Category: The Mill Mentorship

Final Spot After 10 weeks of hard work, I am proud to present Team Mountains Final spot from our collab class. I was responsible for creating the dust and particle effects to add dynamic energy to the rickshaws motion and help tell the story of the mountainous Himalayan environment. Collaborating with my teammates Dee Divakaran…

Shot 05 Iteration 1 The first iteration of the shot 5 dust trailing. For this iteration I mainly focused on getting as much resolution and minimizing the voxel tiling of the simulation. Cache Time per wheel: 5 hours 30 min This set up produced a dust with too much buoyancy , temperature, and high frequency…

Shot 05 dust This week I was focused on getting shot 05 done as fast as possible after we received our animation update. I switched to the sparse solver so that our machines at Monty would be able to handle the volume of this shots FX. I still ran into some ram issues so I…

Custom Cloth Sculpting After getting some feedback that we needed to add more wrinkled cloth details to the soft top of our rickshaw. I created a cloth detailing set up that would leverage the existing Zbrush sculpting talents of my team mate Yeona and allow her to add detailing directly to our model in Houdini…

This week I worked on shot 2 FX and Animation. My dust trail set up is very similar to the one in shot 6, I added multi resolution turbulence and disturbance to increase detail for the up close shot. The speed at which the animation was traveling lead to a lot of issues I think…

This week I worked on the custom velocity field recommended by the mentors. As someone relatively new to pyro this was quite a challenge. I used a smoke sim to create a fluid dynamics velocity field by simulating the collision velocity around the vehicle.

For FX this week I focused on the dust trail from shot 6. I was focused on understanding pyro and gas microsolvers. The simulation is set up with a pop sim from the wheels serving as the smoke source. Velocity is extracted from spinning points scattered on to wheels and point deformed to wheel position…

This week I worked on finishing the rig, procedural layout in houdini, and pyro look development. Rig The rig has been tested and approved by our animator. Rigging Scripts I wrote some quick python scripts for maya to help me with this rig to automate and increase accuracy.

FX test After focusing mainly on rigging I did have some time to do some FX tests. Using our previs for shot_05 I split out my deforming wheels and then calculated a scattered point velocity using a trail node (I will probably switch the trail node to a custom velocity expression in a sop solver…