During this week I did a lot of test rendering and tweaking lighting of scenes that were already created to adjust how they looked. Trying different lighting setups and camera angles to think about what mood was being achieved with the different shots.

I animated the tree being set on fire this week too. I tried several different methods for this, including Blender, Maya BiFrost and Maya fluids. In Blender I did not get the results I wanted, as the fire was emitting from all over the tree, making too much fire. I had similar difficulties when using Maya fluids, however I was able to overcome this by creating a density map for the fluid simulation, allowing me to control which areas of the tree would be emitting fire (this looked a lot more natural as realistic fire does not emit from all around the object it is burning, and is instead a bit less uniform and dense). Tweaking settings to change the look of the fire, especially in the shading area of the fluid was useful to achieve a fire look that I wanted.

After creating this, I built the scene with the tree a bit better with more visual interest and more objects to help to scene feel more natural and interesting. I tested different lighting setups for both scenes but eventually found the lighting I wanted – I wanted to have the first half of the animation more colourful and vibrant with the second half being a lot darker and less light, so I lit the scenes according to this.

I also further worked on my gate scene, and I thought that I should add some hanging banners or flags from the gate with animation. I had found a tutorial online for Blender where you could quickly make banners affected by wind, and although I wasn’t very familiar with Blender I was able to create this, with a little wind animation on planes with a temple banner texture applied to them. I exported this as an Alembic to Maya, and fixed the UV sets being incorrectly assigned.

I decided that an incense stick and burning it with smoke coming from the top would give more visual interest to the gravestone scene, and smoke helps to portray the overall fiery-burning theme of the second half of the project, representing destruction. First I needed to model an incense holder, which I chose a copper bowl for, as well as the incense stick. I modelled these fairly quickly and textured them as they are basic models.

To create the smoke I thought there would be four options for me – Blender, Houdini, Maya Bifrost and Maya fluids. Blender has the upside of having a lot of free online tutorials for beginners which was useful as I do not know Blender very well. However, I could not get the results that I wanted in Blender, and exporting them to work in Maya would also prove to be an issue. Houdini had a similar issue in my unfamiliarity with the software and lacking the knowledge in knowing how to export it, though I did find a very good tutorial (linked below).

I started using Maya BiFrost, attempting to follow tutorials roughly to get the kind of smoke that incense sticks normally emit, pictured below.

However, Maya BiFrost seemed difficult to control and heavy on my computer, causing it to lag heavily. I gave up on BiFrost and instead tried using fluids. Initially I was not sure that I could replicate the above smoke and opted instead for more basic, less interesting smoke. This was not very good though and I eventually found a cigarette smoke preset in the BiFrost browser that with some tweaks looked fairly good. However, on export to the gravestone scene, there were issues in setting this up again and the smoke had to be scrapped altogether. Nonetheless, I thought it was interesting to think about how I could use fire and smoke simulations, especially as I had other experience this project with this on the burning tree.