Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Loopable Flag
recently i had a job that required me to create a looping animation of a flag. i was very fortunate to find such a tutorial on THE AREA.com located here:
the tutorial was invaluable and allowed me to achieve the effect. as i went thru it i found tools and techniques i wasn't aware of and thought it would be helpful to put some more details about the process into writing.
scale is always an important factor when computing any kind of simulation. make sure your units are set the to match the image.
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create a plane in the front viewport using the settings in the image.
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in the original tutorial he creates seams running the length of the flag, in this one i'm creating them around the border. i added an edit poly, selected the edges that define the border and chamfered them.
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select the plane and from the modifier panel and add cloth. click add objects and choose the Plane01 object. match these settings w/the image by choosing satin from the presets menu. this sets the dynamics for the entire flag.
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open the sub-object group section under the cloth modifier. i needed to pin the two corners of the flag, so i selected the corners, applied some soft selection, clicked "make group" and then click preserve. this locks the corners of the flag and will prevent them from the dynamics calculation. (in the original tutorial a selection set is made out of the vertices that make up the border and are applied the settings of burlap or rubber. this increases calculation times and i didn't need it for my sim)
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i ended up using two wind space warps linked to dummies. the dummies have noise controllers added to their rotational values for some randomness. i needed more "violent" motion in the flag and that's why there are two.
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next add the wind forces via the cloth forces button. i also lowered the gravity so the flag would appear larger. i then clicked the simulate button and waited 5 hours for 1000 frames to calculate. (i'm using dual quads @ 2.33 ghz w/8 gigs of ram)
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when the sim is complete and looks good add the point cache on top of the cloth modifier. click record and save the resulting cache file on your network in case you need render servers to see the file. you can then delete the cloth modifier. you'll notice that the max file before the point cache is several hundred mgs depending on the length of your animation and after it's much smaller that's because the animation data was transferred to the cache file, that cache file will be several hundred mgs.
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in the playback type area choose playback graph from the drop down, go the the last frame of your animation turn on the animate button change the frame number to match the length of you animation. this is done so that you can move the animation in track view. make a copy of the flag.
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first thing to do is isolate a section of the flag for the loop, in this case mine is 200 frames towards the end of the sim. in order to get the flag animation to loop offset the flag copy animation by moving its' keyframes by the amount of animation or in this case 200 frames.
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as pointed out by vitsly a simple morph will not work, he came up w/the brilliant idea to use a "wipe" style morph by using the vol select modifier. using the settings in the image including the soft selection. turn on the animate button and in this case move the vol select gizmo to the left until there's no soft selection effect on the verities. (the vol select should be moving in the same direction as the wind) since we're not on frame zero and keyframe was automatically create @ frame zero, in track view move the keyframe @ zero to the end of your animation in this case frame 800. this step is crucial because the keyframe created on frame zero is the exact center of the gizmo on the object and thus will create an exact loop.
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add the morpher modifier and use the settings in the image and that's it. again hats off to vitsly for a very cleaver solution to a complex problem!!!!
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wireframe of the animation:
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Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Monday, December 28, 2009
Monday, December 14, 2009
Machine Phase Sphere Trailer Re-Make
i'm re-making a trailer for my machine phase project that i started back in 2006. i want to upgrade the look and use some of the new tools and techniques i've learned over the past few years as well as finishing it this time. the link below is for the original trailer, it's a 122mg mov file:
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my good friend TIM BOXELL did the storyboards. i've made some changes along the way:
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shot 01 the waterfall is first. i'm going to re-make the cliffs. i used the previous max files and the corresponding cameras and placement of objects as my starting place. i created a new plane object and placed it on the right side. the length and width and set to 100 segments each, the density setting, similar to meshsmooth, is set to 12. we will be using displace to create to rock formations and thus need lots of topology.
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next i created the two displacement masks that will create the cliff's form. i used the gradient ramp for both, the one on the left is the main rock formation and the one on the right is the mask.
the resulting look.
the set up for the holes in the formation.
this is the resulting displacement.
and finally the render w/some rock textures applied.
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next i'd like to populate the surface w/different types of foliage. instead of using high polys trees i'm going to use a particle system to generate shrubs of various textures scattered across the surface of the rock form.
the first step is to create a copy of the cliff and name it cliff emiter01. right click on the object and uncheck Renderable, we don't want to see this object at render time. i then selected faces where the foliage would be emitted.
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i created a pf source, you can see in the set up it's very simple. i used position object and selected faces as the origin of from which the particles will emit (locked onto the rock object), the shape is a simple sphere w/mapping, some scale to create the different sized plants and lastly a multi sub object material that is applied at random. the textures are various images of plants and leaves that are masked in the opacity slot by various black and white images of leaves. (i also created the cliff on the other side by copying the first one and changing the noise values for displacement so they each look a bit different.)
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i used vray w/the default sun light and camera settings.
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the final result.
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the main waterfall is created w/particle flow and is rendered on it's own w/the standard max scanline renderer.
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next is the set up for the rocks poking out of the main waterfall and creating about 6 or 7 smaller waterfalls. the scene contains deformed spheres for the rocks, lower rez copies for the deflection objects, a deforming plane that keeps particles from going behind the waterfall, the spacewarps drag, gravity and 4 deflectors that upon collision delete particles. this scene is also rendered using the standard max scanline renderer.
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the particle flow layout. using a large number of smaller particles that are emitted from thin strips of polys right above each rock, using the spacewarps drag and gravity each particle is pulled downward and either collides w/a deflector that deletes it or bounces it off the rocks and to the next deletion plane.
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i added another particle system to create the foliage on the rocks just like the cliff example. this is the final render.
the final image has a few extra elements added, the falling sphere and resulting trail (didn't make any changes), the bird (no changes) and 3 trees in the foreground that have animated noise modifiers added to a soft selection of vertices to create some wind like movement.
i'll upload the resulting animation as soon as it's done!
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Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Catch Me, Kill Me//Making of pg 23//part five
i re-thought panel four and decided to make a full page image as a background since the conversation was ending and transitioning to something new. i resurrected a scene i created years ago as the back plate image that depicts hologram dancers in a club and then comped dante, vargas and orbit into the render.
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i rendered and comped in some hologram dancers.
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then i did some photoshop to get here.
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i also added a gradient from the top left corner to the bottom right corner so that the background doesn't over power the beginning of the page.
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using the newly created page as a background, i matched up the camera and lights and was able to get a good render of vargas pretty quickly.
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dante didn't corporate as much. this image took about a week of renders to work out the lighting, materials and hair.
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in addition to working out the lighting i had several issues w/the hair not rendering. for those of you that use the hair and fur in max it sometimes isn't obvious how or why it won't render. i've found that in most cases you can adjust the tile memory usage number, located in the environment & effects window, from the default 70 to something higher. in my case i was using 2048. @ this rez 2550x3300 max was crashing when it rendered the hair, thru trial and error i figured out that lowering this number to 1024 solved my problem. i have also noticed that hair and fur created in previous versions of max don't render completely and i've had to delete the modifiers and re-create the hair from scratch in order to solve the problem.
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next are the renders for orbit, same as before i animated him flying thru the panel and used the vray motion blur. after compositing all the images together i selectively picked out the ones w/the most impact that don't get in the way of the rest of the image. in photoshop i blurred and duplicated the different orbits for more motion blur.
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i put dante and vargas in the final page comp so that vargas could break the border w/his head. the orbit in the foreground was also comped into the final page so he could be in front of dante and vargas.
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