In the last review period, I solidified the foundation of the hair simulations and got them to a workable very iterative space to refine. The rain sim also got to a workable space that still needs finer tuning to create smaller files when exporting to alembic. Over the break I worked a bit on props such s below and continued to work on the then upstate and cafe set background elements.
During the first review period, I focused on reshaping the park and cafe sets to more closely fit the animatic and locations that Sharah had drawn. The recreation was also necessary to make the scenes more manageable and useable for whoever works in them. I also worked on several shots in the 3D animatic. For the week I did meet my overall goals for the week despite having to rework some sets. Some of the issues I faced when reworking the sets were issues with creating MASH networks for the park set. To solve it I just referenced the tree file several times and moved them manually into place. Other issues I ran into during the week were issues with the character rigs that are going got be fixed soon when the characters models are updated. In the lab scene, I just found inconsistencies in the layout of the lab set and the lab in the animatic which I pointed out in our meeting. My one failure this week was being able to get the rain simulation and simulated hair into Maya, in time for the 3d animatic, also did not realize that I should have initially put a particle kill box on the rain simulation.
Below are the few props I made for the backgrounds as well as to test if .ass files would carry over textures and lights.
The first image below is the cafe set that has been simplified to be much smaller for ease.
These images show the original scene file. The trees are the same trees in the new park scene file but instead of references they are a MASH network of several colors of trees to create the fall look. The rendered image was done before the far background was placed into the scene, though this will likely go unused for now.
Below is the new version of the park, instead of being upstate New York, it's closer to something like Central Park.
The particle effects are a temporary placeholder. In the upcoming weeks, I will be researching vellum cloth and Houdini particles. My method for this effect was to simply animate the visibility on the metro card while doing the inverse on the particle emitter. also to save time I animated the lab shots in the same scene file, something that I will change to individual scene files in the future.
Below is the scene that the Houdini rain simulations will be in.
Rain effect for the scene above. The particles create a run as well as splashes that can be pulled into Maya for rendering. Alongside looking into vellum I will look at getting the alembic size smaller for the importing process into Maya.
The hair sim is at a point that is easily stylable with hair brushes that can lengthen, cut, push, part, adjust the length, clump, and add curl. The green and blue colors make it easier to see the depth and work with, the orange is close to what the color will be.
