BSA703 18/6

D-Day has arrived. Im gutted that I was too sick to attend the cast and crew screening but I did get a copy from the google drive to watch. Overall I think it turned out ok, I loved the 3D backgrounds and water sims. The 2D animations turned out nicely as well, Im just not sure whether Im a fan of the real photos that were included as part of the hyperrealistic sections of the story. I feel like its too much of a jolt and breaks the immersion in the story for me personally. 

Considering the issues we had at the beginning when deciding on the project, and the communication issues that followed us through the whole semester, I think we produced something that is 90-95% complete. If it wasnt for Ian, I think a lot of the 3D finishing touches would not have been completed, as we lost half of the 3D team for a good chunk of the last half of semester. 

I really liked how the water sims turned out once they were textured and rendered, almost worth all the time that I sunk into learning bifrost and long caching time each time I ran a sim lol. If I had more time, I definitely would have liked to try and get that cough splatter particle sim working but sadly there was only so much I could figure out in the weekend that I was given for it.

Im not 100% sold on the foam mesh(white blobs) but Max liked it so it stayed in.

Final textured bathroom set, Thomas did a great job with this although Im not sold on the yellow wood for the barrels and ship wheels.

This one I would have gone back and reworked if I had more time but Im ok with the sim that was used.

This sim was the bane of my existence and I am so glad it turned out this good. The water is far too chunky to be realistic but I think it fits the surreal vibe better this way anyway.

This was a really good lesson in working as a team, imitating a real world type situation for after we graduate and work in the industry. Despite being the most frustrating part of my job, I found figuring out the water sims the most fascinating part of this semester.(Not to mention its a good skill to add to my resume). Bring on next semester. 

BSA703 16/6

Due to falling sick and sleeping most of monday and tuesday, I wasnt able to work on the fish breathing animation until today, thankfully it was a short one since there is only 2 days left until the project is due. I had issues with trying to animate using the soft selection tool so switched to Blender. Turns out that was even more complicated so I ended up going back to Maya and got a working fish breathing animation. Thank god that Maya->Blender alembic files can be moved around and wont get all messed up unlike fbx.

BSA703 15/6

 After a couple days of messing around, I just cant get the sim to do what I want it to do, so I told Ian to use Edwins original one as it still looked decent enough. I have discovered nParticles can be just as frustrating as Bifrost, but I also believe if I had more time I could have come up with something that fit what we wanted better.

Most of the time was spent getting the particles to fly through the air and land nicely on the table, this was the stage Edwin got to also, his particles just looked more blobby than mine hence why I suggested using his.

My idea to try and add water was to use the particle mesh as a Bifrost emitter. Unfortunately my initial tests did not work due to the amount of water emitted. Even when I set it to only emit water particles in a single frame, there was far too much and it just looked wrong.

BSA703 12/6

Due to Edwin being busy with compositing and editing, I have taken over having a go at making a nice slobbery particle explosion for when Pavo coughs. Trying to make droplets with Bifrost isnt really an option so I started looking into nParticles and found this blog with some good beginning settings for making water(Quite different from Bifrost).

https://area.autodesk.com/blogs/the-maya-blog/pouring_water_with_nparticles/

Unfortunately there is not much at all in terms of current tutorials for nParticles but I was stoked when I found this youtube tutorial for a blood splat. The thumbnail caught my eye as the shape is similar to what we wanted to achieve for the cough. The best part is, there is a free scene download that I can use to follow along the tutorial video.

BSA703 7/6

We realised that the restaurant bathroom door didnt have handles, which would have been fine if the animation didnt include him ripping open the door to dive back in lol. Max gave me an image of what he thought would look good, so I modelled that and added it to the door.

After seeing this handle, Melissa didnt like it and gave me a new image reference to go off so I remade the handle from scratch for simplicity sake.

The other side of the door is a push plate so I just took the baseplate of this model and widened the interior rectangle, leaving the top and bottom point parts the same size as they are in this model.

BSA703 6/6

 Another water sim!! This time we need a couple second shot of a wave coming up to Pavos leg then dissipating. I found this one rather hard due to the very short amount of time the wave is on screen, and needing to make it feel like the water doesnt just disappear quickly. I used the graph editor to stretch out the middle frames a little bit so that the sim is essentially paused momentarily during that section of time. I got it looking ok eventually but I think it would have been better if the shot wasnt as short as it was. An unfortunate side effect of "pausing" the sim is that it can look a little jerky if the pause time is too long, so it was a fine balancing act tweaking the frames to get something that looked ok.

These three are the same Sim mesh cache, just with different timing in the graph editor.

BSA703 5/6

Final versions of the crashing wave sim, one with a foam sim and one without. I just chucked a basic blue shader on it so you can tell the difference between the water and foam. The water is still very blobby but Im putting this down to scale/small area requirements(Just like the overflow sims). This took several attempts to get right but still not as bad as the overflowing sims I had to do. It was also a lot of fun flooding the bathroom!

BSA703 4/6

 Had emitter issue where it would sim the first frame then stop. After a quick google, turns out you need to have the animation playback setting on Play Every Frame for it to work. Thankfully this was a quick solve but definitely gave me a mini heart attack since I have been using this scene for a couple weeks now with no issues until tonight. I had changed it to test the door opening animation speed and didnt realise it affected the sim. On the plus side, the door animation looks nice(after spending and hour and a half posting each iteration on discord for Max to critique). All very subtle differences, mostly in terms of speed and then tweaking the ease-in and ease-out for the final animation.

BSA703 3/6

New sim to work on - the ocean flooding into the bathroom when Pavo heads back into the restaurant. I found this one a lot easier than the overflow, purely because it was simply timing the door to open once the secret room behind it was full. I had to chuck a sneaky extra block in to stop the water sim showing through the wall but you gotta do what you gotta do to get the result you want lol.

Due to using expansion for my overflow sims, I initially had it on for this one. As this image shows, it was not needed but it gave me a laugh when I saw this happen

Thankfully it behaved better once I turned expansion off.

BSA703 2/6

Turns out the original floor flood sim isnt great timing for the final chunk that seeps under the door, so I was tasked with creating a new one. This sim was fairly easy due to it being on flat floor, so again it was merely a matter of getting the emitter size and distance from the door correct to get the final look Max was after. I was happy with the first one, but made the second once I had the door closing animation, as it changed the look of the sim a little bit.