Mug Break

This was quite a fun project to work on. The idea was pretty simple, have a slow motion shot of a mug breaking on the floor.

I did a quick scene setup with lights and textures, then added a camera with DOF to give it a better look and feel. I used Rayfire to break up the pieces using the draw fragments option so I would have control over my chunks. I also did a quick simulation of the original mug hitting the ground, this would be the base for my animation. I then plugged the fragments into Particle flow box 2 via the birth group operator and used the lock/bond test to lock my particles to the original animated mug.

I added an Age Test to my event to send my particles to a new event just before it was about to hit the ground. This activated the dynamics for it to break apart. In my 2nd event I added a spawn test to spawn small chunks from the main fragments to add a bit more realism to the shot.

In this video I have a "Fail" break which is just the original mug that was simulated via Rayfire. The 2nd part was the full speed 25fps render of the whole animation and then the last part was rendered at 150fps, taken into After Effects and then slowed down to a further 500fps using Twixtor.

Thanks

FXWars! Bonfire

This was another CGSociety challenge I took part in, I had a little bit of free time so thought I would give it a go. The brief was to make a bonfire, so I gathered a bunch of reference images from the internet to decide on the type of fire I wanted to build. For this challenge I wanted to keep it simple, something that was manageable so that I could finish on time as well as something that looked good.

I started by creating the scene, made a quick landscape and modeled up some logs and pallets, textured them and placed them in my scene. Instead of having a stationary camera I just had it tracking back very slowly and then I setup the lighting for the scene.

I then jumped into Fumefx to make the fire, using greyscale maps to fuel the fire which gave me a bit more control of the flames. There were 2 fumefx grids used, one was for the logs themselves and then another was for the ground, in the heart of the bonfire.

I rendered out the scene with its lighting as a separate pass, then rendered out a fire and smoke. I brought these into After effects and comped them together as well as making some colour corrections and adding some glows.

For the embers I used the velocity channel data from fumefx and piped that into Particle flow, rendered out the particles with motion blur to get the desired effect.

Overall I was happy with my result, there were a few things I could definitely improve on which I can take into my next fumefx project.

Thanks

FXWars! Bonfire - Progress

Here is my progress on the FXWars bonfire challenge for CGSociety.
I quickly created a scene for my bonfire as well as modeled some logs and pallets and then added some lighting.

After my scene setup I started on the Fire using FumeFX. Here's my first test render I did.
As you can see the scaling of the fire is a bit off as well as the motion is far too slow. I also didn't like the fact that the fire on the ground extended past the logs, so I needed to make the intensity map smaller. Although it's not great it is a good base to start from.

I did another simulation making a few adjustments which got me closer to what I was looking for. Again it was extended a bit too much at the base and needed to be brought in as well as this one had far too much turbulence. Here's a test frame from that render.

From here it was only a few small changes needed to get my final result.

Thanks

FXWars: Mech Arena

This was a CGSociety challenge that I took part in. There was a 3 month Deadline which I had to do in 4 weeks as I started this in the last month of the competition so I had to really push to get it done on time.

There was 3 catagories you could choose from, Arena Intro, Weapons Testing and Robot Combat. I decided to go for the Robot Combat as it sounded the most appealing. Having such a tight deadline I thought I'd keep it very simple with not a lot of action and just a brief combat sequence. I don't think I realised the amount of work that needed to be done to get this finished on time, even with keeping it simple. The Mech Models and Arena, which were supplied for the challenge, needed a fair amount of cleaning up and then I needed to rig up the Mechs. I went for a simple FK upper body and IK legs as it was quick and simple to do however I regretted making the arms only FK when I started animating.

I only had time to do 1 animation pass so had to nail it first time as I couldn't go back to change things, there were cases when I had no choice but tried to avoid this if I could. It got to a stage where the end became really rushed and not as smooth as I would have liked. I then moved onto the effects, again I only had 1 shot at this and my first simulation had to work, thankfully most of them did, maybe not great but good enough to fit into the animation.

Then it came to rendering and setup each shot to render out all the elements in their seperate passes to composite together in After Effects, which gave me a lot more control. As I started putting the clips together I realised some of the shots just didn't work so had to come up with a new ending. This just made things worse and again it was rushed but seemed to fit better than the previous version, even if it isn't that great.

Overall I was happy with the result based on my time restrictions but there is a lot that needs to be worked on and it is far from being complete, but I was just Happy to have a finished animation to submit even if it wasn't all that great. I'll be looking forward to doing another one of these challenges except I'll make sure to start on time.

FXWars: Mech Arena

Still Renders:
Just a few renders of the animation...

FXWars: Mech Area

Deleted Scenes:

These are some renders of the clips that I cut from the animation, due to altering the ending.