This weeks update video:
In the last meeting, we got some really good feedback from the mentors on our environment, lighting, and FX. Some of the biggest points made were regarding the textures of the bottle, cloth, and pyro, along with some environment changes. Billy Jang made a very good point regarding the environment and made a comment on making sure the scale is accurate as most people are going to pick up on the inconsistency, even if it is fully CG. The biggest changes made were to the environment, which Emma Schaberg mainly worked on.
My teams blogs:
Dee Divakaran: Motion Media./ 3D Generalis
Galina Bovykina: FX Artist
Emma Schaberg: Lighter and Modeler
This is the current snapshot of the my shot with no background.
This week I mainly focused on the outer shape of the spritz. I had gotten the edge quality that I was looking for, but the emission of the particles was still had a hard shape to it.
I was looking for something that was similar to this reference. Where the edges were softer, but it still had the edge quality where it was semi transparent in the middle with emphasized edges.
When it emits, it takes the shape of the cone, which is the geometry I am using the normals in the velocity of the emission. I had tried using pop wind or velocity to encourage some of the particles to spread, but that did not work. What I found worked best was tweaking the Variance under the attribute tab under the pop source node.
Found here:
After tweaking the variance between .1 and .9, I found a better fit that soften the edges without skewing the particle path. If I added too much, it would soften the edges too much to the point where it was difficult to see the particles.
Because many changes were made to the environment, there were some issues with transforming the emitter into the correct place. I had to get both the emitter and the tube that was being used for its normals in the correct place, or the emission would be skewed. Once I got those in the correct place, the vector noise that I used had to be tweaked because it relied on the position of the emitted particles. Because it moved, I had up the amplitude and element size.
I focused on getting the same shape as the reference and it was way too wide. At first, I continued to experiment with the noise vector to see if I could narrow the opening.Because I could not get the results I wanted, I reduced the size of the tube so it reduced the normals and therefore made the particle emission more narrow.
Here are some tests:
Compared to the reference:
My next step is to lower the emission of the material as it is too high fully comped. I would like to cache the particles and add point jitter to see if that could help further soften the edges more.
This is what it looks like when the emission is turned down so it will blend in more with the background after comp
