Ok, I know I've promised a tutorial and I'm still going to do it. I've mostly been putting it off as I've been having issues with video recording software. Maybe I should just write it down in a PDF, but I guess video tuts are all the rage. Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is that free video capture software is terrible. I can't work on my Mac, which would be nice because I would have quicktime. (Maybe that is terrible too.) So, you'll have to wait until I get camtasia. And that's going to be a while.

Ok so I've fixed my video card problems. So tutorial soon; at least as soon as I can get some good video capture software up and running. In the mean time, there's this neat little fluid test that this guy did. But better yet is the crit that one of my colleagues gave him in the comments. Worth its weight in gold.

http://vimeo.com/28519440

Delays

Wow sorry about the delays. I have been holding off posting due to my video card not being supported by maya. That's what I get for going with an ATI chip. My 6870 performs well for games, but I need nVidia drivers to run Maya. It's very difficult to work when your view port stops updating. Anyway, not sure what card to get. I don't want to give up my gaming abilities, and I don't want to have to switch out cards every time I want to work or play. I may end up with a 580 GTX or 590 GTX. Not sure yet. But that at least sounds like a better solution than a quadro 4000. Anyway, I'll get back to the tut soon enough.

Portal Shot Film

Ok so not so much Fx related. Well, the portals are pretty neat, but yeah, check this video out. It's amazing.

Tutorial Intro

Ok, I will get around to the good stuff. But I figure I should write it out clearly before I just start posting willy, nilly here. So, instead I'm going to give the outline for how I want to talk about this topic. I guess at the end I'll gather it all up and make a nice PDF or a video tutorial if I can get my hands on some nice recording software. For this tutorial I am going to make the following assumption. I assume that you can read. And since I can safely assume that, the I can also assume you can read maya's extensive documentation. If I talk about something that you don't understand, it will be most likely because you didn't read Maya's documentation on said topic. If you ask me about something that can be easily answered by pressing "F1", I will most likely ignore you. What I'd like to focus on are little tips or methods that I use with Maya's tools. We're going to write quite a few expressions, but nothing overly complex. You don't have to know mel to follow this tutorial but again a little RTFM doesn't hurt.

I want to cover basic particle emission, fields, PP attributes, and PSI shading. Finally, I want to be able to output a high quality render worthy of a demo reel. So we'll see how this goes.

Missile Trail Beginnings

Hey this will be the start of the missile trail tutorial. So now a disclaimer, I'm not an expert, at least not in the all knowing sense. I've worked on this type of effect but have not mastered it. I will be dispensing my knowledge here. I guess the thought is that in teaching I will learn more than soaking up knowledge from others. That said doing is important.

So where to start on the missile trail. Well for one, close Maya. We'll get to that part later. When starting a project you need to know where you are going before you start making a ton of particles. I know it sounds straight forward but it is really critical and most artists skip this step. So the first step is to look at reference. Now that we have google and youtube there really is no excuse for not doing this.

Here's what I found in less than 5 minutes.

So yeah, this is a good starting point. Things to take note of are the length of the trails, the speed of dissipation, the colors of the smoke, turbulence in the trail, length of the fire, shadows and lighting. What will make the missile trail most believable is making it move correctly and shade it correctly. It is important to pay attention to how light interacts with the smoke trails.

I hope this gives you a good idea where to start. Technical stuff later.

-Calibrix

Tutorial Ideas

So I think I've settled on something to talk about. Particles. Particles are probably the most technical Fx. Technically most Fx work is just making something that looks cool. I once made an effect entirely out of blend shaped geometry, no dynamics required. It just requires you to think outside the box and explore some of the weird things in maya.

But yes particles. I remember one of the things that got me started was an old tutorial on missile trails. That was back in Maya 5 or something. Anyway, I thought it could use an update, so over the next few weeks I'll be talking about particles, and more than that, we'll be creating a missile trail while not using any of the built in ramps. It will be all expressions. Kill two birds with one stone I guess.

Blogs?

