Got a few of the Maya exercises done but after last week I've been pretty burnt out. I tried to get as many as possible but I didn't really even get to the end of this series... I will look into the rest of these over summer and do them devoid of the grade. They are valuable information and I completely get that. One of the main issues I have been facing has been towards the batch render system in Maya which keeps intermittently cutting my renders short. I have to keep reinitiating the batch render when it stops on random frames... These are just particle scenes mostly... So its not like I can delete the history of them...
Its been rather annoying dealing with this issue, luckily I didn't have that problem with my final turnaround renders for this Unit otherwise I wouldn't have had them to show on D-Day. Once I have done the rest of this series I will post them on this post in addition to the ones I have... Don't see the point of making a new post especially because I want to keep them in the series. I will do the rest of these videos (Dynamics 3 and the lighting ones particularly interest me) as well as the games character (something I'm getting the hang of... I think).
Well lets get onto the beginning of Dynamics Series 2.
The first video is directional control of multiple animated meshes. These are particles but you instance the particles to look like a particular mesh in the scene. I thought that was pretty cool especially since you can load an animation onto one and have it repeat in many. I prefer to think of these meshes as Lego doods, I think that's what I was thinking in one of the earlier Maya classes. Still I had a problem batch rendering this scene there is probably something wrong with my computer or my install of Maya...
Scale control is the alternating scale of sphere instance with a transparent blue texture. The bubbles run along a path which is an emitter is keyed to run along. As emitter sheds more spherical versions of itself an alternating scale control causes the bubbles to differentiate in size giving the illusion of realistic bubbles. There was a blue background on this video but rendering it in my standard .tif format has removed the background (as it does). A relatively cool thing to know, defiantly cool for underwater situations in CG...
The next video is rotating meteor clusters gradually drifting from a centre mass. The video is primarily about the rotation of each meteor which conducts its rotation randomly. The textures meteor shaped model were provided by the tutorial download on our online tutorial site. This video was quite a cool thing to know again particularly with graduating 3D objects. I really find the Dynamics tutorials interesting it would just be nice if I could figure out why the batch render is hating me so much right now....
Next the illusive object index control which randomises multiple meshes from an emitter. In the case of this video we have 4 shapes (in colours blue, red, yellow and blue) which differentiate randomly each time they are played. You can get the same kind of effect with After Effects randomised shapes, I recall doing a tutorial from my expression book which did a 2d scale/position. The real difference here is that you choose the meshes which become random. You could have the same kind of effect with different meteors which would make the video above more real...
The crowd control video (shown above) uses similar conventions to the shape video above and the meteor video above that. In this case however the emitter is a plane where random people shaped meshes appear at each play through of the animation timeline. Its quite cool but I don't like how they all just appear in this video. Would be much cooler if they grew out of the floor like trees (another video in this series). Every single rendition of each model is at a random rotation and random scale which creates a unique proportion every single time...
The next video is all about aim direction arrows which use velocity toe graduate downwards. The particles are instanced to points using the a designed mesh to project the geometry of each particle. The arrows all slightly differentiate but all follow a predetermined gravity field. The velocity is what causes the arrow to curve and fall downwards as a real arrow would. Without the velocity the arrows eject flat and fall flat without any realistic gravity. This is quite a cool thing to know, I'm pretty sure I've seen a 2D rendition of this... I have to wonder if someone used this and drew over it...
Next comes the Rocket video now again this works very much like the aim direction video with the arrows above this video. The key difference is the trails left by these red rockets which have a fog field that graduates them. The colour is also attuned in the settings. There has been some lighting placed in the scene also to give the smoke some realism. Every missile follows a gravity pull and velocity causes the mesh to arch before falling. I do like this video though, pretty cool seeing thousands of missiles going mad... ha-ha.
The rotation types video again functions like the two video above with the velocity and gravity settings. In this case the key difference is in the alternating rotation values of some of the arrows that eject from the object emitter. You will notice that some of the arrows move and look completely vertical, this is because they have been assigned (at random) a place to look at in 3D space. They all are looking at a value of 0,0,0 which is practically in the middle of the viewport in Maya. This is what is known as an expression... They influence most of these dynamics.
Next comes instances and paint effects. The trees in this scene were created using the paint effects in Mayas vast tree library. The terrain has surface deformation which was added by the pushing and pulling of the 3D plane. A texture mask causes the trees not to generate on the path (except for the sampler tree which I forgot to hide in the scene). On that note I will warn everyone that if you are doing an instance to HIDE THE ORIGINAL. It does nothing but sit in the scene if you are not careful. The plane under the grass is meant to be the dirt road...
This is the goldfish video which sees multiple copies of a goldfish be exported through an object emitter. The original fish had an animation set into its key-frames (much like the robot). In this case however a deformer was used across a 30 frame animation causing the fish to look like he is swimming in water. Sadly this video was another case of my batch render not completing. Usually it wouldn't be an issue in Maya as you can just start from a frame it stopped on. When it comes to particles though because it does things randomly the stills wont match up...
Well these are all of the videos I could muster up, sorry there are not more I guess I will have to work on learning them over summer. Apologies go out to Alan there, I guess I burnt myself out on other things... I knew the Maya videos would catch up to me eventually (as they always do). If you do read this Alan and have an idea as to why my batch renderer keeps stopping randomly I would appreciate the aid. I have never had these problems before and now its randomly doing it with every scene I load in... Anyway I'm going to go outside and shut my eyes for a bit!
Take it easy!
xXStItChXx
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