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Week 12: Final Thoughts

At the beginning of this project my goal was to create a short compilation of extreme weather/natural disaster animations that were edited to look like an end of the world type scenario. Whilst I was able to complete several animation clips, I overestimated how much I was able to achieve in a short period of time. In order for me to have edited those clips together to create the end piece I would of had to put more effort into things like the environment settings, lighting and thus a longer render time. My focus for this project was procedural animations so I decided that it was more important to work on perfecting that then it was to waste time on the overall appearance.

The most challenging aspect of this assignment was rendering the earthquake. The technique I used did not allow me to correctly place a texture on the model. Unfortunately, after a lot of trial and error and still no solution I decided to move on. In the future I would try a different procedural animation that permits me to delete the history of the model, allowing me to texture the object.

While this project was challenging, it pushed me to learn new things in 3D that I wouldn't have pursued otherwise. I now have several quick animations that I am able to put into my portfolio and can continue to expand on with more detail. Although I did not accomplish everything I set out to achieve I am still happy with the end results.

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Week 12: Final Results

Here are two final renders I did for the project:

This was the first animation I worked on. Whilst I was able to capture the movement of wind I don’t feel the flag pole looked very realistic. Next time I will work on my texturing and lighting to make the scene look as true-to-life as possible.

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Week 11: Update

I continued working on perfecting my hurricane animation. Last week I was able to create the direction of the wind by using nParticles. This week I added Maya Fluid to my hurricane. It uses the information from the particles to capture the intended motion of the hurricane.

Maya fluid is a powerful technology that is able to realistically simulate fluid motion. With this you are able to create atmospheric effects, pyrotechnics, viscous fluids and open water. For my project I am using this technique to create atmospheric effects which includes clouds, mist, fog, steam, and smoke.

This has been my first time using Maya Fluids so I have had to research in order to learn how to properly achieve the desired effect. I found this to be very complex. There are a lot of different attributes that can be manipulated and figuring out what did what took a lot of time. Even after doing this project I will still need to put more time and effort into learning the technology if I want to perfect using Maya Fluid. 

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Week 10: Update

This week I began working on the next aspect of my project. My goal is to create a realistic hurricane. I spent a lot of the week playing with nParticles in Maya. I created a funnel shape and attached the particles to the funnel in order to create a hurricane shape. I then focused on the motion of the particles moving through the shape.

I learnt this technique through my research on nParticles. nParticles is a generation particle system used in Maya to create effects such as fire, smoke and liquid. The dynamic simulation framework can interact with other objects to create the desired effect. Through my research it was evident that this was the most effective way to create a hurricane in Maya. 

I followed this tutorial by by khalil khalilian to help me create the basis of my hurricane model.

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Week 9: Update

My goal was to create an animation showcasing a plant freezing over. I achieved this using Maya, Substance Painter and Cinema 4D. I used Maya to make any modelling and UV changes as I am more familiar with the tools within Maya and figured it would save time. Once happy with the model I textured it using Substance Painter. I then exported both the model and the textures so that they were ready to be used.In Cinema 4D I created a new texture for the ice, which I placed on top of the plant material and key framed the amount of texture shown. This is the end result:

I plan to create an environment and better lighting/render for this animation, however I feel with the time restraints I am under it is a smarter to move onto the next animation for the moment.

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Week 8: Update

Throughout this assignment I have focused most of my time on modelling and texturing rather than procedural animations. For my latest animation I decided to overcome this by using a free model. I downloaded the model of a plant from Albert Vall:

https://www.albertvallspunsich.com/educational?fbclid=IwAR0FIofQCeR3QyTchUVe5To1MWU7d3npc2aF49TR21FupIdKRPeuIrOZL8c I was spending too much time on modelling and texturing.

For this next animation I plan on animating a plant freezing over using both Maya and Cinema 4D.  I hope that by cutting out modelling of the plant I will have given myself more time to work on and perfect the procedural animation. The model did not come textured so I will still be texturing it myself.

Here is an image of the model once textured and changed to fit my needs:

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Week 7: Update

The past couple weeks, I have been working on creating an animation of an earthquake. However, my plans have taken a twist. The way I animated the earthquake meant that I was unable to delete my history. Because of this every few frames the position of my texture would move as well as any vertices that I had moved.

