Advanced FumeFX Workshop: Week 1

I enrolled in an Advanced FumeFX Workshop, presented by Allan McKay held by CGSociety. During the course of this workshop we were tasked with weekly assignments, Allan provided a video tutorial showing us how to do an specific effect and we were asked to take this further and try push the boundries a little further than what was shown in the lesson.

My first weeks assignment was to create a basic torch.

This 1st lesson was just a quick refresh into FumeFX for people that haven't used it or haven't used it that much. The topics touched on simple elements like object sources and emission through textures as well as a basic overview of the settings within fumeFX.

There wasn't much needed to improve of the lesson so I just added some textures to my torch with some very basic animation and lighting. My main focus was to produce a high-quality flame and some nice fire motion.

My end product displayed below:

Advanced FumeFX Workshop: Week 2

Week 2's Assignment was a lot more challengeing and fun to do. We needed to create a piece of paper burning.
The Lesson this week was Very basic and touched on using Masks to emit fire and then animating those masks to create the burning effect. I decided to expand quite a bit from what was taught and created multiple masks using radial gradient ramps with slight offsets to create my fire mask and then a similar mask animated and attached to a volume select modifier to remove the polygons once the fire has burnt the page.

I was quite surprised at how complex this effect turned out to be as there was also multiple shaders needed with animated masks blending between them. I also had a few different meshes that would leave behind pieces of burnt paper. This effect required quite a lot of prep time before even starting to simulate the fire, so I ended up simulating a slightly lower res grid to make sure I finished on time.

Advanced FumeFX Workshop: Week 3

For Week 3 our Lesson was to create a Flame Thrower effect on a Tank. I downloaded a free tank model from Turbosquid as there wasn't a tank included with the scene files and did a very quick scene setup. The lesson showed how to create and emit fire effects from simple particles and the use of the particle source. It also showed us a good technique of re-using your fumeFX grids to duplicate the effect. We would just copy the Fume Container and then offset the start time to re-use the effect instead of having to resim again.

The effect from the lesson was more of a gas Flame Thrower which isn't too bad however I would like to do another version of this with more of a liquid fire effect.

Advanced FumeFX Workshop: Week 4

Week 4 was really exciting and probably one of my favourite lessons. We were asked to create a Dirt Explosion. We pushed it up a few notches as this was not a simple effect to pull off and there were so many elements that needed to be put together to create the final explosion.

We started off layering the effect, creating the debris and small chunks of rock that gets blown into the air. Then we built up on this by adding multiple particle systems that created the dirt like effect and then loaded up Krakatoa to render out the millions of particles. To add to the dust layers there was also some FumeFx simulations created to add just a little more detail. After rendering out all the necessary elements I then took it into After Effects to composite together.

For my particular effect I added a background image and tried to match my effect seamlessly into it. I feel I did a fairly decent job at it however there are quite a few elements needed to really sell the effect, but there wasn't really enough time to go further than this.

Advanced FumeFX Workshop: Week 5

This week the lesson was to create an explosion. The technique used to create this explosion was with a particle system, we set up multiple emitters that were offset slightly and had different properties to give the desired effect. I decided to create a simple scene to put my effect in, which I rendered with Vray and composited together with After Effects. There is quite a lot I would like to add to this effect, mainly adding more destruction to the building and a lot more debris. Due to time constraints I left this out to do at a later stage.

Advanced FumeFX Workshop: Week 6

The Lesson for week 6 was to create a fireball explosion. Again we used a Particle system to drive this effect with multiple emitters having slightly different properties and offset by a few frames. I quite like the result of the fireball effect and decided to apply it to a barrel explosion which came out alright, I didn't really have time to play around with this too much so it needs some reworking but isn't a terrible looking effect.