FX Snow Avalanche Challenge

[anakin78z]

P.S.  This is going to be fun having pugsy in there.  I was even thinkings of setups up some dynamics for his ears and skin to be affected by the wind so it will kind of flap in the wind so to speak.  That would be funny. 

13933[/snapback]

Yeah, that shouldn't be too hard to set up. How do you want to handle this... want me to send you the model and my old rig? I'd about a year and a half old, so it's nothing to rave about, but it'd probably do the trick for this.

Also, cause I'm curious, how are you approaching the avalanche? How are you creating your mountain geometry/textures?

How many shots are you planning on rendering?

Once you have a list of tasks, we could probably start handing out 'homework'.

-z

[MatrixNAN]

Yeah, that shouldn't be too hard to set up.  How do you want to handle this... want me to send you the model and my old rig?  I'd about a year and a half old, so it's nothing to rave about, but it'd probably do the trick for this.

Also, cause I'm curious, how are you approaching the avalanche?  How are you creating your mountain geometry/textures? 

How many shots are you planning on rendering?

Once you have a list of tasks, we could probably start handing out 'homework'. 

-z

13936[/snapback]

Hey Jens,

I can put my files up on the animation server at MTSU for you to download from a link I can send you in emails. I can also get files from you through AIM or YM, email, ftp server, etc. Yeah I would like the model but I also want you to have all of my files too. GON the other Jens is writing a shader right now for the avalanche snow and has mentioned that he will create the look of the mountain surface too if no one else wants too. The only thing I would like on that is for it to be able to be a SOP Displacement and also a Displacement Shader. Because the moutains are NURBS and it would displace easily as a modeling tool allowing the particles to interact with it but also be able to render with better definition at render time with the displacement shader the two are so similar its not even funny. The way I am doing snow avalanche is I am keeping points ordered on so that they are generated going down the slope with a small number of particles at first. Every bounce on collision generates more particles. The most partilces is for the Snow Cloud which makes up for most of the snow avalanche then I also have on another split from event bounce collision for the tengrels to be formed these are far fewer than the rest of the snow cloud and shoot out from it because I am going to add to their velocity. Then another split particle on bounce to generate the ice chunks bouncing down the slope. I think I am going to randomly vary their scale within a range so that they look more realsitic. The tengrels and the snow cloud are both metaballs and I was going to do the ice chunks as nurbs spheres with a displacement shader on them and alters every ice chunk differently within a range for each particle ID number. That is just the snow avalanche and that is not including generating the leaves for the trees, the building geometry, or the crowd sim for Pugsy. Gon aka Jens is thinking about using sprites for the cloud look and write in some self shading on them because he fears that the i3d format will be too render intensive. I was orginally planning on the I3d format but I know its heavy. The metaball setup I have on the clouds and tengrels will all mix together to make the shapes for each i3d frame calculation if we do decide to bake it out. Oh I am taking all of these simulations together into one collect although each part could be baked out seperately at various points. I created the mountains base geometry from just a NURBS plane and then got out some Soft Transforms so that the surface would render fast. I am thinking about going back and forming out a cave for the snow avalanche to start from and have a bunch of ice cicles shattering at the beginning of the simulation at the mouth of the cave. I was looking at about 5 to 8 shots to keep the action pace going. About a medium shot from when the snow avalanche begins. Then a close shot of pugsy flying down the down the mountain as the avalanche is chasing him with a shaky cam. Then cut out to a distant shot of pugsy moving through the trees while they are being destroyed. Then to a close up down low and shooting up on pugsy to push the idea of hero dog and then the building would be destroyed around him and then back to a longer shot showing the rest of the building being destroyed while the avalanche is right on pugsy's tail no pun intended. Then back to another closeup shot of pugsy being chased by the avalanche from a 3/4 side shot then back to the a long distant shot taking in the a large part of the mountain. As far as tasks go I think we should show each other the files we have and if some sees something they can fix or do better then they say so and then based on that dialog dish out jobs to do.

Cheers,

Nate Nesler

[edward]

How much of the XXX avalanche sequence depended on custom stuff? Come to think of it, was the white water in DAT pure Houdini?

[Jason]

Hey Edward,

All the base particle motion for both shows was pure Houdini. The sources/forces/collisons was all standard POPs and SOPs. The volumetric rendering was done by an in-house voxel compositor/renderer though, the chunks of ice and debris in the white-water rendered by Mantra.

[Szymon]

Hey Edward,

All the base particle motion for both shows was pure Houdini. The sources/forces/collisons was all standard POPs and SOPs. The volumetric rendering was done by an in-house voxel compositor/renderer though, the chunks of ice and debris in the white-water rendered by Mantra.

13945[/snapback]

Hey Jason,

I'm just curious, do you use i3d at all in production? Or it is suck so much so nobody is using it? I know you have great voxel-b. but does anyone uses i3d for production at all? Is there any other solution for volumentrics instead of voxel-b., JIG and i3d?

Thanks,

Szymon.

[TheUsualAlex]

Hey Jason,

I'm just curious, do you use i3d at all in production? Or it is suck so much so nobody is using it? I know you have great voxel-b. but does anyone uses i3d for production at all? Is there any other solution for volumentrics instead of voxel-b., JIG and i3d?

Thanks,

Szymon.

13962[/snapback]

Hi Szymon,

R+H has used i3D very heavily back in CATHAT, SUM OF ALL FEARS, DAREDEVIL. Aside from using it for volumetric stuff, i3D was even used to generate certain look of the geometry in some shots.

[MatrixNAN]

Hey Guys,

Another Update. Ok I am getting closer to having the particle Building fixed up. If I have time I will add windows, doors, steps, and a frame to the building. I did not have time to add in the avoidance part in the crowd sim although that is the easiest part of the crowd sim. The building is down to about 500 particles or so and renders in about 10 seconds on my computer without any acceleration. So thats pretty good for render time.

If you guys got the emails I sent you with the newer Hipnc files then all you have to do is copy and paste that link into your browser and change the 3 to a 4 to get the newest file from me.

Cheers,

Nate Nesler

P.S. Going to sleep for awhile I have a very long day ahead of me tomarrow.

[Szymon]

Hi Szymon,

R+H has used i3D very heavily back in CATHAT, SUM OF ALL FEARS, DAREDEVIL. Aside from using it for volumetric stuff, i3D was even used to generate certain look of the geometry in some shots.

13968[/snapback]

Thanks Alex.

That's interesting. I thought they were using JIG. How is i3d in production? I mean speed, etc. I'm Afterburn + ParticleFlow power user (all for 3dsmax) and I'm so happy about AB. I used i3d little bit som time ago but hadn't chance to use it in production. I'm wondering if it's really worth of move as for me it was damn slow.

[TheUsualAlex]

Thanks Alex.

That's interesting. I thought they were using JIG. How is i3d in production? I mean speed, etc. I'm Afterburn + ParticleFlow  power user (all for 3dsmax) and I'm so happy about AB. I used i3d little bit som time ago but hadn't chance to use it in production. I'm wondering if it's really worth of move as for me it was damn slow.

14009[/snapback]

Hello,

Well, lots of disk spaces were taken. But, otherwise, it's not bad, actually. RH used Jig on X2. Otherwise, no Jig. Generating the density field part was the faster ones. But doing the ray marching part was slow... I think currenty you can feed the metaballs into the ray marcher directly without generating the i3d files, albeit it was a slower taking that approach, though less artifact that often resulted from the voxel subdivision. Regardless, I think it's just a matter of putting together a solid i3d and ray marching shader.