after analysing the concept i decided to model the temple in maya as the structure is composed of hard and flat surface and as we will be rendering from maya i always preferred to not use other program if possible.
This are some pics of the temple model
I am quiet happy with the temple model all the group like it and i have been able to produce a good replica of the concept art in terms of modelling i had to pay attention to 3 area first.
The topology i made sure that all my poli-faces are quads so that the model render properly and as we may use the render farm it may cos issues if we use bad models
The second thing is the edges of each object after working for few years with maya i came to realise that the program try to imitate reality as much as possible as such there is no object in the real world that have edges at a perfect 90 degree angle and in maya the same thing apply so i made sure to bevel all the object with flat surfaces in the temple if not this would affect the texturing and lighting of the model
and finally i made sure that the poly count is as low as possible to save render time.
DYNAMIC TEST ON SPACESHIP
As i finished modelling the temple early i decided to experiment with maya particle Ozi had mentioned a shot where a spaceship would be crashing on a planet and as they was nobody in the group that really used particles at the time i decided to give it a shot i tried few experiment with maya dynamic during the holidays and i think that this will be a great opportunity to further develope my skills
1. research
the first thing i did is look for some reference material by that i mean looking at some videos of plane crash
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qcr2hh9RQRw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQW_IZ7z2qM
those are 2 examples of the type of footage i was watching
the next thing i did was look at tutorial on maya dynamic my 2 main resources were Digital Tutors which i subscribed to for the year and also a book : Maya visual effects the innovator's guide by Eric Keller
a great book that i would recommend to any maya learner specially if you don't know any Mel scripting and want to use particle systems the book got a lot of hints and tricks that could help in various type of situation
also found a pdf file online that have the explanation of the particle attributs in maya which was very helpful as they are not self explanatory but when you actually know what they do the process fairly strait forward
http://download.novedge.com/Brands/Alias/Helps/Maya6.5/en_US/Dynamics/listofparticleattributes.html2.Production
this is a playblast of the spaceship that i will use to do my particle test it was modelled by Anthony Cole another member of the group with my first test using the fire effect. Applying this effect and tuning it was fairly easy it is one of the ready to use effect that maya have that do not need much editing. To animate my ship i used a curve would not be the best work thru the eyes of an animator but should be good enough for my test
the only attributes that i needed to work with were the extra attributes under the particle shape tab in maya attribute editor
and this is a render test of the fire particles
the second part of the experiment was creating the smoke particle this process was actually a lot more complicated and needed a lot more time and adjusting than the fire effect as there is no preset for smoke in maya and i had to start with a basic particle emitter and then make its particle behave like smoke.
this is the second playblast test that i did
the main difference with the fire effect is in the attribute editor a basic particle emitter do not have many attribute but you have the possibility to create attribute to control many aspect of the particle like colour and opacity.
I had a lot of difficulty making the smoke behave properly some of the setting that were the most difficult to adjust were the life span of the particle, i set them so that they disappear randomly during a certain amount of time this was very annoying to adjust as the setting get affect by the radius and amount of particle among other things. Also i had to create attribute for the colour, opacity and radius of the smoke particles.
This is how i did it
first under the add dynamic attributes click general
This will open a window with plenty of attribute that can be added to the particle.
There is different ways to edit those attribute like using expressions for example, the way that i found more comfortable was the option to use a ramp shader to control your attribute by using black and white gradient as numeric values.
This is a final render of my test
The final render was ok i do think that the smoke particles are not tick enough and need a longer life span to help show that the spaceship is coming at high speed and help make the engine look more powerful.
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