Day 20

Day 20 Forcefield's Shader

Today I try to finish the force field's shader. I was trying to figure out how to get the edge of the force field to have some dispersion as the edge was to fine. So I went around other nodes to Glow, Ruth's shader and many more shaders that has an outer glow. The I went around Ron's shader to figure out what's making the fade out. It was the edge fallout that was making it transparent, it wasn't the opacity node. And the black part of the shader will be transparent. This was how I did the fade out on the outer shell. 

Previously

Network 

I added a AlphaMix to have a control in the spread of black areas.

Tweaking of the ramp to get the colour.

Result

 I added a emitLight Parameter. Though it is not obvious it smooths as well as blends the colour better.

With emitLight.

Day 19

Day 19 Materials


Today I started off surfing the net for better understanding of material shaders. I found this website (http://houdini.dreamerzstudio.net/?page_id=3 which introduces it for me. Later I studied the shader which Mr.Ron help me with and Ruth's shader and tried some testing.

Added Parameter

Transparent Force-field

Testing.

End result

Day 18

Day 18 impact wave

And so I continued with Ruth's impact wave and this is what I have got.

Whole network.

Network of the making of shockwave

 Shockwave

Lifewire of shockwave's network

Lifewire of shockwave

Surface of shockwave.

Greyscale of shockwave

Greyscale of shockwave

Shockwave's particles network

Shockwave with particles

So far I have not applied the shaders Ruth applied, I shall do that tomorrow.

Day 17

Day 17 Mocap shooting 1

Today Edmund and Lu Sheng help out for the mocap shooting. The shot was marching and swinging of swords but no interaction yet.

And also I checked out on Ruth's impact wave. And still currently trying to understand how was it made.

To create the shape of the wave

Creating the particles and metaball

Shader nodes

I tried to do it on my own but there were some problems, better luck tomorrow.

Day 16

Day 16 It wasn't pyro after all.


Mr Ron advised me to change and use particles instead. He also helped me in the shader for the outer shel of the shock wave.

Network

Additional Parameters

Shader's View

Day 15

Day 15 playing with fire

Yesterday i used Joyces clouds to add to my particle instead of using sprites. i rendered it over night and when I came back to school it was not done rendering. But I have to stop rendering the video or else it would not be able the computer for the rest of the day. So below is the video but its halfway rendered.

Tornado with Joyces's cloud

I think it is way better than the sprites but I will have to sacrifice precious time. I will definitely consider the use of clouds.

As for today I realise yesterday I was using flame and wasn't the effect I wanted and today and realise that there was another effect called fireball. So I research further and tweak around with the color and shape of the pyro. And this was the results.

Adjustments of the pyroshader.

Tweaking of some pyrosolver.

Source.

Velocity.

Viewport.

Rendered.

Day 14

Day 14 Pyro


Today Mr.Douglas came to check on us and I showed him that I did the debris particle with the scale control. Previously my tornado's shader was very plain and he made it so much better just by just adding lights. I had forgotten that he told me sprites casts shadow.

Previously without light

With light and mantra

 He also told me that the sprites were to uniform and asked me to randomise the scale.

Expression to randomise the scale: rand($FF + $PT)/5

After that I continued listening to pyro tutorials from sidefx. They taught smoke shading, scattering, voxels, pyro nodes and lowres and upres. Honestly I did not understanding most of the stuff and think that I shall do some exercise to understand better like they say "practice makes perfect".

Day 13

Day 13 Pyro time


Today this morning I helped may with the particle simulation. And this is what we got.

This is achieved by adding trails to particle splits and adding noise to the particle making the pattern generated randomed.

Today for the Pyro the tutorial taught on how to change the colour of the flame.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Day 12

Day 12 -  Continuation of R&D

Today,  I researched on Pyro. Found this tutorial at www.sidefx.com and tried building it. It taught on how to create the flame and control the temperature and noise according to the density of the fire.

Some of the screenshots of what I did:

I assisted May in researching on particles trail.

Day 11

Day 11

Today I tried adding a scale value to my tornado. And I finally solve it! But before solving it I tried all plausible ways and every method I could thought of. I tried replicating the metaball force by referencing the group of the "merge1". It had the vortex force and the spiral force but it dispersed as it goes downwards.I also had help from Jia Bao he also tried helping me replicating the tonardo in the popnetwork. Though it wasn't what I wanted it the idea was interesting and quite creative.

Then when it was about to go home I found this forum that was about scaling the sprite of the particle sop.

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/6877-how-to-control-sprite-size-in-sops/

It is adding the attribcreate to the particle.

Day 10

Day 10 The return of Mr. Ron


Today Mr. Ron was back and gather us gathered and summarise whatever we have done so far. He recommended that I should have at least a clear visualization on the explosion looks and research and develop towards it. Unfortunately so far I had  not thought of the idea on how it will look like. So I research and on game trailers which are packed with VFX.

Star Wars The Force Unleased 2 explosion @ 0:16

I decided that I would use Thor's explosion scene as the concept of the floor of heaven will be from Thor so If the explosion is in heaven there must be some similarities.

Other Research

I tried to do the other method in the popnetwork but it doesn't look as I wanted.

I will continue tomorrow, hopefully it will work.

Day 9

I tried to create sprites for my tornado using the same method yesterday. But this time I did not used the sprite node instead I used the sprite procedural which I did not understand at all.

Final Result

I wanted to control attributes of the sprites so that I can perform some neat particle effect. I knew it is possible to tweak it in shop level but Mr. Douglas said there was a simpler method to tweak by using the default sprite node but there was a problem.

So I went to try the default method. I tried changing the the particle in the primary body to a popnetwork an having source and eventually linking to a sprite node. But the particle did emit randomly by the points of the distorted cirlce but din't seem to follow down the field radius force of the metaball.

Replacement of the particle node with a popnetwork.

I really hope I can figure and complete this by tomorrow.