Week 4

October 9th, 2022

On Friday, Team Eva filmed at The Shed. I helped with the environment set up by arranging some of the books, spreading out the spare wires and other items used in soldering. Me and Eugene captured the chrome ball, foam ball, and block references for each shot. I made sure to put the cube into the scene while they were filming so it would be easier to match perspective from that camera later on.

Here are both versions of the final video that Joleen edited together. Compared to our previs, shots 2 and 3 have been switched, so I will now be working on shot 3.

October 7th, 2022

Over the past couple days, I was able to solve the problem I was having with how the lines rendered and customized the sparks further in both Houdini and Nuke.

In order for the lines to render how I was seeing them in the viewport, I had to add a width parameter. However, after looking more at my references, I determined that it was more realistic to render spheres with motion blur than it was to render lines. That way the sparks can get really long and really small.

I rendered out some frames with motion blur and brought them into Nuke to see how I could make them look more realistic.

It doesn't look too good, but it is a start and comparing it with a lot of still images I got of sparks, I know what next steps I want to take.

Original Glow Blur

Motion Blur Hue Correct Defocus

References:

Next steps include decreasing the amount of points being emitted, decreasing color variation, increasing the length the particles travel or layering lines with the points, and experimenting on how to get the hotspot.

October 6th, 2022

Due to the hurricane last week, not a lot of progress has been made. We were supposed to film last Friday, but the campus got shut down. So for now, Team Eva is continuing to do research and development. We plan to film this Friday.

I have spent some time this week working on generating sparks. Last week, I attempted to do them in Nuke, but I wasn't liking the results I was getting. I'm more familiar with Houdini particles and I felt it gave me more control and ways to customize.

To get me started, I followed this tutorial:

This is the result I got from that:

Result after I customized it based off of welding references:

I mainly changed the settings in the pointvop for velocity and the popsource in the popnet. Amplitude, impulse activation, and impulse count seem to be the most important settings to get right. Right now I have keyframes on the impulse activation to kind of mimic when someone is welding a small area. Next, I want to focus on getting it to look right in render view. The tutorial I watched did not go over that so more research needs to be done.