Water VFX Project (Fullsail)

In this project I needed to make water. So my idea was to make water pouring into a glass.  For this project I created a quick cup in Maya and brought it over to Houdini. In Houdini I applied a glass texture to it. Next I added a sphere and this was going to be my emitter.  I also added a ground plane in order to catch whatever water I didn’t get in my cup. I selected my sphere and made my particles emit for object. I also made my cup into a static object, and since my cup was thin in places I uncheck the Use Volume Based Collision Detection. This made it so my water particles would collide with my entire cup. For my water particles, in order to get more particles, I lowered my particle separation to .015 that gave my water more particles. I also believe that adjusted the density, but I don’t remember what the default was. Lastly, I cached out the particle motion. After caching out my particles, I realized that my cup wasn’t filling up and that a lot of my particles seeped though the bottom of my cup. So I just grabbed the bottom of the inside of the cup and brought the up a little high. I also added a light in order to make the water look more realistic. I added a distance light for the main light but added an area light as a key light. I believe most of my work came for my materials, and trying to get my water to look like water. The first thing I did was lower the diffuse intensity to and extremely low .078 in order to clear up the cloudiness of the water. I then brightened up the light blue color of the diffuse in order to give it a very little tint of light blue. I also made sure that the water reflected light and refractions were enable so it could bend the image when looking through the water. Finally I made the render, which took a total of about 10 hours to complete. And that was about it. It didn’t seem like a lot work but it took me a lot longer than it should have. I encounter one problem that took me forever to figure out, but I also don’t know how I fixed it. This problem was with creating the emitter. When creating the emitter, the particles would either be stopped by a bounding box, not collide with my geometry, or didn’t even show up at all. I tried looking for information on how to fix it, but in videos when people applied the emitter it worked properly, and I couldn’t find anyone who had the same problems. Overall I think my project turned out really good. It looks and acts like water. The only problem I couldn’t figure out was why my cup stop filling up after about halfway through the sim.

Explosion VFX Project (Fullsail)

For this project I was trying to recreate an explosion from a truck crash shown in the first link. The way my explosion turned out was a little less visually what I expected. I was drawing blanks when I was trying to figure out how to create this explosion, so I went online and ended up finding a tutorial that looked a lot like what I was trying to accomplish. I used the tutorial as a base to figure out how to get started and from there I expanded and did my own tweaks. His didn’t match up to what mine looked like so I adjusted my project accordingly. I started off by starting off with a polygon sphere and I applied the explosion pyro FX and it set up my geometry to explode in a ball of fire and smoke. I then disabled the clamp to maximum so there was no limit to how big my fire could reach.  I then began to make tweaks in the pyro section, like Buoyancy lift, cooling rate, dissipation, Disturbance, shredding, turbulence, swirl, and division size. I then added a gas vortex confinement node. I didn’t know what this was at first, but I looked it up to find out what it is and compared it to just a plain vortex force. From what I got from the definitions, the vortex containment node is a boost to the swirl attribute, while just the vortex force would have spun the smoke like a tornado. Once that was all done I rendered it out so that I could jump from frame to frame without have to sim out every frame before.  Then the fun began. I created my camera, and applied the lights that looked the best and gave my smoke the best look. It got a 2 distant lights one for a key and another for its main light. I then applied the material to my pyro Fx called fireball. I placed a Mantra PBR render so I could get constant updates on what my render would look like.  Getting the fire to look correct was the hardest part of this project. I needed the explosion to be a red orange, but I could never get it to look quite right. I change to get the color from the heat vs. the temperature, because it gave me a better default color. I then changed my source range. To get the color to look as close to correct as possible. I gave the fire density a float ramp and adjusted were I felt was necessary.  Lastly I went to the color settings and unchecked the COP and Render Viewports and all that did was lower the gamma. Next was the smoke. For the smoke density, I gave it a hill preset for the ramp and then I adjusted the final amplitude. In order to make the cloud look think. I started at 10 and slowly went down until it matched my reference, which was at about 4.  For the color of the smoke I tried to get it so that the fire that disappears in the air to turn grey while I wanted to keep the rest black. It sort of worked except it looked like a black cloud of smoke with the sun giving it highlights around the edges. I then began to mess with the shadow density and to try and make them look realistic. I lastly gave it a volume light in order to make it look like the fire was glowing.  And after that I was pretty much done, all I have to do is render.  Render took a lot longer than expected. Roughly 8 hours and still not finished rendering. The only problem I have is the red spots on the explosion. Could never figure out how to make it look right.

