Hristo Velev » Finished

With Igor Zanic and Naiad in Belgrade! Naiad/Max workflow.

Hristo Velev — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:13:41 +0000

I spent last week in the afterglow of summer in Belgrade, with the awesome Igor Zanic! He taught me some Naiad, and we established the workflow of shading it in Max – with Krakatoa, Frost and VRay. Check out the goodness:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP7NaWeprxE

Now, the way this goes – it starts with the Naiad sim. It took only 42 min with, 7.5 mln particles through a reasonably dense cell size (the grid resolution in Naiad). On top of that, a secondary sim was done for splashes, this one taking 45 min for 20 mln particles. The machine was a recent i7 quadcore, nothing spectacular.

After that, the native Naiad EMP cache was converted to PRT, and sent to Max and Krakatoa. The first element was the mesh, with Frost and VRay. That went very smoothly, being able to quickly relax a high res sim to get a smooth but detailed result was of great help. The VRay setup was very straightforward – reflective transparent 1.4 IOR shader, with some of the VRayMaterial fog for depth and a good environment map, oldschool lighting. Render times at 1280×720 did not exceed 8min per frame, and you can see the detail is astounding.

On top of that, four Krakatoa passes were rendered. An interesting thing I noted is how much shading these liquids depends on the scenario. We did another test before this one, with much calmer water, and it ended up using different type of elements, and with different weights. Fortunately Krakatoa, with its KCMs, provides great flexibility in treating the material coming from Naiad, and you can devise different schemes of shading it.

Setting up these passes was fun and a breeze. On the main one I used a normalized velocity for a texture lookup, assigning a material with a blue to white gradient in the diffuse. This makes the faster particles whiter, which looks great. For the calmer areas, putting a threshold on the velocity, setting the selection channel and deleting the slow particles looks great, to clear them up in the clear areas. Of course, you could do a red-green pass and do all that in comp. Adding a velocity driven curve to the density makes the structures more visible, very good for bringing out the detail.

Then it was the Vorticity pass. We used a custom vorticity channel we exported from Naiad, and it’s a very simple expression, Naiad is very friendly towards exporting custom channels. Again, a texture lookup and delete thresholds were enough to make this one look interesting.

The splash sim was also rendered in Krakatoa. This one looks pretty great out of the box, but again the velocity-density curve looked great in bringing up the detail. Lighting is quite important too – getting these darker deeper parts is very cool and easy with a simple 4 point light setup.

Last one was a depth pass. Loading a fraction of the original particles, and shading with the Voxel mode in Krakatoa, you can get a very useful pass that you can dial the light extinction and coloring in depth with.

Now, it’s interesting to see how much freedom there is in compositing all that. A very broad range of looks can be derived, that my very limited comp skills obviously do not showcase You can see a breakdown and another option for comping it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTWJLAN653w

Finally, huge thanks to Igor and Tamara for the hospitality! Looking forward to meeting you again!

Cheers!

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New York destruction demo for ScreenScene VFX

Hristo Velev — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 12:47:12 +0000

I did this one when I was in ScreenScene in Dublin. TP and FFX based. Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjvLGVDgfPI Related posts: Demo reel, Oct 2011 Electric arc in Thinking Particles video tutorial Creeping cracks effect Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin Related posts:

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A bit more on the ink in water animation – a scene and explanation

Hristo Velev — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:53:53 +0000

Some people have been asking me about that scene, so here it is.

The way its done is:

do the FumeFX sim. Look at my setup for a start point
make a Particle Flow , use the FumeFX birth and follow nodes to make particles dance with the sim
use Krakatoa to render. Partition a lot to get a smooth effect
blur slightly in post to blend them in

That’s it! Any questions – write below

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New reel opener finished!

Hristo Velev — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 03:51:29 +0000

So it’s ready, enjoy! Related posts: Reel opener, FumeFX pass Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin Related posts:

Reel opener, FumeFX pass

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Final version of the shot

Hristo Velev — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:16:25 +0000

Ok, that shot’s a wrap. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Another new animation – Bar-be-gone!

Hristo Velev — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:24:35 +0000

To everybody looking for explosive fun in the serene holiday season: Done with 3DS Max, Rayfire, Thinking Particles, Particle Flow, FumeFX, mental ray and Fusion. Related posts: Particle beams, hell yeah! A bit more on the ink in water animation – a scene and explanation Creeping cracks effect Related posts brought to you by Yet Related posts:

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Glass break-in

Hristo Velev — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:48:24 +0000

Turns out radial glass break-in is quite easy to do with Rayfire and some additional steps. Might make a tutorial some day. Related posts: Creeping cracks effect A whiskey glass render Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin Related posts:

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Creeping cracks effect

Hristo Velev — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 09:31:58 +0000

I started making the chimney demolition scene for the blur challenge, and I developed a creeping cracks effect, which I’ve wanted to do for some time. I used Rayfire and Thinking particles, which gave me the possibility to make it quite flexible. I paint the main crack with Rayfire’s draw fragment, then create a spline over it, and drive particles along it. I create the secondary fractures with Rayfire too, then use TP’s object as particles to make the closest ones to the central crack recess most, and the farthest to recess least. I create the crumbling pieces with size based on distance to the central crack too, which is cool Enjoy!

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A different take on the welder

Hristo Velev — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:08:12 +0000

Another shot at that – lots of sparks, better comp, etc. I aimed to make that more cool then realistic. Related posts: Reel opener, FumeFX pass Gun and sparks tools for Thinking Particles Creeping cracks effect Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin Related posts:

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A new animation is up – welding FX

Hristo Velev — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:57:10 +0000

I made that for the Blur challenge at CGTalk: Related posts: A bit more on the ink in water animation – a scene and explanation Creeping cracks effect Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin Related posts:

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