The Eagle Has Landed

Finally, today is the day we've reached Los Angeles.

Our flights from Singapore to HK and HK to L.A. were really really long.
Kept figgeting about since I'm claustrophobic.

We've arrived safely at our new home and successfully established internet connection.
Right now Jia Bao, Tanner and Lu Sheng have officially knocked out.
Except me of course since I want to write this short post before I knock myself out too.

This will be the last post before I migrate to my new project blog.

Once again, thanks to all the lecturers in NYP SIDM who made this possible.

Mr Ron, Mr Michael, Miss Eda and Mr Tk!

Link to my new project blog here:
www.projectsesi02.blogspot.com

So once again stay tuned, we'll be geared up and back in action by Monday (L.A date, in Singapore it'll be Tuesday) to kick some CG butt.

Elapsed Day 7

Guess what.

Yeah our flight got delayed...

Feel as though I'm actually stranded in my own home country.

Either way I've spent time thinking about my idea for the next upcoming project.
It's a simple yet satisfying idea, I'll draw out the storyboards soon.

Let's see if I can pull it off shall we?

Anyway here's a demonstration of my latest rock generator digital asset.
It's pretty cool and procedural check it out!

Part 1

Part 2

Watch out for my next project blog coming soon!

Day X

Our final year project officially ended last friday along with our presentation.

Because we didn't have our ultimate final renders ready we had to show our individual best works produced during these 3 months.

For me it was the digital assets and procedurally generated models I created.

Here's my digital asset presentation

Height Map Digital Asset

Rock Generation Digital Asset

It's not over yet, we're back in school now to touch up on the shot and document our files. Whether we can finish it in time by this friday? We'll find out soon enough.

Day 54

I suppose my encounter with pyro fx has paid off even though it's not going to be used for the project in LA.

I dived into the AutoDopNetwork for Tanner's flip fluids file, tweaked a couple of parameters and nodes here and there.

I have a rough idea of how the file works. The smoke solver is actually driving the flip fluid particles to flow nicely. The particles are somewhat there for the details.

Here's my documentation of what I've learnt so far:

AudoDopNetwork

Particle Fluid emitter:
Velocity changes speed emission rate of fluid.
Variance increases randomness of particle motion.

FLIP Solver:
Force Scale increases amount of strength used to drive the particles.
Smoothing controls how much friction is applied to particles. Affects bouncing off primitives.

Gravity:
Y-axis tweak, nice to tweak this along with velocity and force.

flipfluidobject:
Particle seperation affects space between particles.
Physical Tab -
Bounce affects particles bounce sensitivity. Tweaked this along with smooth.

Smoke Solver's Apply Source:
Noise Tab -
Frequency tweak?
Turbulence tweak?
I turned it off as it didn't make much difference in the end.
Emission Amount -
Doesn't affect look much.
Affects rate of emission of smoke but doesn't affect particles much

OBJ/ particlefluid


particlefluidsurface:
Surface tightness controls connectivity between particles in volume state.

Basic Liquid Shader

Achieve looks by tweaking:
Attenuation Density,
Attenuation Colour,
White water &
White water colour.






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Flood Simulation

Here are test simulations to determine the flow of how the flood is going to pour down the terrain. The simulation of the particles may differ when the emitter is scaled up to match the size of the terrain. Thus I'm prepared to increase the emission rate of particles and re-tweak the settings if needed.

Test Renders 01 to 08 showcase the simulations of the particles not in their fluid volumetric state:

After getting the look I want from the flow of particles, simulating them in their volumetric state didn't go quite well.

Note: For comparison with render timings, total number of frames flipbooked is 50 for all simulations.

testRender_09: Simulation from testrender_08 with volume state.
Simulation Time: 11 min +

testRender_10: Very active noisy look.
Force Scale: 2.5
Smoothing: 0.25
Bounce: 0
Simulation Time: 10 min +

testRender_11: Particles still scattered around but less active.
Force Scale: 2
Smoothing: 0.25
Bounce: 0
Simulation Time: 10 min +

testRender_12: Particles extremely active. Particles scattered, seperated and isolated everywhere.
Force Scale: 2
Smoothing: 0.1
Bounce: 0
Simulation Time: 9 min +

testRender_13: Lack some splash details. Liquid flows somewhat nicely though.
Force Scale: 1.25
Smoothing: 0.5
Bounce: 0
Simulation Time: 10 min +

testRender_14: Particles flow very smooth and nicely, probably not ideal for a violent flooding scene we're working on.
Force Scale: 1.5
Smoothing: 0.5
Bounce: 0
Simulation Time: 10 min +

testRender_15: Particles flow slightly more vigorously, other than that not much change.
Force Scale: 1.5
Smoothing: 0.5
Bounce: 1
Simulation Time: 10 min +

testRender_16: Some particles flying around.
Force Scale: 1.5
Smoothing: 0.35
Bounce: 1
Simulation Time: 10 min +

testRender_17: Looks decent if it's going to be scaled up?
Force Scale: 1.5
Smoothing: 0.4
Bounce: 1
Variance: 5 in x, y & z
Simulation Time: 10 min +


These are what I've observed so far

In simple terms,
Force Scale controls how nice and smooth the flow is.
Smoothing controls how sensitive the particles react to geometries.
Bounce controls how vigorous the flow is.

Possible Outcomes?

Increase emission rate of particles if scaled? (To achieve and maintain fluid details.)
Somehow decrease the size of each particle in it's volumetric state?
May have to bump up tweaked values to maintain detail on scaled fluid?

Day 53


I've thought about my alternative ideas regarding the project to be done at SideFx. I've got a couple of references to help me start off since it's involving particles flowing in houdini. I'm not going to go into details on my idea yet till I get the storyboards drawn out.

For now my first alternative idea involves using particles to reenact the activation of science fiction active camouflage.

Second idea involves using simple trails of smoke sprites emitted from missiles delivered by an apache strike team. Reference images will be posted soon.

Day 52

So day 51 went by pretty quickly. The lucasarts talk was about how a production pipeline works in the game industry, attitude and quality comes first, passion and things we're supposed to look out for when we enter professionalism.

Quite similar to most talks we've been to before. Still it was worth refreshing our memories with what stuff we should be prepared to face when we're gonna enter the film industry in the near future.

This morning my storyboards involving the epic nuclear explosion with the destruction of military choppers have been rejected. Thankfully the guys from Sidefx told us conducting pyro simulations over there will be too time consuming before I went too deep into my research. Oh well, looks like I'll use my alternative storyboards I've had in mind.

I really wanted to do an awesome nuclear explosion... ):

Moving on to project Dragon Flood, I'm providing some assistance to jia bao and tanner by doing a few placements of more rocks and understanding fluids to help tanner when he needs it. (Since fluids is quite similar to pyro fx)

Day 50 to 51

Once again I've stayed overnight in school to run a couple of pyro simulations while working with Jia Bao on the placement of geometries in the terrain.

I've done some shading tests along with the simulations. Even though the simulations run pretty okay, the pyro shader still needs quite a lot of tweaking to get my hollywood style nuclear explosion.

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Here are some test simulations before test rendering using mantra.

The secondary simulation wave is being bounding by a square. I don't know whether it's the gasresizefluid container causing this problem or isooffset. Let's post some questions on odforce!

 

 

 

 

 

Day 51 post shall continue, based on me writing about an upcoming Lucasarts talk which we're gonna attend at 2pm. Also along with some problems I'll try to solve regarding the secondary simulation bounding problem.