Visual Effects (Project 3, Soft Bodies)

For my final project in Visual Effects class, I set out to complete simulation in Maya using "Soft Bodies". Soft bodies are geometric objects in Maya that have been manipulated to be flexible objects. They can bend, ripple, bulge, and more. Soft bodies can be used to make a mesh move towards a goal object, deform and distort the mesh with springs, and to emit nParticles from the surface of a mesh. 

For my project, I decided to simulate meteors striking the ground near a city. Some of the meteors will strike the ground and the ground will absorb the impact. Others will hit a force field that protects the city and bounce away. I also wanted the force field to ripple upon the impact. Here is a quick summarization for what I had planned. 

I set out by creating the environment for the scene first. I made the ground and the shield soft bodies and then created a particle emitter for the meteors. Once I had the particles resembling the appearance and physical attributes of meteors, I made them collide with the shield mesh. This way the particles would bounce off and ricochet from the surface of the shield. Here is a motion test I completed before rendering to test all of the attributes. 

Once I was happy with the results of the soft bodies, I cached them. This allows Maya to store their movement in the XYZ space. Once it has the cache, it can simply replay the simulation and not have to compute it again on every play-through. It also helps with the rendering process. After that, I rendered the scene out using Mental Ray in Maya 2016. Here is the final render.

Overall, this project was a great introduction to soft bodies in Maya. I look forward to learning more in the future.

Texture Painting (Substance Designer #1)

This week I got to explore Substance Designer 5 for the first time. I did some procedural textures and really enjoyed the interface Designer provided. I did a lot of exploration with the various types of nodes and how to achieve the desired affects. Since it was my first time, I did stick to somewhat simple textures.

The four textures I created (from top to bottom) are ceramic tiles, sandstone bricks, reptile skin, and a metal surface. I included the base color, metallic, normal, and roughness maps for each to show how the end result was created. You can also see the node layout I used. I greatly enjoyed Substance Designer and will continue to explore it in the future.  

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. 

Visual Effects (Project 1, Rigid Bodies)

This month, in Visual Effects class, we started off learning about rigid bodies and fields in Maya. The first project primarily focused on learning how to properly utilize active rigid bodies, passive rigid bodies, and constraints. Active rigid bodies are applied to a mesh that you want to interact with the environment around it. For instance, a hammer hitting a cup; both need to respond to each other so they would require an active rigid body. The table that both of these objects are sitting upon only require a passive rigid body though, since the table will not be acting upon either objects. Constraints limit the actions of an active rigid body to force it to comply to the movement you want. There are nail, pin, hinge, spring, and barrier constraints that can all be applied to rigid bodies. I started off with the scene provided below. 

As you can see, this scene emulates a Rube Goldberg Machine. There are several objects that interact with each other to push the action forward from one end of the contraption to the other. The first step was to try and conceptualize where I would place my rigid bodies and constraints. I mapped these out using Photoshop CC 2015. 

The next step was taking these ideas into Maya. I pretty much followed my "storyboards" once in Maya, but soon realized some changes would need to be made. I also ended cutting the total time down and ended my scene where the last cup gets knocked over. I had a lot of fun exploring the rigid bodies, as there is a slew of different options you can change to get the desired outcome. Some of these attributes include mass, dampening, drag, and bounciness. I also used fields, such as gravitational and uniform to keep the geometry behaving normally. The Dynamic Relationship editor was most beneficial for keeping track of these relationships between rigid bodies and fields. After all of the active rigid bodies were set up and working correctly, I baked the simulation to animation keys. This way Maya would simply have to compute the animation of the objects moving instead of the physics simulations each time.

Once I had the scene set up to my liking, I added some textures and began to render using Mental Ray in Maya. I ended up with 1400 frames of animation. I will admit that the render time greatly exceeded my expectations. It took a good 48 hours to render with mental ray. I rendered out in batches of 200 frames at a time so I could check for any mistakes or errors present. If there was an issue with how something was rendered, I could simply fix it and re-render that batch of frames.

After the render was complete, I used fcheck (integrated with Maya) to check the .iff files that were rendered. I then arranged the video in Final Cut Pro, adding some ambient music to set the scene as well, and came to a final animation clip. It is important to note that all the animation seen here is simply simulations baked to keys.

Overall, this was a great introduction to particles and physics in Maya.

Some things I would have liked to fix are the pole on the hammer (jerking around a lot), the balls falling out of the cup (appear very suddenly), and the overall speed of the process. This project was done on a time crunch, especially with 48 hours of rendering, but in the future I will definitely use better time management to fix any issues that arise in the production process.