FLUIDS SIMULATION | FIRE & SMOKE
HI Speed - Hi Emission
This example has higher values, from the density, to bouyancy, to its solver quality; of course, this might look more accurate to what a real flame looks like.. however a lower quality look might be what the effects team or the director is looking for.. Render times on this will go from 20secs to 1-3 mins per frame depending on your solver and render output settings. (This example, per frame = 50 secs at 720p).
Solver Quality : < 200
Lo Speed - Lo Emission
The emission and speed of the voxel solvers is quite low in this example, but there are times where the required look for the shot/scene will need to have low solver quality settings to achieve this style. Other times.. these settings could also be used on wide-long shots or where the flames are very distant from the camera… Consider this also as a basic setup for the flame dynamics as part of the test and iteration process, and where render times should be kept very low…
Solver Quality : Default – to > 100
Smoke Trail & Explosion | Emma10
One of the challenges in early Maya versions, was the limitation on the use of fluids scale and distance that will expand overtime, due to CPU limitations; in the most recent versions, since 2016 until today, the fluid emitter can auto-scale and kill the emitter evaluation over time* parameters. Same as with fire*, as detailed above, the resolution will need to be up-resed to increase the amount of detail shown on the final renders.
Solver Quality : > 250 to 850
SIMULATION SYSTEMS | FUR & HAIR DYNAMICS
Character Fur Test
This test render’s purpose is to visualize the fur maps applied to the Fur system, adjust the colors and values accordingly to estimate the final output render times. Also a template comp of the render layers is applied to find the balance between look, quality and production time… (This test render uses low render sampling, and increased for the final output to reduce noise and flickering).
Output: 720p -1080p || Combination of MR and Arnold hair…
Maps used: Length | Color | Attraction | Specular | Baldness | Density | Scraggle
*Density and attraction settings work together when adding hair dynamic system to the character; that way, the values of each other will affect the final motion of the fur after cached…
Dynamic Fur Test
After adding some attraction maps and hair dynamics systems I came up with this render test. The light and render settings sampling requires to be higher to reduce any flickering on the shadows…
Tip: Generated more than one hair systems for the character; one for the small hairs and the other one for the longer hairs, and they could be cached into a single file… This also helps the calculation times for rendering and depending on your processor speed you might get slightly different results on the fur motion…
FRACTURING SIMULATION
Fracturing Preview & Setup | Dragon vs Knight
In this test, I’m able to foresee what places of the rocks or main boulders need to be pre-fractured to suit the collision more accurately between geometries and rigid bodies, before applying thw final *dynamic fracturing to the simulation (inside 3DsMax/Rayfire). This process helps to increase the number of iterations and meet the targeted look and Creative Direction.
**Rayfire also uses random, curve projection and texture based fracturing in real time which allows the keying objects in the fly and the import of already pre-keyed objects to use as colliders…
Fracturing Preview & Setup | Xeno vs Ninja Aliens
In comparison with the previous sim shown above, this is not a full solid wall but a surface in the ground.. And here I modeled some thickness to the ground without making the rocks too big and bulky… Seeing for real life pavement references, its more like peeling an orange than a 3-ton wall being brought down by some impact or force…
**Cleanup has to be completed by cleaning up keyframes and by deleting unnecessary pieces not shown in the background after running the simulation to reduce render times, file size and to make sure the composition stays as desired without any noise from extra and unwanted or unused geometry.
**Notice how I added some secondary objects as colliders for the ground to be lifted up and have that impact bounce look in the simulation…
From the very beginning...
When I was 7 or 8, I was interested and intrigued by the TV magic that made some of my favorite 90’s Saturday Morning cartoons come to life, like “The Roadrunner – Wile E Coyote”, or “Popeye”; where after “discovering” that the *magic happened behind the scenes at the hands of cartoonists drawing frame by frame;… I decided to direct my path into the world of animation… leaving aside my other child dream of becoming a firefighter and a masked wrestler (yep…at the same time!!).
Later on my grandma, who was herself a great teacher and artist, without any knowledge in Animation, showed me one of her favorite pastimes.. drawing little stick figure drawings characters in sequence in little yellow and “sticky” post-notes (flip books)… And indeed, there it was, right in front of my face; for the 1st time I witnessed it all became to life.. “frame by frame and drawing after drawing”, the Art of Animation.
From then on, and after watching some of my favorite animated films, like The Lion King or Aladdin my intrigue and fascination for what was going on behind the scenes, became a goal for me to learn how to draw as fast and as beautiful as some of the greatest artists at big animation studios did.. And looking into today and into the future… my dream of becoming an better artist still open to follow any routes that might come along in my way; exploring new horizons day by day and always hoping to finding new ones….
What Motivates Me :
“The never ending result after producing animation sequences in exchange of a good smile or a big laughter, by merging creatively Art and Technology…”