For this week I continued on the doll part of the project as well as the toys. I finished the spinning top and kendama toy that will be used for the simulation with texturing done too using Substance Painter.

I also decided to animate the blood splatter of the doll. To begin with, I wanted to learn to use something like RealFlow or Houdini to fully simulate this effect of blood spraying onto the model. However, after speaking with a tutor about this, as the blood splatter effect is so fast that it can be done over the course of 5 frames, spending a long time learning Houdini just for a very short part of the animation seemed like a bad allocation of time. Instead I eventually decided instead to make it in substance with an animated shader, initially painting the blood on the model and saving copies of texture 5 times with less blood each time. This gave me 5 different texture sets that I could order as image sequences in Maya and as I played across the frames I could switch textures each frame. Maya had some issues with this however, so I instead had to manually create 5 texture sets, then apply the first, render, then the second and render a frame, then the third and render a frame and so forth. This lead to the effect of blood splattering on the model, even though it is just a quick texture switch.

I then saved 5 different versions with progressively less and less blood, leaving me with 5 materials for 5 frames of blood quickly splattering up the model. I first tried to set this up in Arnold with image sequencing.

This looked ok, but did not look right; I wanted the blood to look less like an overlayed dull texture and more as if a shiny liquid had stuck to the model. I rendered using a different material and lighting setup with this result.

During this time I also started thinking about how I would do the scene where the tree is on fire. I looked around for several different methods of creating fire in different software, such as in Blender, Houdini, C4D, Maya (BiFrost and fluid systems). I initially wanted to use Blender and rendered out a test sample on a sphere shown below.

However when I imported the tree model that I wanted to add fire too, when I recreated the steps I used to make the spherical fire, it looked strange and there was too much fire being emitted from the shape making it look odd, as if the tree was exploding with fire. Shown below is the nodes I used in Blender to create the fire, as well as a rendered shot of the fire.

Later, I realised this was because you need to add a density map onto where you want the fire to be emitted from, with a black and white map showing areas you do and do not want fire to come from. This was useful when I used Maya’s fluid system to create the fire, creating a fluid box around the tree and changing parameters until the fire and smoke looked how I wanted it to.

Incandescence was a useful tool in helping the fire and smoke to look the way I wanted it to. As the emitter is responsible for both emitting the fire as well as the smoke, creating a black bit at the end made the edges of the fire look like they were emitting black smoke. Realistic fire has lots of different colours in it so this really helped to add to the realism.

Creating a density map allowed for me to only emit fire and smoke from certain areas of the tree, making the fire look far more realistic. Only having certain chunks of alpha on the tree emit fire made the fire look a lot less uniform.

I cached this simulation, but the render times were still very high due to the processing required.

I further developed the Torii gate scene this week too, starting with basic lighting and adding a few more Quixel assets to the scene.

We also updated our storyboard for this week and assigned tasks to complete. Our sound design students wanted a previsualisation for this week after we met with them online, so I roughly created one using playblasts and some filler images for renders that were not created yet.