Week 1
BULLET RIGID BODIES
Dominoes
This week was an introduction to Active and Passive Bullet Rigid bodies.
To create falling dominoes, we started by creating a rectangle and duplicating special by 50 more of them and added a plane for the surface. The dominoes were active rigid bodies while the plane was passive. By adjusting many settings and adding gravity we made dominoes to fall.
I decided to play with camera and lights and make a cute render of falling wooden dominoes in disco lights.
Jenga tower
Started off by creating a rectangle and duplicating special to achieve a tower resembling Jenga game.
Here it is a playblast without dynamic keyframing also it was too slow so I adjusted the mass and gravity in the bullet solver.
Then selected all boxes and created dynamic active rigid bodies. Later on, added a sphere shape and also created an active rigid body. I had some issues in the screen recording below with my sphere after keyframing and changing the body type from dynamic to kinematic in order to create a realistic collision. But the problem was just a tiny setting next to the time line. I turned it off and it started working.
It was important to tick the ground plane property so that the Jenga tower would have surface to fall onto after colliding with the sphere. Also changing frame rate to higher Hz might help as well.
In addition, the ticked property of Enable simulation can be unticked after baking simulation.
Here is a simple render of the falling Jenga tower.
For rendering, I used AiToon material and couple of area lights
Glass shatter
Started by modelling a simple glass, deleted all history by type, reset transformation and created a solid shatter effect with 14 shard count
This is the effect so far, now I needed to add a plane for it to fall on and adjust gravity and other scatter settings
Now I had to adjust the active rigid bosy settings to make it more realistic
Now I needed to delete the duplicate glass so that only one could be seen, add a camera, create a little environment with the right materials
Pre-render
Week 2
NCLOTH
Silk cloth
Simple cloth used for a flag
Cloth connected to pole with nConstraint
Added some wind for wave effect
More complex flag with Volume Axis field and adjusted settings
Cloth clothes
Creating a skirt 3d model from a cylinder, removing top and bottom faces and adding a lattice for easier transformation
Deleting all history by type and attaching top-line vertexes to models surface with nConstraint
Adjusting several settings to make the cloth look seamless and be similar to a skirt
Final Outliner
Playblast of cloth simulation
This week we were introduced to Maya's FX nParticles
Before and after applying passive collider to 3d objects
This lesson we exproled various particles, settings, using different shades and et.
BIFROST GRAPH AERO SYSTEM
Basic introduction to Bifrost Graph editor to see how the nodes work. Here value node changed the planes position by 10 metres in Y direction.
Assignment 2
Natural environment
For my first Natural scene I decided to model a kitchen in Maya, add a pot onto the stove and make smoke coming out of it. This will be a rendered video
Started off my making a room out of plane and building the furniture
At first I added the bulb lights but later on I removed them since they didn't fit into the scene, in my opinion. So I added light in kitchen vent and some light through the window.
Here I rearranged the fridge, modelled a pot and I was ready to open Bifrost Node graph
Here is a close up of the stove
Here is the node graph for the smoke, I added a Platonic shape into the pot and made the air vent as a collider
In Aero solver settings I adjusted the Temperature Diffusion from 0 to 15, changed the smoke style to fluffly and adjusted the Simulation speed from 1 to 10.
Here is a not fully rendered arnold view of the smoke coming out of the pot. Since everything seemed to work fine I adjusted the render settings and started to render the sequence of 200 frames. Each frames rendered for about 3 minutes.
A few still renders
First render exported from
After Effects
The render had a lot of noise particularly the smoke near the air vent so I adjusted noise reduction settings and AE and added a bit of Gaussian Blur around the area where it was the noisiest. Also the smoke was too quick to I slowed down a bit.
Final Natural render
BIFROST GRAPH COMBUSTION AERO SYSTEM
Updated Bifrost and tried to do combustion aero system, the main difference from aero system and combustion aero system us that it has source_fuel node and the values are different
Assignment 2
Surreal
Started off my using Alien character from Media browser and Attack position motion capture, on the alien I created a quick rig and added the motion capture.
Then I added arnold standard surface material and used water from presets to make it look like a waterman. Next part was to add Bifrost fluid on the man and make a plane as a collider and the model as an emitter. Played with several settings such as gravity and wind point to make the water splash of the waterman. Made the as an AiShaddowmatte. For lighting I used ai PhysicalSky.
Final Render of Surreal environment
Assignment 2
Fantasy
For my fantasy scene I decided to model a fountain and have particles falling out of him, adding bright neon lights arround it.
This is my modelled fountain that I will be using.
Created an Emitter of particles and checked the 'Use plane' box. But the particles were going outside of the fountain and they were sam sized. I needed to adjust these settings.
Adjusting the Bounce and friction really helped to make the balls in the boundaries of the fountain and overall closer to each other. Made linear size for the particles
Pre render view and playblast
Final render of Sci-fi environmental FX
