Volcano

As promised, a volcano. Also done for a class tutorial project in Maya. I slapped a water-like plane and a sky sphere into the scene to give it a slightly more natural look. I also did not include sparks coming out of the volcano. Sparks are rendered with Maya Hardware, seeing as they are streaks, not sprites or clouds.

So, there is a sprite volume emitter spewing smoke (way too fast, by the way, but I didn't feel like tweaking the uniform field on it any longer). The volcano was made live, a curve drawn on the surface, and then it was made into a flow emitter with blobbies. Finally, there is a second volume emitter with cloud particles for the steam.

I found that working with particle systems is a heck of a lot of tweaking and fiddling, but it can be fun. Especially if you have a book nearby that you can read while it is rendering.

So, a volcano, in the middle of the ocean with nothing else around, on a bright sunny day.... 3D, maybe? Naw...

"Ring of Fire"

So... wow, school sure is busy. In any case, here is a quick tutorial that I worked on for one of my classes. It's a semi-homage to my program, Biomedical Visualization - or BVIS for short, in case you can't tell. I didn't want to just have an animating circle, which is what the tutorial called for. And when I say short, I mean it took me about 20 minutes, and that was only because I had to retrace part of my steps for the texturing.

This was just a quick "emit from curve" with a scale animation on it. The fire texture was yanked from a procedural texture from Maya. I did have some issues with density, but I just ended up copying the sequence in After Effects rather than try to render it out to tweak it.

There was a volcano tutorial that was a pair with this one, but I am having severe issues with the curve actually adhering to a live surface. It's driving me nuts, really. So, no volcano.

Now, I'm off to do something (hopefully) productive and related to the multitude of projects that are looming.