I created a region passive for the active DMM which cause to save some parts of the globe to not gets broken that much and not gets shoot outside. I adjust the density of the active DMM in order to stop it from breaking before colliding with passive DMM. For the direction of the shard of glass I gave it zero gravity so it causes them to spread in all the directions. After I got the result that I liked, I cache the geometry in animation tab and I deleted all the other shape nodes from DMM objects so I had my geometry pieces ready for the second part, which was smoke fluid. I have two containers in my scene. The first one is for inside smoke and the second is for smoke which emitting from shard of glass. I created an emitter inside the center of globe, which collides with inside inversed sphere that I already had in my scene. I adjust buoyancy, opacity, velocity, swirl, turbulence and etc. to get the shape and speed that I wanted. The reference smoke is white but I wanted to give it more color so in shading tab I made a smoke red. For rendering I created two spotlights, and IBL. The Globe texture is glass. When I render my scene I realized that I cant see the smoke inside the glass. I adjust my ray tracing but I couldn’t get the result. I tried to put an object inside the glass to see if it just doesn’t show the fluid, and it was true. I could see the geometry inside the glass but fluid. I even tried a plane in front of the fluid and I gave it glass material and I gave it enough ray tracing to show the fluid behind it but I couldn’t get it. I changed the ray tracing in different area such as glass material advance refraction, reflection, render quality, final gathering ray tracing, and in the lights ray-tracing tab. I research a little bit but I couldn’t find anything about this issue. So in my render my the sphere that breaks the globe is showing inside the glass but the smoke doesn’t show inside it while its emitting from inside. However, you can see the smoke in the playblast.