Effects Update

Alright, as I said in my previous publication, this is gonna be all about effects. Sarah updated the shot blocking and I started updating the effects based on the comments we received last Monday.

The first thing I did was to update the asphalt vector curves that make out the pieces to even them out, since the previous ones (due to the road elongation) were somewhat stretched. I added more width to the base image by repeating the pattern and working on making it seamless. This reduced the stretching on the actual 3D geometry from which the fracture is made out.

I added UVs to the top of the road so Sarah could deal with textures once handling the road in Maya. We are moving our data from Houdini to Maya using Arnold ASS files (Thanks to The Mill for the tip). Once the geometry is in Maya, Arnold shaders can be added to it flawlessly. 

After the geometry adjustment I went on and applied the setup I had for the beam pull, and addressed some of the notes that The Mill gave us. One of them being slowing down the overall speed of the pull.

I made some additional pieces to act as debris. The debris sim just a POP simulation, so what I did was copy these debris pieces to the particles. I assume that once we produce the final render, the motion blur will conceal the interpenetration with some of the pieces.

And lastly, I was able to add an extra layer of detail to the setup having the pieces pull up by size. So if you notice, it all starts with small asphalt pieces and as the animation progresses, the beam starts to tear bigger chunks.

I’m still strugling with my regolith and pyro layers. It becomes heavy quite fast, that’s my main limitation at the moment. I was planning on including the work I’ve made for it on this post, but I might have to leave that for another one once I get to a better place.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!

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