This week's update:
Link to my teammates blogs:
Dee Divakaran: Motion Media./ 3D Generalist
Galina Bovykina: FX Artist
Emma Schaberg: Lighter and Modeler
This week my team as a whole collectively worked on getting the previs ironed out as much as possible before working on the effects. We had two variants of the previs and built upon them.
While we submitted this version for our saturday update, which includes the storyboard references with all of our fx shots.
Here is another version of the previs with the live footage that we shot during class. This live shot helped us with the lighting and composition of each of our shots so we can implement them into our previs. Once we had camera movements down, then we can continue with our fx as everything else revolves around that.
After getting the previs down, I worked on the flip fluid fx in shot 4. I had tried a few different techniques prior, like emitting fluid into the bottle, or looking into sculpt fluid, but the easiest and least expensive way to have the fluid inside the bottle is to have make fluid from geometry.
This was my initial test and I tried extruding the edges to create a strong collision barrier, but there was leaking, but it was a good first test. We had the bottle doing a velocity type spin where it would spin very fast and then slow in an elegant way. The first test that I did was with a retime node where I slowed the spin, that way I can later use the retime node to speed up the simulation so everything matches.
This was with the original speed of the bottle at double speed. My thought process for this if I simmed the fluid at double speed and revert it back to the original speed it would look like it was in slow motion, but instead it made houdini flip (ha) out. Not only that, but my collisions were still broken.
I did quite a few other flipbooks that looked similar. The collisions were glitching because I extruded after the transition and with a simple node order switch, the problem was fixed. I extruded all the sides and the bottom and after doing that, there was no more leaking. At this point the main concern was the speed of the bottle and I reverted that back to the original speed.
I added the original camera move from the previs and rendered out a flipbook along with placing a thumbnail of the reference that my team shot while we were at the mall.
The things I need to work on still is the density and overall look development of the liquid. Next week I will be giving shot 3 a lot more love and will be focusing o the spritz effect.