Shiny shizzle

Like any battle field there is always aerial fire. Always the little twinkling sparkles of red hot bullets piercing the skyline whether they be small arms fire or an artillery shell. Taking a break from doing the smoke debris i decided to take a look at re-creating this nice little feature for the ambience of the final product.

I started by using a fluid chamber without an emitter. This is something that people wouldnt normally do but i thought i would give it a shot. Most people would try attaching a surface emitterto a shape like a sphere and making them glow. Well instead i decided to take advantage of the fluid chambers scale abilities.

Here you can see me scaling them chamber to be an extremely thin rectangle to represent the “bullet” shape. The fluids would also be set as a centre gradient on all factors because i wont a static amount of particles shaped by the actual fluid container edges.

Here i am playing with the colours in the centre gradient so that the particles are visible. The settings are also set to static as well.

Ive here managed to set a glow for the particles to give it some illumination.

The i started playing with the incandescense to give it some colour depth instead of just a glowing yellow. So this is rather simple but will be effective. Ive already animated one bullet and it works fine, i just need to figure out how to pivot multiple bullets to one instead of trying to figure out the exact maths of its rate of travel. I’m not that great at maths you see.

Hello Mr Foley

Well as some test smoke is rendering i want to think about some Foley art. The project for the ultimate immersion is going to need sound, that will mean that the sound effects of the background are going to have to be top notch. What has to be considered? Well considering there is a social uprising with small arms fire and maybe some heavy arms fire at points it would be quite subtle yet muffled. Here are a few examples of what i will be looking for to create.

This video has some great ambient sounds. Although the guy is saying we can use this for free i’d like to try my hand at designing the sounds if i have the time after the CGI. So looking at the sounds, the explosions can be used from a midi drum kit and then have a smoothed echo effect layer with some sound displacement filtered on top to give it that edge. The gun fire can be simple taps on a desk. Using different materials many different sounds can be achieved. And also using pitch changer and other filters i can make a quite versatile library of sounds ready to give some nice ambience and immersion to the piece. Damn i love my Foley

Express this…

Well i started to think of a new plan for the explosions instead of actually doing the building. In terms of explosion i could just simply ender out a lot of unique looking explosion planes and then having them composited into the image afterwards. This would save a lot of time in rendering and also the dreaded errors that maya like to throw. Upon rendering the actual explosion that protruded from the building the session had crashed and actually decided to corrupt its whole .mb file, which really really sucks. So i decided to save the whole agro of getting .mb files to work and simply keep it simple. I would render out passes of a plane exploding from a large distance and then rendering out unique fluid explosions and unique smoke fluid streams separately. Then the compositing will handle the jigsaw puzzle instead of Maya taking the full heat of the rendering. So again i started looking ino attaching particle emitters to the debris for a realistic effect without the presence of an annoying building which likes to corrupt itself every 5 minutes!

So you can see here this is the kind of angle shot i would take of the explosion. It leaves a lot of room for the falling pieces and also leaves a lot of space to show distance and depth for the initial breakage. We dont want something ridiculously high resolution because it will be extremely hard to actually render it out and also the compression would take forever!

Here you can see i have lit the scene with using one spotlight and using some depth map shadows at 258 pixel resolution. You wont be able to see them on the backdrop because i need a surface for it to map onto. I’m wondering if you can hide and object but still take in the shadow definition information? Anyways the scene here also shows that i have textured it with a generic concrete texture, very simple but effective. Couldn’t really imagine large chunks of debris to look like anything else.

Here i attached a texture image PSD to the sprites and then used them as an Alpha transparency channel. I then started to think about its movement and its spawn creation. Things started to get rather render intensive at this point so i really had to shove a lot of settings down to minimum. I even had to shut off the particle emission for a sec just to pan the camera. Although i think i may start deleting some object history to free up some space. Anyways the particles here are blending together rather nicely but are obviously spawning at the same angle constantly. So i needed to write an expression.

Here you can see that the sprites are being born at a random angle. This is because i added to attribute “spriteTwistPP”.
This attribute determines what angle the sprites are born if set to the “creation” of them. So on the expression editor a used this expression.

