What I have done mostly in week 4 is refining the portal, add interaction when the motorcycle goes through the portal, and figure out how to export the portal into Maya to render in Arnold.
After learning how to make the portal last week, I rebuild the portal based on the feed back that I have received. There are three additional things I added this week. The first thins is I increase the speed of the particles, and add a layer with popfluid.
The second thing I added is using popattrack inside popnet to create the first wave of particle shooting out when the portal open, and the puff effect when the portal close. For this, I had to play with the timing of the wireframe portal scaling down to make it looks better after P attribute transfer on to the the wireframe.
The third thing I added is the portal warping and light streak effect with a copy node. I used copy node and keyframe the copy amount, and I also used stamp input to get the $CY to create variation in scale (multiply 1.6 in X, and 0.95 in Y, Z), and rotation since I am using the same simulation. I created two different version of the simulation. One with the same smoke that the velocity is pointing outwards, and another one with the velocity pointing in with wind blowing in X. The first simulation makes the effects look more wild, the second one, in the other hand, looks more in control and has a more defined shape.
After the basic portal effects is done, bring the particles into maya is the next challenge since Maya does not use points. The result I found was following this tutorial on YouTube. Special thanks to Joleen from team crimson for sending the tutorial in Slack.
I was able to successfully export my portal as .ass files and import into Maya using Arnold StandIn with point cloud. After I import the .ass files into the maya scene created by my teammate, I was able to adjust the timing and position of the portal to fit better in the scene. Special thanks to Stanley for doing the animation of the motorcycle.
The pros of using .ass file is that I am able to use user data nodes to access the attributes like Cd, emitint, age and life from Houdini in hyper shade to adjust the aiStandard Surface. However, the file size of is also very big, and takes a long time to export. Therefore, I have to export all the .ass files every time I change something in Houdini, and it is going to take a lot of times.
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