top of page

EFFECTS SIMULATION BLOG

THE MILLS MENTORED PROJECTS

FINAL RENDER

10/2/2017

"The Ball" Exercise: Featured Work
"The Ball" Exercise: Animations

Using GasDisturb Microsolver and vdb to for collision objects to get nice curls

CREATING SWIRLY SMOKE

"The Ball" Exercise: Featured Work

10/2/2017

NEW UPDATES

​

FINAL RENDS.JPG

"THE BALL"

EFFECTS SIMULATION PLAN AND CONCEPTS


GOAL:

CREATE RIGID BODY, SMALL DUST EXPLOSION, AND DEBRIS FROM CONTACT OF THE BALL ON THE GROUND 

​

METHOD TO BE USED

  • RBD FRACTURE: CUSTOM PAINT DENSITY TECHNIQUE TO BREAK FRACTURE'S UNIFORMNESS 

  • PARTICLES: SPAWN PARTICLES FROM SURFACE BASED ON VELOCITY    BY USING POINTS FROM DEBRIS SOURCE

PUTTING TOGETHER IDEAS

REVIEWING PAST WORKS AND COMBINING TECHNIQUES

​

9/20/2017

​

First day of this project, I discussed with Sonali about the idea what will happen for the scene and we agreed to have a ball with rock texture rolling from a bench, falling down and break into pieces with some dust effects.

I started to explore my options and looked back into my previous RBD stuffs in the past including old files, 

and my reel that contains RBD parts, etc. 


I finally found a solution to once again use the Fracture "Density Painting" technique covered by Jean-Michel Bihorel at Plural Sight which I've been using for a couple times already for: a Santa Monica College's Digital Effects class taught by Rachael Campbell and the VSFX 721 Houdini Class at SCAD with Professor Fowler.

Combine with the new technique I recently studied during this past summer

from the cool Steven Knipping's Applied Houdini Dynamics series.

"The Ball" Exercise: Featured Work

​"RBD Project at Santa Monica College's Digital Effect class" 2013

"The Ball" Exercise: Featured Work


​RBD FRACTURE SET UP

​CREATE CUSTOM FRACTURE OBJECT TO BREAK

​

9/21/2017


To avoid having broken pieces to have same or similar size as regular voronoi fracture would do,

which causes an unwanted uniform look,
I use this method to create a "CUSTOM PAINT DENSITY" for the ball fracture.
It's been helping me really well to keep my art direction under control easily and effectively.

"The Ball" Exercise: Events
paintDensity_edited.jpg

Custom "Paint Density" Network

​

STEPS

​

1. USE PAINT NODE TO PAINT THE BALL TO BLACK  AND APPLY SOME SPECIFIC PAINT

TO THE  BREAKING DESIRED AREA

​

2. USE SCATTER TO CREATE POINTS

​

3. ADD VORONOIFRACTUREPOINTS

AND CREATE ANOTHER SET NODES TO MERGE AS A SECOND LAYER

​

4. ADD VORONOIFRACTURE TO THE END 

explodedView.JPG

Results

RBD SIM

CREATE RIGID BODY SIMULATION

9/22/2017

​

My RBD sim set up for this project is pretty simple. I used RBD Glued Objects for the ball

and specifically for this test I just added velocity a bit in -Y in rigid source node to make it fall down.

I also Fetched Unpacked Geometry from Dop in dopimport node to get the point velocity back before cache it out.

"The Ball" Exercise: Featured Work

RBD SIM

PARTICLE SET UP

SPAWN PARTICLES FROM SURFACE BASED ON VELOCITY

9/23/2017

​

PLAN FOR PARTICLE SET UP

​

  • GET POINTS FROM THE ACTIVATED BROKEN PART OF PIECES BY USING DEBRIS SOURCE NODE

  • FADE OUT PARTICLES WHEN DIE USING ATTRIBWRANGLE

  • USE THAT PARTICLE SET UP TO SIM AS A SOURCE

"The Ball" Exercise: Featured Work

Particle Source Set Up

1.  Create a particle source geo using object merge to import rbd dop cache in
2.  Create a debrissource to get particles emiting from from pieces 
3.  Use pointvop and add turbnoise to tweak velocity (pic below)
4.  Use attribwrangle to fade particles when die (pic below)
5.  Cache out to be used as source for sim

"The Ball" Exercise: Animations

SMOKE SETUP

SET UP VOLUME SOURCE


9/23/2017

​

PLAN FOR SMOKE SET UP

​

  • BRING IN THE CACHED PARTICLES AND ADD FLUIDSOURCE TO USE AS A VOLUME SOURCE

​

  • CONVERT RBD CACHE TO VDB FOR COLLISION

​

  • DO SMOKE SIM USING VOLUME SOURCE

"The Ball" Exercise: Events

VOLUME SOURCE SET UP

  1.  Add object merge bring in particles

  2. Add attrWrangle to set pscale 

      @pscale = 0.1 * @pscale;

   3. Add fluidsource 

  • Check ON using noise, curl noise to add details and make it more interesting.

  • Turbulence, grain up and element size smaller to add details

"The Ball" Exercise: Animations

MATCHED ANIMATIONS

9/25/2017

MATCHED ANIMATIONS SUCCESS!!

​

I just tested combining together 2 animation balls to match between keyframe animation rolling ball that Sonali did to match with my RBD explosion, between Maya and Houdini.
In Maya, I imported my explosion cache fbx file and  increased the ball size to match the position and size of Sonali's ball

and move her keyframes back to negative numbers

until the ball matching seemlessly.

​

I also used technique Key on/off visibility to swap between 2 balls.
I found my ball from houdini has a bit rough surface and had to go back to fix and bring back into maya again.

"The Ball" Exercise: Featured Work

Check it out!!

Progress Blogs for "The Ball"

"The Ball" Exercise: Animations
"The Ball" Exercise: Pro Gallery
bottom of page