Visual Effects (Project 2, Particles)

This week in Visual Effects class I learned about emitters and particles. The second project required me to three particles in Maya using legacy emitters. For this project I chose to simulate rain, embers, and steam. I chose them because they all behave very differently and I thought it would be a good exercise to explore how particles act in regards to physics. 

Using Legacy emitters, I primarily used omni and volume types. The steam and rain lent themselves to being easily manipulated with volume emitters while the embers were better execute with an omni emitter. This is because the steam and rain only travel in one direction while the sparks needed to be able to travel in all directions from their source. I also applied gravity fields to all my emitters. I used different gravity fields for each particle so I could independently control their behavior.

Once I had the particles where I wanted them it was time to render. Now the simulations were all made using different particle shapes. The steam was made using Cloud (s/w), while the rain and embers were made using "Streak." 

Because of this, I had to render out my scene in multiple passes; one with Maya Hardware and one with Maya Software. After I had rendered out the scene twice (once in both hardware and software) I brought it into Nuke. In Nuke, I was simply able to merge the rain and embers over the scene that contained the steam. Here is the final product:

This project was a great introduction to emitters and particles and I look forward to learning more.