Week 5

After presenting Tuesday, I got some feedback from the mentors on what I need to improve. My pyro lacks detail and feels miniature in the scene because of this. They suggested increasing the voxel size and decreasing the disturbance in order to do this.

This weeks goals:

• Make pyro more detailed and feeling less miniature

• Figure out problems with Houdini to Maya vdb pipeline

• Parent pyro to the car

• Get the second tailpipe working

• Get a good collision object that the pyro wont go through

• Make wet tire marks for when the car leaves the puddle

5/2

So I was able to fix my pyro without starting over. The only thing I will have to redo are the fans. The voxel size was decreased to 0.25 and the disturbance was decreased to 5.

5/1

I was so sure that I fixed the pyro by making the animation after the 90 degree rotation, but it freezes up as soon as the car takes off.

4/30

Today was basically 5 steps forward and 10 steps back.

Achieved:

• Vdb pipeline from Houdini to Maya

• Parenting the car

• 2nd tailpipe

Ruined:

• My pyro

Parenting the pyro emitters to the car. Back in my week 4 blog I mentioned how I just couldn't get it to stick in Houdini. Mitch had the great idea of sticking spheres in the tailpipes in Maya and parenting them to the car in there. Then reimporting that into Houdini and using those spheres as the emitters . I learned a little about parenting and baking in the process.

After importing this into Houdini, I brought the spheres to the top level and put them into 1 geometry node. I then transformed and merged them. That merge was then used as my geometry to source the pyro from.

So now I have 2 spheres emitting the pyro and it is in sync with the car. Only issue now is how I created the pyro. In order to get the pyro to go out instead of up was by rotating it 90 degrees. This no longer works because rotating it messes up the top level of keyframes that were brought in from Maya. So now I have to go back and figure out how to get similar behavior to what I have now but pointing in the right direction from the start. I'm hoping it's not too hard since I have a much better idea on what I'm doing now.

without 90 degree rotation

with 90 degree rotation

4/28

I've been doing some tests to see how the pyro looks with a change in voxel size and disturbance. Render from week 4 blow had a disturbance of 30. Voxel size was differing in the 2 different spots it was in. They are now connected.

disturbance: 15

voxel size: 0.75

disturbance: 15

voxel size: 0.05

disturbance: 5

voxel size: 0.05