Day 56 Genesis

Day 55 Genesis

Today was the so-called the final day or render day. The tweaking must stop and proceed with the rendering. To really confirm the "best" look, I did flipbook of sequences with different attributes. This is to compare the attributes like which are better, which are more suitable. To wait for the cooking of the sim alone was tedious. The process goes on till I get the one with the maximum effect. I put in the flipbook sequences in After Effects to compare. With Mr Michael help, I got a better result.

 flipbook sequences in AE

There was some problem with the caching although the oversampling was set to 10. Mr Ron showed me a few method to play with the converting.

 different volume conversion

switch to test out different method

After that, I had to rop the bgeo sequences to save the calculation time when rendering. It took me about an hour to rop it out. Then I left it to render after I input in the lights and desired shader color.

Day 54 Genesis

As the final hours getting closer and closer, I am feeling the heat even though Mr Michael told us that we need not show the final renders. I wanted to work to the fullest to come out with the final renders to impress everyone. Hmmm..... we shall see.

For now, I am still tweaking. Opinion/suggestion from Lu Sheng by Mr Michael that there will be no end to tweaking, that's true but for a perfectionist like myself, I wanted to show the best, but come to think of it, there will be subjective views and " What is the best??? "

Despite those, I carry on tweaking. However, there was still some particles stuck at the emitter. To fix this, a fan node was place in position slightly behind the emitter to blow out all the stuck-particle. To get the position of that specific place, a vopsop to normalize the normals and a polyextrude to get the position.

polyextrude for the fan position

 expression to use the position to put fan

Day 53 Genesis

Over the weekends, I did some testing and lots of tweaking. It was a tedious process with all the cooking after every small adjustment of number but it was worth it. I converted the smoke to particle to see how was it like. I did a render to test. When I went to school and asked Mr Ron why does it looked like that and he told me that there was not enough sample rate of the popnet at the particle-fluid node which I used to do the conversion.

 test render

I then took this opportunity to refresh my memory of the flood system as I had to complete everything by this week. I kinda remember how it works, hope everything kicks in. I also did some test render and added motion blur to one of them, it looks decent and I quite like it. Hopes this works well.

 flood render without motion blur

flood render with motion blur

Monday goes by with lots of tweaking. As the emitter emits puffy smoke, I had to tweak other attributes as well. Temperature was one of them. As temperature is high, it acts like real-world physics where high temperature = smoky/steam, lower temperature = condense liquid. Went to work on this area but nothing seems to happen. Consulted Mr Ron, he suggested Viscosity. It kind of works now as it produces more "tube-ish" flow. Everything started to come together.

Day 52 Genesis

After much tweaking, the gush of the water was still kinda weird. The water still goes upwards no matter how I tweak. Went around the network to see what happen until I remember about the point normal in the water emitter. As expected, it was pointing upwards. A quick shift of node fix the problem.

 weird normal with xform at top

fixed normal with xform at bottom

Also there was something about the creation frame, as the dragon will only spit water at frame 115, I adjust the start frame on the DOP node and creation time on various nodes. However, it did not work for some strange reason. I posted question on the forums regarding this. Mr Ron's suggestion was instead of playing with frame time, why not play frame 115 at the first frame by using a time-shift node.

After tweaking, I tried to convert the smoke sim into particle form to start testing renders. There was weird movement and I had to solve it fast.


Some test renders I did.

Test Gush 3 from Tanner Caelum on Vimeo.

Day 51 Genesis

Mr Douglas came in for his final progress check before he leave for his oversea trip. He wanted to see the progress of the shots and check that everything is ok. I showed him that I have integrated in the gush system into the shot. However, there are a few problems where I had to solve like snapping smoke container and the direction of spit .etc. Now what I have left to do is to tweak for the best look and correct physics of spitting out the water. Spent quite long to tweak the parameter like the fastness of gush, the constant emission and so on.

Flip Book Test 1 from Tanner Caelum on Vimeo.

Flip Book Test 2 from Tanner Caelum on Vimeo.

Day 50 Genesis

The problem was fix using write file directly and use a rop geometry to rop out the sim and then bring in back using file node. So now I had to render out the bgeos whenever I tweak the slightest of attribute. I am able to come out with a test render. Afterwhich, I finish up the commercial version and did a little documentation on the hip file.

Test Gush 2 from Tanner Caelum on Vimeo.

I also receive the shots from Mr Douglas. I was wondering how can I start to put in the stuff. As Mr Ron help to fix the caching problem, he stay on to help me kick start the work. As he already started halfway, he tells me about Murphy's Law. Murphy's Law, states that "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong"

So Mr Ron continues to guide me throughout. After filing in the exported geos of the dragon and the mountain, changing the emitter to a cone shape makes the spitting more natural and to drive out the normals and use them as velocity direction.

convert primitive to polygon 

polyextrude to cone

point node to add normals to add velocity

For the vector field, it was the same as how I did in the gushing system. This time, as the dragon is moving, I needed a way to "parent" the field. The emitter with all the movement/animation was brought in using a object merge node. A circle was put into a copy node with the emitter as to copy all its moving/position data to the circle. A polyextrude was added to create the other end of the cylinder with that as the position of the vector field. A sweep node for copying the spiral normal circle on the points of the backbone which is is the polyextruded out vector field. The rest of the step are similar to the previous system.

 polyextrude for vector field position

 sweep for arranging

network of vector field

For the dopnet, it is the same as the previous system except that needed to bring in the terrain as terrain object and sourceapply to source the smoke.

network of dopnet