Week 09 Day 61, 10th August '11 (Wed)

SH030 Animation
Consulted Evan about my animation, his views were...
- FG_HAMMER should pull back slower
- MG_HAMMER have less tilt and lower lift, hammer head stay down more
- Get have some shaky motion as hammer drags on molten surface

CHOPs noise was used to drive the rotate Y of front_pivot_control, so much more convenient to just apply noise than manually animate it by eye!

00_sh020_flipbook
http://www.vimeo.com/28184996
This is what i got before speaking to Evan.

Here's how it looks like after the above improvements,
01_sh020_flipbook
http://www.vimeo.com/27786135

Blogspot is being such a pain, sometimes it doesn't let me upload the videos...

WIP: Smoke Effect

Before I carried on further with either sprites or smoke simulation, Steven introduced me to a new way of generating smoke which Bryan was using. What we do is render metaball as volume and using $T (time) to animate the noise in a volumetric shader (billowy smoke).

It was an interesting technique, glad i got to learn it - also produces good results and is much faster to render compared to smoke sim.

Threw out renders with various settings to see how each parameter affects the look, jumped back onto other tasks for now.

01_smoke_volume_hi_detail

http://www.vimeo.com/27613921

5/5/5 Freq, 8 Turb, 3 Amp

02_smoke_volume_hi_detail

http://www.vimeo.com/27613988

15/15/15 Freq, 4 Turb, 2 Amp, $T 0.7/0.6

Increased the speed of the animated noise...

Problem: Particle Collision 
Went back to tackle this, tried the following...

- Increase Oversampling
- Increase Collision Sample Threshold slightly
- Smaller variance values
- Switch to simple grid instead of molten surface geometry
- Use 3rd Context Geo or link via SOP Path
- Checked the collision geometry's normals
- Translate emitter up in Y so the source & collision don't intercept
- Extruded the surface with "ExtrudeVolume SOP"

All were no good, no luck on forum too... fight another day!

60_pcollision_problem_top_btm
Particles are falling through after my effort....
http://www.vimeo.com/27502777



Dinner from Denny's
Gigantic portion, slightly expensive & worth trying at least once - USD$12.00 if i didn't recall wrongly,

end.