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.

Virus Animatic

My fellow classmates and I (there are six of us in this particular ensemble) are undergoing what teachers like to call a 'group project' and students usually affectionately refer to as 'collective procrastination' (among other less savory terms). In any case, this project involves working up an animation for a mock client. We came up with a topic, a client, a budget, and a script to start out with. The fact that the script was finished without coming to blows was amazing to watch.

Now, this paints a not-so-nice picture of our group, which isn't true at all. We all genuinely like each other and enjoy our fellow classmates' opinions. It also appears that we have very wide stubborn steaks. It was an amusing, very polite and amicable, absolute refusal to back down or admit defeat. However, after hours of research and discussion, a script was born (and revised and studied and rewritten and mostly finalized). Naturally the storyboards stemmed from there.

Another thing that has tripped us up to some extent is the unrealistic-ness of the situation that our group finds itself. Six freelancers would not band together to work for four months on a 2 and a half minute animation for an educational institution. You would be lucky to get two animators together, and we won't be touching the actual time frame. So, to start with, there is quite the interesting set-up.

However, as mentioned before, we are stubborn and we persevere. Thus, here is our animatic from said project. It's like a baby animation that was born slightly deformed and is missing some fingers. And maybe an ear.