Before and After

Been working some more on the gas station scene now that I've got the majority of the trial and error out of the way. Below is how it was looking before.

And now for how it's looking at the moment. It's still very much WIP but at least it's an improvement.

As I said, it's still a WIP but it's a vast improvement from my previous attempt. First of all, not sure why the initial explosion is rendering so poorly. But other than that, I still need to rework the RPG as I'm not very practised with using ribbons but I was planning on doing some work with ribbons after this project to get a better sense of them.

The fire needs some major work I feel. I think that the material and the particle system is good, but I think that the scale of the texture is wrong. Whilst this would be idea for a torch or a camp fire, it doesn't have enough textural detail to suggest that it's a large roaring fire. I need some more practice creating high detail fire sims anyway so I might do some more to generate the textures I need.

I also need to make the particle system for the fire on the pillar and once I've done that it'll tie in the fire licks that come up over the top, so that they look less out of place and actually have a cause to start. And I also think that I need to give the larger explosion a bit more punch. Though once I've got the ribbon done for the RPG I can reuse it for some debris trails.

Explosion Updates

So here's what I've been working on recently. Currently in the process of reworking this gas station scene and here's where I'm at with the explosion. It still needs a lot of work but thought I'd do a quick update. 

First issue is the trails of debris from the explosion. I don't like the use of sprites so I am thinking about using ribbon data instead. I just couldn't get the trails to not be so popcorny. I also need to re time the lighting and work some more on the shape of the explosion. It doesn't look right as it fades when you can see stray sprites. 

This is something that I've been reworking recently, just tweaking a bit to make it ready for when I redo my portfolio. Though this was also a test of render styles. I was looking back and I didn't like all the black emptiness so I was trying out how fog affects the feel of it. I like it, but I'll probably need to redo the whole scene to make it portfolio ready.

Progress

Just a quick update as I've been reworking one of my old projects and I thought it'd be interesting to compare the original and this new one I'm currently working on. 

The one on the left is the original and the one on the right is the new one. Admittedly the new one still isn't quite there yet but it's just nice to see the improvement for myself. Though I'm struggling to mesh the fire and the smoke together in a coherent manner. I like the fire, it's got a nice fluidity to it and it has a lot of variation. And I like the smoke, the flow maps give a a good sense of internal motion. But I don't like how they work together, they look too much like separate entities.  

Flame On

So I've been practising my work with fire in both simulations and realtime work. As I'm currently redoing the gas station scene from scratch I thought that I'd start it properly by going back to making some fluid sims for tests. This was a good opportunity to get some more practice using Maya Fluids. I feel like I'm getting more used to it now, I'm definitely more confident in my ability to use it to create flipbooks and textures. 

I made other sims to make into flipbooks as well as use them to generate the textures below.

Instead of creating flipbooks I decided to have a go at using UV distortion. Although it's more expensive than just using flipbooks, it provides more variation and thus looks more natural. I also implemented alpha erosion within the material as well as I thought it was a more realistic approach to fire, although it bumps up the cost of the material. 

Although I like this approach, as it gives a good natural result, I need to work on the alpha erosion as you can see there's some popping. I don't know whether I need to rework the setup or switch back to usual alpha fading. I'll try to stick to alpha erosion as I don't like how the normal alpha fades in and out so uniformly because it doesn't look realistic enough. And yes, I think I may have overdone the bloom :)