Final Countdown

We're due in 10, 9, 8 ... It's the final 10 days before thesis is due, and of course I still have a mountain of work to do. I'm jealous of my fellow thesis mates who are starting to coast knowing that they will finish on time.

For me, finishing is contingent on three things: particles, realflow, and compositing. Besides the drudgery work of lighting, animating, rendering, and editing/sound, I still have no idea how long the particle, realflow, and compositing work is going to take. This is especially bad considering the thesis is due in less than two weeks.

At this point, I am still focusing on getting all the shots rendered out before trying to perfect any one shot. Right now I have most of the beginning shots done. Tomorrow, Monday, all my animators should theoretically be finished, and it will be a big rendering day.

Conrad finished his animation on the manual page turns, it looks really nice. I had to tweak some frames to make sure Billy's hand traveled with the paper, but all in all I'm happy with those shots. Cidalia's textures look awesome, and the nCloth turn is very fluid and fun to watch.

Still working on the pour, although I've got some good bubbles and animated the meniscus pretty well such that it looks like water in a bottle. That will be my first realflow test, and if that is successful I'll use it for the potion splash, and then the dragon splash. Blobby particles in Maya is my contingency plan, and I've already experimented with using splash blobbies (with some success). For that shot I also tried another way of doing ripples on water, still mapping to the wave height offset of the ocean shader, but this time instead of animating the ramp color positions I animated the 2D placement node's UV repeats and frame translates. The result is a much more controllable ripple. So I've gone from using a rendered moving ramp as an animated texture, to directly using an animatable ramp, to using a ramp that is animated by its 2D placement node. That's some great problem solving if I do say so myself.

The spices shot is done, rendered out. I lined up the ripples as best I could with the spice pieces, and it looks fine. Gavin said he didn't like the trees in the background for that shot, but it was really difficult to get nice-looking ripples without the shot composition being really oblique.

The drop out of the bottle looks good as a blendshape, and interestingly so does the resulting drop splash. I considered realflow for the drop splash, but in my footage that I took with my family over Thanksgiving, I found it only lasts for about 4 frames. I thought, what the hell, I can model shapes for 4 frames. It went really fast and the results and look really good. I had to put a ramped transparency on the blendshape to get it to fade properly into the water and make it look like one solid liquid entity instead of the ocean surface and a modeled splash.

Next on the list is all the dragon, non-effects shots, for tomorrow, when my animators deliver (hopefully). After that, all that's left is the ash and smoke effect, the fire and burn effect, the potion splash, the dragon splash, and the underwater shot. That's a lot of work for 10 days! I'm really liking the way the rendered shots look. Now if only I could get the major effects to look right, I'll be in good shape.