What I have done this week:
Remove the wireframe of the portal to break up the shape.
Remove the multi-layer effect.
Add interaction when the motorcycle goes through.
Ground plane interaction.
R&D on fiery speeding effect to replace multi-layer effect.
Goals for next week:
Create more particles interaction with the motorcycle to sell the light streak effect.
Add more layers of different looks to the portal.
Create matte for compositing.
Create the fiery effect for the motorcycle.
Based on the feedbacks from the mentors, I had changed I had made some changes to the portal. The first thing I did is I remove the attribute transfer that is transferring the particles onto the wireframe. The attribute transfer is giving it a solid shape, but it is too strong and making the portal looks too flat. Additionally, it is also not working with the ground plane collision since it is going to lift up the particles dropped on the floor as well. Therefore, I just remove the attribute transfer and rebuild the portal again to give it a different look.
The second thing I changed it that I decided to remove the multi-layer effects from the previous version. The mentor mention that the effects doesn't looks intentional, and looks choppy during the last session. Therefore, I did some test with different looks of the multi-layer effects. The solution we found was to make them separate more to create a tunnel look like the reference below.
However, I found out that is not working with the portal shape I have right now because mine is looking more like a planner shape and the motion is going outwards. It would just looks like layers of planes, so I decided to remove the effect and make a fiery effects on the motorcycle instead which I will discuss after the changes I made.
The third thing I added this week is the interaction when the motorcycle goes through the portal. I added the motorcycle and a ground plane as collision source of the pyro solver which is being used as the advection for the particle simulation. Here's the result I got.
After I got the simulation working, I started to bring everything to the Maya to work with the animation and render it out, and this is when things went wrong this week as well. There are some issue with the render farm that Alexis and I couldn't figure out why the farm is only rendering out the layer of the portal by itself. Normally it should render different layers of such as the beauty layer, which include the portal and the motorcycle, reflection of the motorcycle, and the reflection of the portal. We couldn't figure out why, so we have to render different layers locally which is why the final video we put together this week doesn't have the reflection, and the motorcycle was not render with the portal.
Addition to the things I have changed, I was also following the tutorial on how to make the fiery effects on the motorcycle. It took me a while to understand how to create the velocity field, and get the animation from Maya to work. I was trying to use the motorcycle to create the effects, but Houdini is running extremely slow with all the VDB conversion, so I ended up using a sphere instead.
I used a sphere to match the movement of the motorcycle, and then used a distance from target and attribute VOP to manipulate the normal on the sphere for velocity.
After I figure out the how to use the cross product in the attribute VOP to make the normal flows around the shape of the sphere to the -1 Z direction, I transfer the normal onto points which is being converted to VDB volume to create a velocity field. Finally, I merge the velocity field and a separate the volume that carries the density as the pyro source for the pyro solver, and I use the sphere as the collision source as well. Here's a quick smoke test from the pyro solver.
For next week, I will be focusing more on the portal and refine it first. The priority of the things I will be focusing on are:
Adjusting the angle of the portal in Shot 2.
Create more particles interaction with the motorcycle to sell the light streak effect.
Refine the portal and add more layers.
Create matte such as heat distortion for Mich to composite.
Create the fiery effects for the motorcycle.
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