Felt it was time to move to the actual shots, created both sprite and basic smoke simulation set up in sh030. At this point, i doubt i could execute my initial plan where smoke's emission amount will be driven by maybe the shader color's 'value' so wherever had higher value (hotter) would have higher emission.
I'm going to go with manually grouping the hot areas and use them as the source then use Peter Quint's method of driving the emission amount using CHOPs to get pockets of smoke. That's the strategy for now!
02_smoke_sim_freecam
http://vimeo.com/27613790
There's a problem with this render, it wasn't rendered with rest field so the noise are stationary.
00_sh030_smokeSim_vs_sprites
sh030 test render comparing both smoke sim & sprites, same issue no rest field - will remember next time! It's taking up some time as i'm kinda unfamiliar with simulations as it wasn't my main focus during final year project. Time is ticking away, we got around 20 days left before presenting to the office.
Quick tweaks for the off-shelf smoke sim,
- Viscoity
- Turbulence
- Vortex Confinement
Photoshop CS5 Lesson by Evans
(Painting color/bump etc maps)
Sorry if it looks boring because there's no images as it was shown via projection, we sat down and listened! But it's helpful information if you wish to become a texture artist and don't know about them.
Evans is showing us how we could use the 3D features available in CS5 to paint textures. You still have to layout your UVs neatly unlike ptex where you could directly paint on the 3D model itself, one of the main benefits of utilizing these 3D features is you can easily paint seamless maps.
You don't have to repaint, jump back to your 3D application and find it out looks bad or seams are obvious and have to ump back into your 2D paint application. A lot of time is wasted going back and forth.
Points mentioned:
- When laying out UVs (e.g creature), having the seams under the belly, armpits or parts less visible to the camera is advised.
- Making sure your canvas has enough resolution to avoid having pixelated textures in your renders.
(Personally prefer paint my textures double the final render output, if i'm rendering at 1280x720 - my textures will be at least 2048x2048)
- Save your maps with lossless formats like .png & .tiff, not lossy formats such as .jpg.
WIP: Molten Shader
As i was going back and forth painting my molten mask, i noticed it's orientation is rotated the wrong way after it's imported via "Texture VOP".
It's probably related to the S and T coordinates which gives me the option of tiling the texture if needed, going to carry on working with this problem hindering me for now unless a solution comes to my mind or scan the forum if i have spare time.
Fired off a few more renders of smoke simulations at higher uniform divisions this time and come back to them tomorrow morning. Coincidentally the server went down in the late afternoon and i was unable to access my project archive, guess i'll call it a day!
Helpful threads i found:
Dry Ice Example Files by Jeff and Soothsayer
Zdepth and normal volumetric by Ben Laidlaw
end.
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