Senior Project Work

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For my Senior Project, I wanted to do something different than typical animation. I decided on an Effects Library, featuring the use of Autodesk Maya's integrated FX options along with add-ons like BiFrost.

I thought that a fire effect was a good place to start, as it can be done multiple ways. The way that I did it was by starting with an nFluid Container plus an Emitter.

This first render is just to show that the bounding box and dissipation of the fire are working correctly and that it does look like a natural fire. There are no lights or shaders, so it's only an orange fire.

After completing the first render, now it was time for the rest of the work to begin. I added a light through the Arnold Renderer and created a basic scene for my torch to live in. I have not done a lot with UV editing in the past, so this was a good opportunity to learn more about that.

Besides a scene, I also got to work on the flame itself. I began messing with the color of it so that the fire didn't look flat and unreal. I added a turbulence field and a separate nParticle Emitter to give off smoke.

When it came time to render, there were some problems. I had not done a lot with formally rendering video, so this rendering process had a lot of settings at very high quality and took 17 hours to complete. 17 hours divided by 120 frames means that it took on average 8.5 minutes per frame to render!

I added some camera movements to give the video some life, but it seems that I forgot that I didn't create a full scene! The camera veers off slightly farther than I preferred...

For the final render (so far), I went to work fixing the camera issues and added one more nParticle Emitter to give the effect of embers coming out of the fire. Now, it's really starting to look like a detailed fire!

If you're someone who grew up in the mid-2000's like me, then you've likely at least heard of a show called "Avatar: The Last Airbender". I didn't watch the show too much when it was still coming out, but I finally decided to catch up on it during the global pandemic a few years ago. Thinking back to watching the show made me want to try and recreate some of the effects from it, therefore a waterbending effect was the next logical step!

For this test, I downloaded the BiFrost add-on for Maya as it would give me the best looking water simulations. Since I wanted the water to move in a path, I decided the best move would be to attach the water emitter to an object and then attach that object to a motion path. After deciding on a low-poly human head to be the object, this is the result!

Now that the water looked good, I cached it into a 25 GB file (wow!) and started working on the 3D animations for a character. This next render is what the keyframes on the character look like plus the cached water on top of him.

I'm not a huge fan of how he moves in this scene, but that's keyframe animation for you!

The next step in the process was to take the character's movements from keyframes to in-betweens. Doing this plus adding camera movements is what this next render will show.

For the final render of this effect (so far), I wanted to finish the in-betweens of the character's movements and smooth out what doesn't look natural.

I also thought that basic dirt didn't look good for a base, so I learned some quick XGen and created some grass for my character to be standing on. Unfortunately since my version of Maya 2020 has a glitch where the expression editor doesn't open, I could not make the grass sway back-and-forth nor could I add a map to get different densities of grass.

For my last effect out of 3 (because good things come in 3's), I wanted to try out the integrated shatter effect in Maya called "Bullet". If I were to give any reason as to why specifically I wanted to do this effect, I would probably say it is because I want to get better at working with active & rigid bodies in the program.

There was a lot to do to set this one up, more than the previous two. I wanted my scene to be in a detailed room, so I learned how to properly set up UV's using displacement and normal maps. I also wanted the shattered object to sit on a table so that the exploded pieces would land on both the floor and another surface. Finally, I wanted my character to do something more than throw a ball at a wall so I created a quick sword and made him stab the object.

The first major setback was that my active rigid bodies were phasing through my table, due to some issue of the bounding box not working with complex objects. To solve it, I hid a simple cube within the table that didn't have any bounding box issues and that solved it; at least in the viewport. This first render showed me that I need to do two things: ensure the simulation starts at the right time before rendering and don't always believe what the viewport tells you.

If I were to have guessed which effect would give me the most problems, I would not have guessed the Shatter Effect. Having the object explode at frame 1 in the render when it worked just fine in the viewport was not what I expected. To solve this, I had to do two separate renders: one from the start to the frame right before the intended explosion & another from the frame where it's supposed to explode to the end.

This worked for solving the timing issue, but not for another problem. Some of the shards are phasing through the table, which usually doesn't happen in real life. What is weird is that the pieces don't go through the table in the viewport, so that gives me an idea of how to remedy it.

In order to fix this for the next render, I am going to try and cache the explosion simulation through Alembic (like I did with the water effect) and then reference that into the scene. If it goes the way that I think, then the pieces should act as though the table is present in both the viewport and the Arnold renders.