Fire VFX Project (Fullsail)

For this project I wanted to replicate the fire from a grill from which lighter fluid was put on the fire. The first thing I did was to model the grill and coals for the fire to emit from. Once it was all done, I made my coals emitters for the fluid/fire. After adjusting my scale and resolution of the 3d container, I used the fire that I was making in lecture as a base point for what my fire should be. I then tried to make where I had no boundaries for my container, but it never seemed to work. I then applied collisions to me grill in order to stop the fire from penetrating the geometry. Once I got the fire to stop going through my grill. I began to make fixes to my fire. I added a tiny bit of turbulence, reduced my density, added buoyancy, and got more swirl. I did one more thing and that was adjusting the dissipation. For dissipation, I couldn’t use a constant value because I wanted my fire to erupt and eventually simmer down. So in order for this to work I keyed my dissipation in order to get this effect. I also keyed the pressure for the temperature in order to get a bigger explosion at the beginning of the movie. Once all that was complete. I went to the color section in order to give my fire a more realistic feel to it. Since my reference was a clean fire, meant that there was going to be little smoke. For the color I adjusted it to so that the fire would appear mostly yellow with orange and read around the edges, until the fire began to calm down and evenly spread out the colors. I was pretty much done with my fire except for the lights, and a small error with the way my fire came out of the grill. The error was that my fire was coming out vertically from my grill so it looked like there were gaps in my fire for certain angles. I tried putting multiple fields on it, like drag, air, turbulence, and a vortex field, but nothing seemed to want to interact with each other. For my light I made a point light for the fire and a directional light just to light the scene. The point light was put on a quadratic Decay rate, an orange tint, and was given the expression:

 (if (time > .6) pointLightShape1.intensity = rand(300,700);)

(if (time < .6) pointLightShape1.intensity = rand(209,400);)

This was necessary because I needed to light the fire and make it look like it was flickering on and off. Lastly I animated the camera in order to show off the grill fire, and cached out the fluid in order to render it faster.

I think it turned out a lot better than I thought it would turn out. And for my first fire it look pretty good. I wanted to take it in to Houdini but I’m not that familiar with Houndini and I ran out of time in order to render it out.

Viscosity Project (Fullsail)

For this project, it is a continuation on my water project, except this time I was adding a viscosity to the water and turning it into honey. If you haven’t read my paper on my water project, this is how I created the water. First I applied an emitter to a sphere in order to make it emit particles. As far as the settings I adjusted to make it look like water, I adjusted the particle separation to .015, which made the particles thicker, and adjusted my density to around 1000. On to the shader, I lowered the diffuse intensity to .078 to clear up the cloudiness, and I gave the diffuse to a blue that is on the edge of becoming white. And that was I when it came to the water project. Before I adjusted my water to look like honey, I created a simple bread slice in Maya, exported it as an obj, and brought it into Houdini. In Houdini I made it a static object so the liquid could collide with the bread. Also as far as lighting the scene I put one distant light facing the opposite way of my area light, which I used as a key light. So when I started making my honey from this emitter, the first thing I did was give the fluid a viscosity.  I rendered it out a few time in order to see if the fluid fell correctly.  I ended up settling on a viscosity of about 1300 because it looked close to like honey. I also animated the emitter so that it was being pulled up which give it a wavy effect as it was making contact. Now I went and messed with the shader. I boosted up the refraction intensity and give it a golden honey color. This made it so that the fluid was golden yellow that had a slight refraction of the surrounding environment, which in this case was just my bread. I really only affect the color when it came to the reflections. For the reflections I turned it into a slightly brighter yellow than my refraction, this brighten up my fluid as it fell before contact.  I threw on a few final renders and realized that my render color was darker than what I saw as it was rendering. So I then took it into nuke and adjusted the gamma so it looked like how I saw as it was rendering. That was it. I think that it turned out really well. I believe it looks like honey and it acts like honey.  The one thing I wish I added was a better texture for the bread instead of a plain clay texture.