“SmokeParticle1.spriteTwistPP = rand(0,360);”

This then gives them a random spawn of a 360 degree angle. Which makes them blend together very nicely which has made me extremely happy with its result so far. I have done a few test renders and i have to say it gets really intensive. I may have to compress the resolution of the smoke particle texture to make it render out a lot faster. It took 6 hours to render out 180 frames which really is an understatement. So thats basically hat i have been p to this weekend. Now i need to look at the distribution and wind pattern of these sprites and add some more expression involving incandescence evolution.

Mr Sheen

well after figuring out particle debris and how the shatter theory works i decided to attach some surface emitters to the falling debris for a much more realistic effect. It was using the “smoke” effect in Maya which can be applied to objects. BlastCode when at certain points of the animation considers the falling debris to be a separate object from its original shape. Which obviously means you have to texture it differently, but this works out to be very useful because the original shape wont be emitting particles when not in motion.

Here is the particles emitted as what is called Sprites. These sprites are like tiny image planes which can be textured to have an image attached to them and then manipulated. At this point i hadnt figured out how to attach a texture though.

Here on this image it shows me using a different particle type from sprite which is actually called a cloud surface shader. Its like a blobby surface which can be textured to hold textures as well, but is rendered out onto the Maya software shader instead. This would be an easier render because it would mean i would only have to do a single render pass but unfortunately it doesn’t have as much control as sprites and doesn’t give me the effect i wanted.

Here you can see the difference when the actual scene is rendered out. The surface of the particles looks nothing like a cloud of debris smoke. I was starting to get slightly frustrated at this point as i felt like it was simply doing a rubbish lambert texture onto multiple spawning spheres. I needed to start figuring out how to attach alpha channel images into the particles.

And so, i changed back to sprites for obvious reasons in this image. That particles don’t look like an object, they look a lot closer to what i was aiming for. Now to start tweaking..

Test rendering

Here you can see the actual explosion in action using test rendering. I have also just ome up with the idea that we can simply texture properly in photoshop instead of maya. I just need the simple nurbs to be up and running with a simple surface shader. Booyeh!

You can see that also the particle debris from the surface emitters havent been added yet because i havent textured them. And also that the lighting is rubbish. This is simply a test render until i have a reference point to do the lighting. Or have no lighting and then using 3d lights in both photoshop and after effects.

Lets get cracking

Well yesterday i managed to get a lot done with the term “trial and error” written in 200 hundred feet high concrete letters. I used the Maya plug-in blastcode to recreate the shatter of a nurb within the polygonal building.

Here you can see me converting a duplicated and extracted polygonal edge into a Nurb and then shaping it once again to fit the space gap of the original polygonal structure. I found that working with nurbs can be tricky considering the way the vertices are aligned and the way that the edges shape into a much more organic form rather than the standard polygon.

Here you can see the duplicated edge floating in space, i simply moved it to the side for a reference and then put it back over once i had shaped the Nurb. Call it layering if you like.

Here you can see the basic functions of blastcode in action, you can see where the explosion emitter throws out the properties of the physics with the large field. his then can be tweaked to actually give you a explosion that you need.

Here you can see me tweaking the physics explosion and showing where the segment of the nurb is non existent as the pieces of it fly out into the air. The cracks are formed by using a noise map and then tweaking its attributes and mesh thickness. I used a rather thick mesh for those big chunky pieces.

Here you can see that i connected the rigid body of the plane under the building to the resulting debris. This then has the pieces reacting to the surface. You can play with the friction and bounce and many other levels to get a good resulting debris breakup. I found that the pieces were flying too far so i upped the friction and gravity and gave the pieces some depth to how they fall.

I then started looking at how far they fly and how much gravity is affecting the actual pieces. I wanted the pieces to be very heavy and rather slow moving. Considering this building will be very far away i think that the pieces would fall quite slowly. Taking reference from something like 9/11 or the Iraq conflict shows how slowly a resulting blast can be from a distance. The pieces although moving at the same rate of motion as any other piece would move, is actually a lot slower in the human eyes but it has a lot more ground to cover from a distance.

Here you can see that i textured the pieces into a very simple lambert as a test. The annoying thing about nurbs is that you cant texture map them with UV’s. I have had trouble finding a good way to texture them other than just applying a simple lambert. The beauty of Blastcode however is that you can texture the pieces differently to the initial wall prior to breakage.

