Lee Greatorex Photo/3D blog

Further studies in particle work (Maya)



playblasts and render tests can be found here http://www.youtube.com/user/scutteh

This is progress from working through the flame section of the Maya Studio Projects: Dynamics book;

Just going through a few new dynamics books for Maya currently to learn more MEL scripting and Expressions. My first test is a of a plinian eruption. While the speed isn't correct here I'm quite happy with the result currently.



The animation itself runs too fast, simply as it was just a test to see if the plume went up in the air. Render time roughly 2 hours for 60 frames. the sequence was originally meant for PAL but I rendered the final animation at 15fps just so it was a little slower/more like how the full animation should be.

Just a couple of photos I took tonight of the new instruments the Mrs bought me!

I have also uploaded my test shots for my final year project (which was during the 2007/2008 term) to youtube. While they are already up on here I can't seem to share them so here they are for all to see!

A little more face sketching.




Also been working on some Dynamics in Maya and will be buying 2 more books when I'm back from a short trip back home. Dynamics/particles is pretty much what I spent most of my final year doing and also enjoyed it the most throughout university.

While most of my work was done in XSI/pflow I spent a lot of time using realflow and Fumefx. I'm currently moving the skills learned from that to Maya/MEL scripting. I've set myself some pretty simple effects tasks to do for now (smoke,fire,explosion,snow) just as starting points while I get used to the expressions editor and such.

Looking through my old footage on my laptop I found some test shots of my Final Year Project at university and I thought I'd put them on here so that I can compare my lighting techniques after learning some new tricks and techniques later.

My final year project was based around mainly using fluid particles to make a glass of water turn in to a flower (well a flower growing from the water). I knew I was going to be shooting it on just a black background as I was wanting to emulate the slow motion Sainsbury's food adverts that were out a few years ago. Lighting was obviously going to be one of the key things I looked at as I needed to make it efficient and yet still look good. For this I decided not to use caustics as the was no solid background for light to reflect to. Then I created a simply lighting rig using grids with a white or gray Lambert texture on them, hiding their primary ray visibility in the render and then using final gather. This cut the render times down by a great deal without the need of global illumination/caustics and gave me the ability to create a nice studio lighting setup using grids as reflected lights and reflectors themselves.

I don't remember the exact render times but they were at most 2-3 minutes each per frame. The only troubles I had were actually with using XSI and Realflow together. I made a decision at the time to stick with the package I knew as opposed to which had better fluid/Realflow integration and it caused some pretty nasty glitching problems during the render phase.

Here are a couple of test videos of the petals growing, hopefully the video compression on here doesn't make them look too bad. Unfortunately I don't have the final render/shot on this laptop but I was going to re-render it or infact reshoot it completely using Maya to make the most out of it.