Welcome back! It is now 11 weeks in and I think things are starting to shape up! I have to say though, I am starting to get worried since time is passing very quickly. I need to have everything completed by week 13 so that I can render in full size.
Adjustments to the Velocity Field
The velocity field on my main pyro is promising! One thing my professor suggested I try though was to add a bit more extra downwards force. This is because realistically, helicopters would be pushing the air downwards as well to create lift. So, I used an attribute adjust vector node set to "distance only" and "interpolate" to push the velocity vectors down along the negative y axis. I had to be careful about pushing it too far down though, as it was starting to cause some strange motion blur issues on render-view
I also tried to tighten the 'downwards spiral' a bit, pushing the velocity in further as it went down. At first I tried to just adjust the force value to push the velocity inwards rather than out, but that wasn't giving me a desirable result. Ultimately, I ended up just deforming the base torus itself, selecting its inner-radius lower faces and pushing them downwards and inwards with a soft transform.
I made a few minor tweaks to my velocity and force scales too.
To finish things off, I added a little bit of wind in the pyro solver in the opposite direction of the helicopter's movement (left). This is because I wasn't getting enough coverage on the left side of the screen, my smoke just rising directly upwards instead of billowing out more. This helped, but I may need to adjust the animation of the helicopter a bit, since it seems in the reference to move further horizontally than I have it at the moment (thought I'd like to avoid that if possible. We'll see)
Getting the Rest of the Procedural Islands
This section will be pretty short, to start, I applied most of what I did to the first island from last week to the remaining floating islands in the scene. I made adjustments according to fit each island. The one in the distance behind the large column on screen-right was basically a copy-paste from the first island, though without the smaller noise detail since it's far enough back I didn't feel it'd need it, and for the sake of my PC. Side note, I need to get better depth of field in my renders so that the islands have a little blurring as they get farther away. The island in the bottom right I only did one voronoi fracture pass of medium-sized pieces.
The columns on the far left at the end of the shot needed a little more attention, though. First off, I made the voronoi fractures stretch much farther vertically. I did two passes of the exploded-view displacement. First, an overall displacement like I did for the previous islands. For the second pass, I only selected a few particular pieces to push outwards, in order to create some distinct ridges and ...mini-columns(?), if you will. Although, I had to go in and manually tweak some pieces since the results weren’t the best for me.
Then, the volume noise. Again, some of it was stretched a bit more vertically.
Unfortunately though, my PC did not like this object in particular. I wasn’t able to get highter resolution noise on it without it completely freezing up and me having to shut down Houdini. I’ll try to troubleshoot next week but, with the time remaining for this project, I may have to rely more on texture normal maps.
Next week, I'll work on covering all the islands/columns with foliage and trees, and texturing.
Art Directing the Fireballs
Now, it was time to move on to adjusting the fireballs. I mainly had to mess around with the pyro trail settings to get the fireballs a little further away from the camera, as well as adjusting their paths a bit. Now, in last week’s render, the fireballs were far too big. I figured out the issue to be the massive amount of velocity on the fireballs literally pushing the flames out into that large ball, so I simply turned down the vel scale in the pyro solver. This helped, though at the cost of slightly more stepping with I plan to solve in the next week.
Finally, I keyed the temperature, density, and burn attributes to fade out a little faster so a long smoke trail doesn’t take up the entire screen for too long.
Fixing the Pyro Trails
Here, my professor requested that I attempt the fireball method on the background pyro trails, as the current setup doesn’t look very appealing.
This was easy enough, just taking my copy to points setup from the fireballs and pasting it to the pyro trails. I had to make several tweaks to accommodate the new size and durations, such as reducing the velocity and adjusting the temperature, density, burn keyframes.
In the pyro solver, I had to drastically increase the dissipation value. I also had to increase voxel size, as the previous value was greatly straining my PC due to the high count of trails.
The Final Render
Unfortunately, I did not have time to render all my elements for this week. The main pyro render took up the majority of render time, and I re-rendered the initial pyro and explosion as well as I had made some shading adjustments to them. The fireballs, pyro trails, and islands are shown in a final flipbook.
EDIT: Got my final render! Here it is:
Looking at it now, the biggest things I notice are A) some odd motion blur on the main pyro FX, I think I may need to reduce the downwards pointing velocity, and B) the pyro trails are looking way too big and noisy. Overall, I seem to be losing a bit of that slow motion feel as well, so I'll try to bring it back.
For Next Week...
Since it's time to start really chugging things along, here are my plans for next week:
Get the final 3D model finished and into the scene. (I've fallen behind on the model, regrettably, and next week will be largely focused on its completion)
Adding debris pyro. These are pieces of debris that I will shoot out with POPs and set on fire.
Start texturing the floating islands and helicopter
Adjust lighting accordingly
Tech fixes
Begin full-size renders
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