VEF1 Particles Project for 1605

Particles Project

This month for the second project of our Visual Effects 1 class we created particle effects.  The guidelines were to create 3 different effects from a list. I chose to create the effects of fire, smoke, and molten metal. I used the foundry scene we were given in class for this project. This is what my final scene looks like:

I used what I learned from the fire place tutorial we were given.  The first thing I worked on for this project was the fire effect.  First I duplicated the geometry of the oil inside the barrels and used it to create surface emitters for the fire. I changed the particle type to multi-streak, and adjusted the emitter settings until I was happy with the results. I also added turbulance fields to my fire to make the flame movements seem more random, and a uniform field in Y to make my flames rise up.  This is the result:

Next I worked on the smoke, I used my notes from class to set up my emitter and particle attributes. For the smoke I used volume emitters and changed the particle type to cloud particles.  I used the same cloud particles linked to two different emitters with slightly different creation expressions for random radius. I also added a 3d cloud texture and turned on my transparency.

The last effect I worked on was the molten metal. Once again I used the notes from lecture to create this effect.  I used a surface emitter here with blobby particles with a low threshold. I turned on collisions for my particles and added a uniform field to them to make them collide with the bucket. I also turned on friction for my particles to make them almost drag on the way down. I added a blinn material to my particles and changed the color. I also changed my incandescence color to match my reference of molten metal. My result:

After my effects were done I animated my render camera and set up my render settings according to instructions. I rendered my scene in two passes, first I rendered my software particles and background with my hardware particles hidden. I used Maya hardware set to the production quality setting to render. This process took about 8 hours to complete. After that was done, I rendered my hardware particles (fire) with geometry mask on. I used maya hardware to render at production quality with my number of samples set to 36.  This only took about 2 hours to complete. After my renders were finished, I imported them into nuke and composited them together. I then took my video into Final Cut Pro and added my music and intro/credits. This is my finished product.