I also spent a long time working on textures and making the crack look as realistic as possible. This took up a lot of my time so when I discovered that when the texture was placed on the model it would change I became frustrated. After hours of trying to overcome this obstacle it was clear that I needed to move onto the aspect of my project in order to use my time effectively. However, if I find myself with time at the end I will try and complete the earthquake animation. 

Here are two still image of the earthquake to demonstrate the deatailed textures I worked on in Substance Painter:

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Week 6: Update

Whilst working on this project it has become clear that I am focusing less one what I intended to achieve. Originally I intended to focus on procedural animation to create extreme weather conditions/natural disasters. However, in order to receive the best results I’ve had to spend a lot of time working on making them seem as realistic as possible through texturing, lighting and rendering.

I have been using Substance Painter to achieve this. I have used this program before however I am learning different parts of the software in order to get the most realistic results.

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Week 5: Progress

This week I was able to finish the animation of the flag blowing in the wind. I am currently rendering out a textured version, which I will take into after effects and edit further.

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Week 4: Challenges

One of the biggest challenges I will face is having the required tools to complete the project. Through the research I have done it is apparent that the most effective way to simulate these weather conditions is to use plugins. However, these products are out of my budget so I will have to figure out how to create these effects without any extra add-ons.

Another challenge is being able to learn an abundance of new techniques in a short period of time. I will be working with new elements within the programs such as Maya Fluid, Bitfrost and nClothe. I want to create quality not quantity. My way of overcoming this obstacle will be cutting out how many different elements I create. If I have only produced 3 mediocre pieces, I will work on perfecting those rather than creating new ones.

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Week 3: Influences and Inspiration

Daniel Danielson is a Swedish Art Director and Motion designer who specializes in animation and motion graphics. I stumbled across his work about a year ago and have been amazed ever since. Whilst Daniel doesn’t specialise or focus on simulating weather conditions and natural disasters he has created some in the past which sparked my initial idea.

Roger Kilimanjaro is another artist who has influenced my work. Kilimanjaro is a freelance CG artist from Paris. He works with fluids, colliders and particles to produce clean procedural animations. Although his work is different from what I intend to produce they follow the same principles and techniques.

Because procedural animation is new territory for me I need to look to others for guidance. My main source of direction has been through a handful of YouTuber’s who create tutorials relevant to the animations I’m trying to achieve some of these include: Vision Of Jeremiah (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8aJsskgexJoUei5XXWpnOA),

UHR (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA2fQNuxeENMAlQkV01OXxg/feed), and  

Mike Hermes (https://www.youtube.com/user/MikeHermes65/featured).

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Week 2: What is Procedural Animation?

Procedural animation is an auto-generated animation that is simulated by physics. Rather than animating objects manually and creating individual key frames, procedural animation allows you to animate through specific rules and conditions. It enables you to animate the natural movement of clothe, fluid, particles, hair and much more.  

Procedural animation is often used in games to create more fluid character movement. This helps the animators achieve the most realistic results which in some cases would not be possible through manual animations. Techniques that are used include the ragdoll effect, which uses physics to realistically simulate a death sequence or the way a character falls. Rigid body dynamics is another procedural animation technique, which unlike ragdoll physics, doesn’t lack control. This procedure uses code to gain more control over a character’s movement and allows them to walk and jump.

This is relevant to my project because I will be creating different extreme weather conditions such as earthquakes, extreme wind, a hurricane and frost. Through my research I have learnt procedural animation will provide the most realistic results and cut down the time it will take to animate.  

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Week 1: What I want to achieve

My objective is to create a montage of 3D scenes depicting different extreme weather conditions and natural disasters. The animation will display an end of the world type scenario due to global warming. With climate change being a hot topic of conversation within the media, I believe it is important to not only use this opportunity to create an incredible portfolio piece but also address a world wide issue. My goal is to spread awareness about the real consequences of our actions through realistic imagery and shock the audience into rethinking their choices that impact the environment.

My goal is to push the scope and work with procedural animations to simulate different extreme weather conditions. Procedural animation is something I have little to no experience with but after doing some research I discovered that with these techniques you can create amazing results.

I intend to use both Maya and Cinema 4D to complete this project. Although I have been using Maya for several years, I feel I have only explored the surface of the program. This project will help me dive deeper into the software by working with particles and fluid. I also intend to do the same with Cinema 4D, however I have limited experience inside this program. Through my research I have learnt some animations are more effective inside different software’s, which is my reasoning for using both. However, if I find one is more efficient than the other I will stick to using just one program.