CoP 3: More Practical Work

Continuing with smoke simulations I've tried to create a character element in the animation using the particles. I created this using 3d containers, fluid systems and nParticles in Maya, however I used the new Arnold renderer in maya to render out the animation but using this means that I can't batch render it without it leaving water marks on the screen. I avoided this by using the render sequence renderer in maya but I don't think that it rendered the full simulation because you can still see the particles flying through the scene.

In one way this shows how the particles work in the simulation and see what the particles are doing and how they react to one another in the simulation. 

For this simulation I'm using maya so the solver for this simulation is the FLIP solver, which is great at small to medium fluid simulations because particles are able to flow on top of each other without destabilizing and flying off every where.

For the character element in the simulation I wanted the particles to seem like they are trapped in box and they are trying it escape by crashing into the walls of the box. I wanted to create the feel like the particles were going to suffocate due to the smoke trail it leaves building up in the box. Doing this gives the audience some emotional connection to the particles because the audience worries about the particles.      

However I will be re-rendering this simulation out again using Mentalray so that it won't leave water marks, and so that it will render out fully and get more effect out of the simulation. Below is a frame of what a proper rendered out version should look like. (sorry that the image is a bit dark)

CoP 3: Emailing Practitioners

I've started emailing practitioners so that I can gather more primary research for my dissertation. To get the emails I had to research into different studios and find the vfx artist within the studios, doing this would give me a more reliable contact who would reply back to me and be able to answer the questions I asked. The questions I asked were, What software do you use while simulating particles? What solvers do you prefer to use for particle simulation? and how do you control the particles in a artistic way?

The studios/practitioners I contacted were;
-Blue Zoo's co founder Tom Box,
-Framestore's head of VFX Andy Hayes,
-Double Negative's Mark Ardington,
-a VFX supervisor at ILM Mike Mulholland,
-Effect artist Bruce Wright,
-CG Leader at The Mill Sih Harrington-Odedra,
-Oliver Winwood VFX Supervisor,
-Gavin Harrison Tech director at Double Negative,
-Thomas Slancik VFX generalist and design at methodstudio / lead houdini fx artist,  
-and finally VFX executive producer at Double Negative Melissa Taylor.

Out of all ten people I've contacted only one of them got back to me and that was Oliver Winwood, who got back to me via Linked In. The conversation started with me asking my questions to him, however he didn't reply straight away so I got a reply saying that he was busy and that he will try and get back to me as soon as possible. He finally got back to me saying this:

I replied by saying this:

hopefully I will continue speaking to Oliver and try and gather more information about his job and what he's worked on that may help my dissertation. However I feel like I won't hear back from him in a while because he's a very busy man and all the replies I've got from him have been two or three weeks apart. 

I've also got in contact with another practitioner called Stewart, who works at Dean Clough in Halifax. His job is in animation but he also works with Autodesk Maya so I thought that I could ask him a few questions to do with the software. I rang Stewart and he said that he would pass my questions on to other practitioners that would answer them better and in more detail than he could. I want to say this sounds good but I'm just worried that I won't hear anything back from Stewart or the other practitioners. 

CoP 3: Research Boards