Here is the scene lit with a type of dawn light, although i cant do too much until i have the graded image of the final product. So i still have to keep on with connecting the fluid properties to Mayas physics fields.

This image here shows that i also turned the resulting debris into particle emitters. I am currently in the process of texturing them to be a smoke particle by using an apparent “cloudlet” feature. But i am still on the hunt for that. So things are on the way….slowly, starting to get a tad bit tense. But whats new eh?

Polygons to nurbs

Well looking into the Pulldownit plugin the basic version actually doesnt shatter the objects. It simply makes rigid body optimizations which really is’nt useful to us at this point in time. So i looked into another plugin called “Blastcode” which one of my friends had lying around and its a fantastic tool for maya. I had a play for a while and found it was rather easy to use in ways and also had some fantastic rigid bodies collisions. But there was a fatal flaw. The building i modelled earlier was polygon based, this plugin is nurbs based. Which is rather odd to me because i thought nurbs were for more organic modelling rather than polygons.

i tried to convert the polygonal mesh into a subdivision first by cleaning up the polygons and checking the nonmanifold option in its cleanup tool. And then converting the subdiv into a nurb. As you can see it failed rather miserably, which means i have to start again.

Even the texture disappeared which really sucks. Sorry team, thats just the way it goes with dynamics…

Maya buildings

Well considering i was going to be making the explosions i may as well show what work i have been doing these past couple of days. I started looking at one of Phil’s concept designs for the buildings and had a crack at one.

Here you can see the building in constrcution. It was simply adding a cylinder and cube together and then combining them into one polygon mesh. I had some trouble with the edge loop tool because of some wayward polygons hiding away under layers but after a cleanup it sorted itself out.

Managed to take a look into maybe making some more definition on the polgyons by using some extrutions and then creating some spires. Had a few goes at making the spires and managed to make some pretty cool looking ones on the top of the cylinder. The cubic tower has a ventilation shaft for just some subtle depth. I had to remeber that not too much detail would be required in areas because of the distance they will be put in on the composite screen.

Here is when texture mapping came into play, i managed to take a planar shot of the uv map and then started texturing in photoshop using the UV snapshot.

I managed to grab a lot of the textures from CGTEXTURES.COM which is a great resouce for free textures at extremely high resolutions.

Here is the scene rendered out and lit up with a light. I wanted to give it a dawn feel so i used a relatively orange light to take a look at the colours of the scene.

Its amazing what colour correction and lighting can do to the object. Its just a shame that i cant use this building…i shall show you why in my next post.

Celebrity chef time

Well heres a vid Elliott has wacked together of us working at the Lighthouse theatre filming celebrity chefs! The video is rather self explanatory.

PULLDOWNIT

Well looking into new tech that could be introduced into the Maya dynamics system i started thinking about Plugins and managed to stumble upon one called “Pulldownit.” Very obscure but managed to stumble onto it when looking for shatter tutorials for Maya. Which are by the way extremely hard to find unless you want to pay out of your moth eaten wallet because you’ve bought an box 360 because you really couldn’t be bothered to keep up with PC gaming and their lack of actually finishing a game without any glitches, but i digress. This plugin is capable of making realistic looking cracks with apparently a much more efficient render time and stability than the original shatter dynamics. It also crates rigid bodies onto the separate objects so that they would actually be affected by each-other in terms of friction, contact, gravity and all that shibang.

You can see on this video that the physics are a lot more advanced and have a lot more control. I think this would be a great addition into the project for a realistic crumbling on a building. Have a look at this one.

This one shows how you can link up the objects to fields a lot easier than the Maya dynamics. I think that this could be utilized very well when it comes to explosions and the buildings crumbling. So segments would be blown away and such instead of the whole object having to be destroyed. I also found that the separate objects in theory could be turned into particle emitters. Which means i can then start turning them into smoke emitters, i hope this is something that would be possible because it would make the experience a lot more realistic.

The Plugin is actually free which amazing apart from the pro version which involves a few extra features. As far as forum chatter goes there’s no mention of water marks which is brilliant. Only problem is that it is windows only, which would mean working at home a lot more. But when its rendered into alpha channels things should get a lot easier. Cant wait, mr mike is excited =]