Rocket Flame
This weekend I worked on refining the rocket engine flame. After some troubleshooting, I ended up rebuilding some of the network to use pop network sourcing rather than straight geometry sourcing for the flame. This help correct some issues with the flame looking choppy as it moved with the flying bike. My pop network allowed me to fill in some of the subframes more resulting in a cleaner flame, but has reintroduced some of waviness in the fire that still needs to be worked out.
Skid Smoke
The skid smoke was revamped a lot this week. A big thanks to Sanat Charankar for helping me better understand pryo and assisting in getting this setup working efficiently! Using attribute transfers, the back tire of the motorcycle is isolated as the source of the smoke. Using a scatter node as the emitter for a pop network. The resulting points and velocities are brought into a pyro solver along with a collider group for the group and the back of the motocycle.
The smoke is working well, but I will keep refining the look. Specifically, I would like to add some more environmental forces and, if the team agrees, I think it would be interesting to have the smoke drift up over the bike body at the end of the commercial. This will be a discussion tomorrow during class.
Rendering
Along with refining the effects, I have started the work of integrating the effects into Maya for rendering. I am currently trying to build the look development for the flame in Maya. The rocket flame is proving to be more difficult than I thought to recreate the look in Maya, but I have had some initial success with projecting a ramp on the blackbody volume shader. The ramp is based on UV coordinates, which was not working with the flame. My workaround so far was to created a projected ramp, which gave me an object that has been parented to the bike animation. This allows me to project a UV ramp on the flame and have it move with the effect.
