Final animation

Final scene complete

Finally the day of completion has arrived and i am happy to say that it was an enjoyable and challenging project. At the start of the project i even questioned myself if i was able to complete the project to the way i wanted it to be, I didn’t want to discard this project and go for another one which i know i won’t enjoy as much by knowing how challenging it will be somewhat gave me a reason to continue with it. One aspect i think that has i have hugely improved on is my modelling skills, during the digital environment project i began taking interest to modelling when i had to model objects for the kitchen. I did not know i would enjoy it this much and im happy that i did as this may of helped me to make a decision towards what direction i may want to take in the future.

While undergoing the storyboard stages i came to a point of wanting to add in water effect into my scene, this was to be used a flood sequence similar to that of Titanic. This is where my research came in to play and how i found out about Realflow dynamics simulation software. After reading more about this software i knew that this is what i need to use in order for me to produce the water effects i want, i did have ago with the emitters in Maya but they were not on a higher level then Realflow.

The area that i feel i did not do as well on what the conceptualisation, not saying i did nothing for it but i just did not spend as much on time on it compared to the modelling and texturing. You see at the start off the project i was supposed to go straight into the storyboarding stages as like what everyone should do, but for some reason i just dived rite into the modelling stage. I think this was one of the reasons why i kept on changing my ideas story wise throughout the week. At one point i told myself i wont continue modelling unless i start on the storyboard and if it was not for that i would not have had any of the water effects or the final commercial i have now. So yeh storyboards play a major part in the development stage and i wished i had done more or done it sooner. feel like my 2d conceptualisation suffered because of the amount of time i spent on the 3D.

But overall i am pleased to say that i am happy with the final outcome and for you guys watching this i hope you can see the hard work i put in to this work to produce it a good standard.

No render farm

Just a little post saying that i renderd out all my scenes through my home computer and not the render farm. I would of liked to use the renderfarm but i was doing work at home most of the time so i just decided to render it from home

Speeding car sequence

This the speeding car sequence which i edited in after effect, ithink it looks ok but if any else thinks other wise let me know so i could change it a bit, so to let you guys know i dont know why there is lag in this video and it is not there in the final version

Rendering twice

ok in previous post i talked about the issue i was having with the render setting that Jarede had sent through the email. I have decided to render out two versions of the scene, one being the 720*576 setting and the other being 674*482.

Problem or not

i had a look at one of Jareds email about the render setting and such, i followed the render setting and applied it to my render and the result i got was like it seems to have zoomed in on the picture and the car loks massive. I dont know if it is supposed to be like this or not, ill try come in thursday and ask around if any one knows

Same problem with the last project solved!!!

ok with the car and fluid completed it was time to render the both out in Maya, but while in the process of rendering out each camera i was shown the same dodgy looking render. Basically in last terms project we were using Maya mental ray physical sunlight to cast the sunset effect from each camera, but not the perspective camera. After setting up the render setting i rendered out each scene file and when i viewed those scene in after effects i noticed that there were no lights in the scene and that the background was black. The only way we resolved this last term was take away the physical sunlight out and replace it with a normal area light, this is why our final version did not look as good as the tests.

ok with the same problem happening to me now i know for a fact that i was going to try and resolve this because i do not want to hand in a lower quality version compared to the test i have produced. Ok so what did to fix this problem was to render the background and the foreground as separate layers. This then enabled me to go in in after effects to position the background correctly, once i found out how to pull this off i was laughing of how simple it was to do.

Time for the effects

Ok now that i have finnished rendering out all my scenes, i now have to start to import them into after effects for the effects. The effect that i am going to use is the camera shake, this is commonly used when a high speed object zooms past the camera. During Gareths project i got time to familairise my self with after effects so this shouldnt be much of a hasstle.

How i produced the flood effects

I will write down with print screen of how i produced the flood effect in realflow and how i intergrated it within Maya. Firstly i started off with having to create the maze environment in maya, i did not want to model the maze as this was just created for the car to travel around and aslo for the flood to take place. Ok the first thing you need to have installed to import the maya scene over to realflow is the realflow plugin, this plugin would allow maya to export a selected object as an realflow SD file for it to be able to work over in realflow. The second important thing you have to do is to triangulate the object you want to imprt into realflow, this allows the object to intergrate with the fluid in realflow. I will paste screen shots of what i just explained about



































Ok once that was done it was time to open up realflow 4, once opened up you would have to create a new project just like any other programe. After doing this i went to file import and went to the location of the realflow SD file i exported out of Maya. Here is a picture of what i have got so far


















Once i had the scene ready it was time to add in the emitters, these emitters are kind of similar to the ones in Maya but not as powerful and effecient then the ones in realfow. The emitter that i picked from the list was an object emitter, the emitter that i used for the sand car effect was the fill object emitter which i will talk about in the next post. The difference between object emitter and fill objct emitter is that object emitter allows the fluid to be produced from any desired locaation. For example the for the flood effect the object emitter would allow the fuid to travel around the object and the object being the scene which i imported from maya. Fill object emitter is used when you want to create a fluid particles inside the object itself, for example for the sand car effect i used the fill object emitter which was used for the particle to emit out of the object. Like the car the particle burst outward from the car as the car was filled with particles inside of it. I hope i was able to explain the difference between the two properly :). I will post the pictures of the what emittes i used and where its then located


















As you can see from the above images i added in a gravity emitter, this was needed so gravity could be applied to he fluid, with out it you would have to fluid travelling upwards. Once this was done i had to apply a mesh to the global link, this would be important as it would be the mesh file which i will import in to Maya. Now i had to apply the setting to the object emitter, wont talk about each changes i made to the settings but i will post a quick screen cap of the settings i chose.


















Setting for the object emitter


















Settings for the gravity emitter


















Settings for the mesh (Important)

Ok now that all the important parts were done it was time to simulate it, this is smilar to rendering out in Maya. The first test i done of the flood effect i had to resolution set as 0.005, this gave out a more jelly looking water and the render time took about 7 hours. As you can see for this flood effet i have raised the resolution to 0.01 i tried 0.5 as a friend suggested over youtube but my PC could not handle it even for a quad core so i had to stick to 0.01. All that was left now was to let the fluid simulation render out. The overall timeit took to render out i think was 29 hours which took about a week because i had a few problems with my computer. Here is a screen shot of the renderd out fluid in realflow


















OK so when the simulation is completed i re opened Maya and opened up the scene which im imported to realflow. Then i had to import only the mesh files which were renderd out from realflow in to Maya. The last step remaining now was to render the scene out in maya and that was it. I already posted the flood effect on the blog but ill post it in this post again