Ok wow, I was totally going to post shit here, and be, you know helpful. Wow, 6 months later and I think I have two posts? I give those guys that take time to do this real Kudos man. After working with 3D software for 8-9 hours a day and then coming home only to work with it again to write up some tutorial... Yeah... or I'm unmotivated and lazy. That could be it too.

So lets see... what to say. I'm learning python/pyMel. That's a start. I guess, I'm suppose to be learning pythonQt, whatever that is. But I think just learning anything is important right now. Picking up Maya 2012, for no explicable reason. I mean there's a lot of new features, but it's not that new. I need to start cracking on Houdini again. I wonder if it will run on my new MacBook Air? Probably not. I need a new mouse for my desktop, the middle click is mushy and is annoying. Also, it's apparent that I need a different video card for 3D apps. My ATI 6800  doesn't cut it. So Quadro 4000 it is. Now, I know where my money is going...

Anyway, useful tips... That's what this was all about. Actually, I need to write up a tutorial on flamethowers. Maybe I'll do that this weekend, or I'll be in Vegas.

2D Fire with Smoke

So I wanted to do a video tutorial on tips and tricks about maya fluid fire. It was going to be awesome, but I couldn't get the video capture software working. I was going to show you how to make this:

But alas it is not so.

If you are learning fluids I would suggest starting out in 2D. 2D boxes are much faster to sim and it's much easier to see what the parameters are doing. Once you understand the 2D fluids then taking it to 3D is just adding another dimension.Well at least, that's the simple way of saying it.

Fluid Explosion Buoyancy

So explosions are fun. And it's something that everyone wants to start doing right when they start maya fluids. So let me share a tip that I've been using.

One of the most difficult things about fluids is getting them to move quickly. Explosions have a strong force and movement for about 1-3 frames and then act like a normal mass of heat and smoke. The problem with fluids is that if you apply say a strong radial field or volume axis field with turbulence and away from center force. The fluid destabilizes and the simulation breaks. Or it's nearly impossible to slow the fluids back down to normal speeds. The former being the bigger issue. Granted, I'm also using maya 2009 and don't benefit from the improvements for 2011, like gradient force, auto resize, general stability improvements.

So here's some of my tricks: I tend to not use fields with fluids. The use of a field usually produces unnatural movement. And as you know a strong force will break the fluid entirely. I find much of the first 3-5 frames are working on shaping the explosion. That could mean placing a cluster of fluid emitters to create interesting shapes. Keying the scale of the fluid emitters. Start small, then in one frame go really big then cut it back down to size over the next couple frames. Use emission turbulence.

So that will get you the basic shape of the fluid but the more important part is timing. There are two things I use to accomplish that. The 1st is fluid simulation scale. I usually write and expression but you can also keyframe it. I usually smoothstep  the fluid sim scale from a high value (like 5 or 6) to a lower value (like 2 or 1.5) during the 1st 5-6 frames. This causes the blast to react very fast and then slow out rather naturally. It's like using damp but better. The next big trick is buoyancy. I usually control how my explosions rise with heat. So my density values are used to determine how long my smoke will last and my heat values determine how long my blast will last and how far and quickly the smoke plume will rise. You can set your density buoyancy to something rather small. Like 0.1 or even -0.1. Then set your heat buoyancy to something high, like 10 or 20, with a dissipation to match, like 3-5. You heat buoyancy controls hot fast the explosion will rise, and the dissipation will control how far the explosion will rise.

So go ahead and try it out. I hope these tips can help you get a handle on how to control your fluids.

New Comp

It's been awhile. Funny how time flies. Got a new computer. It's a Falcon Northwest Talon series. It's a great machine. I would recommend their products wholeheartedly. But on to more important things. FX. I want to make up a little fire tutorial. But I think that may be too ambitious. Fire's not something that is simple to understand and even I don't have the complete mastery of it. However, I would like to give some easy how-to guides on fluids. There seems to be a lack of good information on them, or at least the information is hard to find. It's tedious to sift through pages of forum posts to find the one gem of wisdom contained within. But alas, I will try my best. So now that I have a new computer to run Maya on; fluids, sometime soon.