Visual Effects 2 (VFX)

This is my last month in the accelerated program at Full Sail University, and barely a handful of months from graduation. one of the classes I took was my second Visual Effects Class.

This class went in-depth with techniques we were introduced to several months before in VEF1. There were 3 projects to be completed. This is a documentary of them all.

Fire in Maya 

First, we touched Maya fluids. I had only use of Maya particle system, but the fluids are a great tool in maya. I created a fireplace fire. For this, I needed some reference as to what my fire should look like. It was very important that my fire matches the reference. This way, you can create something more realistic.

I went to youtube to find suitable reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH79BmeeM0o

Being most confident in Maya, navigating and finding what did what was not difficult. I had the most trouble knowing when to apply different things and how much.
Part of the requirements for the projects was having a research document that described the effect and the process. I found that doing this really kept me on top of things. I created my fire using maya fluids and here is a still of the container in maya:

Maya Fluids container for my fire effect. 

After creating the effect, I tweaked a lot of attributes to get it flowing as close to the reference as possible. This was the hardest part. To make it realistic, there were a lot of trials and errors. Here is the final render from this project:

Final Render

Being my first fluid effect, I think I did an okay job matching my reference. From the critiques I got from the instructor, I did not get the speed quite right, and personally, there was a lot more I could have done with the texture. 

Smoke in Houdini

I am fairly new to Houdini, but immediately I saw how powerful a program it is. 

I chose to create a smoke effect in Houdini for my second project. I found some reference on youtube as well for this effect. Here is a link:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H9hDaobWNc

I had to do more research in Houdini Pyro effects. there are not a lot of good tutorials out there concerning pyro, but the information I found about the basics were sufficient along with Houdini's help documents. Here is a screenshot of the effect simulating in Houdini. 

In this project, I learned how to use lights to enhance the effect, and camera creation/placement in Houdini. I also learned about using Houdini's rendering node, mantra. It is quite powerful, like the rest of the software and easy to use. However, I did not know how to set initial state, and I ran out of time. 

Otherwise, this effect was quite straightforward. Like with Maya fluids, the struggle was finding out how to use each attribute, and how much. 

Here is my final render: 

Research/Final Project

For the final project, we were allowed to create any effect we wanted, as long as it was an advance from what we had already learned, or done in an entirely new software. The learning process would be the major thing. 

I became perplexed over what effect to do that would show my growth. I watched various visual effects videos. I finally decided to simulate glass being shattered by glass. 

I first went to maya, but the workflow was not efficient. I decided to use Houdini. With it's voronoi fracture node and procedural workflow, it was much wiser to use it. 

First I did a test of the effect, which I presented as a research project in class. Here is the render for that:- 

Instead of a regular ball, I attached a pyro effect to the sphere, making it a sort of fire ball instead. 

the first issues i ran into was the way the effect shattered. I received a critique on this, and realized it occurred when i changed the scale of the original box object, instead of the size. 

While working on my final project, I worked smarter and got the desired effect. 

I learned many new things, including caching files, setting initial state, correctly duplicating scene nodes, rendering ambient occlusion, combining multiple dynamics to work well together, among many more. If anything, this project was mostly troubleshooting. I was pleased with my final result, as I learned how to rely on research and personal knowledge to figure out how everything would fall into place. 

Here is the final render:-