Disintegration Project (Fullsail)

For this project, I needed to do something that I have not done in previous classes. After a lot of thinking I decided on doing a disintegration effect. When looking for reference I found out that there were many different types disintegration. The way I was going to pull off this effect was to use ncloth in Maya. I figured that it was the best was to create the effect with little knowledge for using this effect. I also found out other reasons to use this effect. One of these reasons being, the ability to get a car to change paint colors by tearing off the old paint. For this project I needed a high res piece of geometry in order to get the best effect. SO what I did was look back at my old modeling projects and found a low res project that I enjoyed making. I then took that geometry, and made sure everything was one piece.  I then needed more faces in order to get a better effect. So I subdivided the geometry and went from about 200faces to about 200,000faces. Now that I have a lot of faces, I selected all of the edges on the object and detached them from each other. Now all the faces should be separated from each other. Then select the entire mesh and make it all ncloth. Next your going to want to turn off the gravity for ncloth, so it doesn’t move until it reacts with something. NOW THIS IS A MAJOR STEP, make sure you go to you nucleus and turn off both collision and self-collisions. If you don’t do this, your simulation will take an eternity to sim or worse crash Maya. Now we have to make something for the ncloth to react with. I created a volume axis field for mine and enlarged it in order to cover my entire mesh. But you could use just about any field. You then animate the field to move through your mesh. You will need to adjust a few settings in field in order to get it to work properly. The settings I changed were: Along Axis, Turbulence, Turbulence speed, turbulence frequency, and turbulence offset. Once you are done tweaking the settings you should be done. Once you get the motion the way you want it, cache it out, and then render. I think my project turned out really well. The only thing I wish had gotten it to do is getting the faces to fade away as the got so far away from the object.

Rigid Body Project (Fullsail)

        This was a Rigid Body research project for my STE (Software Technology) class at Full Sail University. Going into this project I knew the basics on how rigid bodies worked from my visual effects class earlier this year. But I would be using different software that I wasn't using before called Houdini. One problem I had was getting the ball to make contact with the funnel. When I gave the ball an active rigid body and the funnel a passive rigid body, I figured it would work. But the ball kept on hitting an invisible floor right above the funnel. In order to fix this, I made the funnel a terrain rigid body and it ended up working fine. I had plans to texture the Houdini version, but due to time constraints, I wasn't able to get it done. Overall I am really pleased on how it turned out.

Character Animation 2 Project (Fullsail)

             This is an animation project I did for the CAN2 (Character Animation 2). I found this project to be pretty easy, but I did have trouble with the trip, and keeping its foot from penetrating the plane on the ground. In the end I think it turned out pretty well. I thought that It turned out pretty well. If I had more time, I would have offset the antennas and arms a little more so they are not so parallel.

Strong Pose Project (Fullsail)

This was my strong pose project for my CAM1 class at Fullsail. In this video I was trying to create strong poses that showed off emotion through silhouette. The poses, in the order shown, were showing relaxed, fear, anger, happy, sad, disgust, and balanced. They all turned out really well except for the happy pose. That was the hardest, in my opinion, to create. I was given the character and all I did was pose it.

Character Animation 1 Project (Fullsail)

This is my final project for my CAM1 class. I started off making storyboard for the animation so I knew what I was going for. Once I got a plan, I began to block out all of the contact poses and any additional key frames for the animation. After that was complete, I put in the passing poses followed by the up and down poses of the walk. Lastly, I made the foot roll keys and tweaked the keys in the graph editor. I turned out pretty good for my first animation that tells a story.

Soft Body Project (Fullsail)

In this project I was working with soft bodies in maya. I like how the jello interacts with each other. I went with the rounded geometry instead of the sharper geometry because it looked more realistic. The one thing I wished i fixed was the fall the blue jello cube. It didn't seem to work the way I wanted it to.

Waterfall VFX Project (Fullsail)

This was for my project on particles. I wanted to create a waterfall that showed of my use particles. I created all of the assets except for the textures. I used 4 emitters to create the waterfall scene (2 blobby surfaces, 1 cloud, and 1 multi-streaks). I like the way the smoke particles looked like they were evaporating off of the water, and just how the particles look like the element they are trying to portray.

P.S. This was the first render and had some problems with rendering. I am currently working on an updated render and should be up soon.