Wednesday 22 May 2013

Updates and Stuff

Here's a brief update on my gas station scene. I've not done much to it since the last time I updated. The only major change I've made is redoing the smoke plume after the second explosion. The rest is mainly just tweaking.


In other news, I've also finished up the majority of the work for my final major project at uni. It's so nice to have this finally in it's finishing stages. Not only did I learn a lot from this project but it's nice to have to finished so that I can be free to move onto other projects. 

Fire Tests

So I've been playing around with the smoke plume recently trying to get it just to look a little nicer. I was trying to implement fake lit particles as I've not worked with them before and I thought it would be a good place to try and get to grips with it. I also experimented using macro UVs. 


I really like the aesthetic of the one on the right, I think it also has much more fidelity. Unfortunately it's also far more expensive. So dat next-gen, huh? No, I definitely think that if I do want to use it for my final renders I'll definitely have to go in and strip it down to make it game ready. 

Friday 17 May 2013

Blue or Orange??

I finally managed to figure out why UDK kept spawning the emitters twice. Months of trying to figure out what was wrong then you watch one tutorial and find out that it was just one measly check box. This happens too much in UDK. But now I can finally render out videos properly so it's all good.

So here's the ground attack again but now rendered properly. And below is the same effect but with just a different colour palette. Looking through my blog again I realised that I veer too easily to the blue spectrum and that maybe I should try using a different colour scheme once in a while. 



So I should be done with this one, for good now. But I might just quickly build a nicer environment to render it out properly just to look nice. But other than that I can get on with other things now.

Tuesday 14 May 2013

Ground Attack Updates

So I got round to finishing this off over the weekend, kind of. I saw kind of because I've not done a final render for it I'm still using the level I was using to test it. I really should get round to building a nice render scene that I can use for most of my effects. 

Anyway, it looks a little different to how it was before because I got so frustrated with it not going the way I wanted and ended up completely redoing it but it all worked out for the better. The reason there are two videos for this is because I was not really sold on the dust streaks in the middle so I tried a render without them in to which I feel is a little lacking so I think I'll keep them.



And again I apologise for UDK's stupid rendering system, I've no idea why it insists on rendering every emitter twice with a fraction of a second delay. Every render I have ever done has done this so I'm not sure whether it's something I'm doing but I'll definitely get it fixed for proper renders.

As for now, I have to figure out why UDK's rendering emitters twice. But other than that I'm going to start trying to teach myself Maya this week as I feel I need to get to grips with it as it's very useful for an FX artist for both it's fluid dynamics and it's cloth simulations among other things.

Saturday 11 May 2013

Explosions and Other Stuff

So I'm still working away on the explosion as well as a bunch of other stuff. Getting close to deadlines for uni projects so I'm trying to balance my time effectively between that and other projects. But I just thought I'd do an update of what I've done to the explosion.

So I started to block out the second explosion. I'm trying to go for something much larger in scale than the initial explosion to give it that more variety but more to show that it's building up to something. Like I said, I've only really blocked it out at the moment so there are still some issues with the timing. And the biggest issue I've found is how to naturally blend between the roaring fire and the explosion, but it's all still very much WIP.



I've also whipped up a quick concept for the next thing I want to work on.



So basically the idea is that it'll start off as a small ball of energy that then starts gathering the energy around it. And as it starts to increase in size and take in more energy it'll become volatile and vibrate violently before exploding in a beam of energy. I think for the beam I'll try working with some mesh particles to get the overall shape down and probably work with some beam particles for the centre. I've never actually tried working with beam data so it's a good excuse to learn it. I think I might add some dust particles that shout out backwards at the initial release of energy to try and give it some nice counter motion.

Friday 10 May 2013

Lantern Animation Test

I recently made a quick looping animation for a project I'm working on at uni. It was really fun and a really good excuse to teach myself something new. I've been wanting to have a crack at some small animations for a while now so this was a great opportunity to learn it. It's by no means great, or finished for that matter, but I do feel like it's definitely something I can learn.



This was only a test to see how it looked in UDK, although I've not managed to actually get it into UDK yet so now my next couple of days will be looking up tutorials of how to import and export animations. But once I actually get it in I feel that I'll have to redo it anyway. I feel like it's moving a little too far or too fast that once it's in level it'll look odd. Plus it looks a little rigid at the moment so I'll probably try and give it a bit more bounce and random movement next time.

Monday 6 May 2013

Uni Work

I realised that I've mentioned the work I'm doing for uni but not actually shown it before. So I thought it'd be nice just to quickly whack up what I've been working on. This is close to but still not the finished piece so there's stuff that needs changing about and tweaking. Like I'm still having a little trouble with the cube map and looking at it the splashes look to opaque and vibrant so I should go and tone those done really. But it's coming along I guess. So enjoy.


Saturday 4 May 2013

Explosion Update

Just a quick update on how the explosion is progressing. The major things I need to fix are basically to make some more flipbooks, even if it's just like two then I can get a better sense of variety to make it look more natural. Other than that are the things that I need to add, like some large embers falling from the roof, and I'll make some glass shattering particle systems that follow the shockwave. And then I need to make the second explosion, which will be a lot of my focus at the moment.

Wednesday 1 May 2013

Ice Spell Thing

So I finally think I might be done with this, finally. Although it would be nice to add an explosion or something that would happen on impact, just to give it a bit more validity and purpose. 


Looking at it now the trail looks like it lives a little too long, but considering that this was supposed to just be a very quick project I think it's time I just call it otherwise I'll just keep tweaking forever.