Week 9

Final Result:

Things to work on this week:

• Pyro is a bit gray. Make more white.

• Knock back the density.

• Overall, make more subtle.

5/29

One of the things that I didn't really notice that Professor Fowler pointed out to me was the way the pyro seems to rotate up and down in the beginning. I remember purposely keeping my amplitude on because it helped make the pyro puffier, but I didn't realize how noticeable the up and down rotation of the emitter was in the beginning. She also mentioned how the pyro pushes a lot before the car takes off. That was also intentional, but I pushed it too far. So I did two more vdb caches and renders since merging seemed to be working better for me. The first one had 5 substeps, a decreased ending disturbance from 75 to 55, a decreased amplitude from 1 to 0.25 before the car takes off and from 0.5 to 0.1 while it's taking off. I also decreased the element size from 2 to 1.25. The second vdb had 3 substeps, a starting amplitude of 0.5 and an ending of 0.25, the same decrease in ending disturbance, and a decrease in amplitude offset from 0.5 to 0.25.

When I merged these together, I immediately saw the impact of the decrease in amplitude. The pyro was a lot straighter and never really went up like it used to.

I missed the way the pyro would come up the further it blew away from the tail pipes. If I had more time, I would have tried adjusting the intensity of my fans to push it up more. However, I had past working renders that came up the way I wanted, so I merged that in and masked out the part of it that was closest to the tailpipes so the beginning wiggle was still gone. (same as final/video at the top)

5/28

I got feedback from Professor Fowler on the last iteration with the new grade and color correction and she said it was looking better. She also mentioned that the pyro still has a weird movement when taking off. To improve it, I increased the substeps to 5. I noticed that the more I increase substeps, the less "whimsical" the pyro looks in the beginning. Due to this, I increased the disturbance as well. The increase in substeps helped get rid of some of the separation that was happening, but the wiggle it does when taking off looked too intense.

So I merged that render with the one from 5/27 so the gaps were still filled in but the wiggle isn't as noticeable. The grade is also a little different since I had to cut it back more once they were merged. This grade matches my references better.

5/27

All of the comments this week were about the compositing of the pyro, so I decided to work with the grade and color correction for the next iteration.

Render from the end of last week

updated