Visual Effects 1

Hello,

I'm currently in the process of finishing up the Visual Effects 1 course at Full Sail University.  This class was insightful on how to use maya Rigid/Particle/Soft Body dynamics for visual effects. I'm pretty sure that I've decided to do VFX for my school's final demo reel, because I think that simulations and dynamics will look really impressive and I can do a great number of effects using dynamics.

In this class we had 3 projects; 1-Rigid Bodies, 2- Particles, 3-Soft Bodies.  They each focused on utilizing their respective effects and default scenes were provided if we decided to use them. I went the creative route, creating my own scenes for all 3 projects. While on all 3 projects I ran out of time, I did like how they turned out overall.


Project 1- Rigid Bodies.

In the Rigid Bodies project we had to use Rigid Bodies (fancy that) to create a Rube Goldberg-esque machine. We needed a minimum of 10 active rigid bodies and 3 constraints. The default scene was a casino-like machine where you just had to focus on getting a ball to the end of the course.  My scene was a bit different.  I had a plan that I would use particle effects to show the effects of Co2 emissions on our atmosphere in this project, and have various human-made objects contributing to the effect, ultimately ending in the demise of Earth.  

I had a lot of simulation and rendering issues, so I really only had time for some of the basic ideas that I had, many things had to be left out for the sake of the project. I used bones as some of my rigid bodies, and various other objects as well. My final render did not finish in time to add the sound, so there's only sound in the playblast.  Please forgive the empty (Title) in the credits of this video. Tara Pfeiffer (my girlfriend) is in the Audio Engineering program at my school, so she recorded and mastered the sound for this one.

I didn't have time to set up lights or materials into this scene, I did all I could to render this as quickly as possible but it didn't turn out as well as expected. The final render isn't worth putting up here because it's not nearly as good without the sound.  This project was fun in the end, however, because getting the rigid bodies to do what you want them to do is an inventive process.

Project 2 - Particles

In the Particles Project, we had to simulate 3 separate particle effects. There was a list of particles and a default scene, but we could create our own scenes if we wanted to.  My scene was a spaceship landing, including 4 effects: smoke, engine fire, forcefield particles, and dust. I wanted to add more dust layers and cloud burst effects but I did not have the time to do so.  I used a directional emitter with multi-streak particles for the fire and emitted the smoke from the fire particles as a cloud particle. there were separate turbulence fields effecting the fire and the smoke.

For the forcefield, I used a volume axis field with around axis vortex and a newton field to create the effect. the particles were emitted from a spherical object and collided with the ship.  For the dust I used volume axis, radial, and turbulence fields on an omni emitter to create the effect.  This project was time intensive, and I would have liked to have done more, but I got a finished render with sound completed, so I was thankful for that.  I put in a good amount of work in Nuke to composite this project as well. And yes, the credits say particle sTimulation instead of particle simulation. This was a hilarious mistake.

Project 3- Soft Bodies

The Soft Bodies project had one requirement: to create an effect using soft bodies. The default scene was just a human 'melting man' model to do with what we please.  I created my own model in Zbrush quickly, and my project was a ghost coming out of the wall.  I used a soft body emitter with a lattice (because my geo was about 180k poly's and I didn't want to freeze my computer with simulating all of those points). I had to rotate the lattice to get the emitter to make the ghost come out in the proper order, because particle number is very important in emitting soft bodies. 

The goal was also animated to simulate the effect of the ghost coming out of the wall. I had 3 separate render layers, the base (background and ghost together to save on time), the fire, and the portal/blood effect. The fire and portal were both maya Hardware particles, and I was going for a creepy look. The main issue I had with this scene was that I could not figure out how to make the hardware particles cast a convincing shadow on the wall. I will be looking into how to do this in the future. Also Mental Ray seems to give up after every 10 frames or less every time I try to render, so I had to watch it closely. When rendering in Maya Hardware for particles, the batch renders clocked in at about a min or more per frame, when rendering a single frame through the render window was only 1-4 seconds. I still have not been able to find the cause of this problem, and it's a serious issue that really hinders productivity. 

I took my layers into nuke to add the grainy effect and for colour correction. Then took it into After Effects to add the text and finally into Premiere to add the sound.  This project was really fun, and I enjoy making something scary every once in a while.  (Don't have your sound up all the way for this one, it can get a little loud) 

Overall this month, I learned a lot about Maya dynamics, rigid bodies, particles, and soft bodies. I look forward to experimenting more with these tools and making really cool effects in the future. 

~Until next time~