week 4 - Class Tutorials

Particle Systems 

Smoke Tutorial

For this tutorial we learnt how to use particle systems, i've tried to use particle systems in the past but couldn't get it to work, so hopefully after todays tutorial i'l understand the technique alot better. This technique will become very useful for when we want to make our pearl harbour attack scenes and have some boats smoking as there sinking.

I began by using the superspray which is under particle systems in the drop down menu, i then selected hose from the preset menu and pressed play to show the particles flowing up.

I then increased the particle quanity to 40 and changed the the viewport display from ticks to mesh, i also changed the particle size from 1 to 7. By changing the emit start to -30 the particles start before the first frame, then by changing the emit stop to 130, this means that the particles will flow to capacity til the end of the frame, then changing the particle type to 'facing'.

 
 Now that the smoke is made, a material needs to be added. Firstly i opened up the material editor and clicked 'maps' and 'diffuse colour' and added particle age to it. I then change the top colour to white, the middle to an off white and the bottom to a light grey, this give the colour of the smoke.

 
 After choosing the colours i went back to maps in the material editor and selected opacity and added a 'mask' to it. I then added noise to the map channel, and a gradient to the mask channel and added the material to selection then rendered.

The smoke effect came out well and would add the sense of realism to our animation although i might reduce to the amount of particles to save render time  
 


Fire Tutorial 

Another use for the super spray is to make fire, this tutorial we were shown a way or creating realistic fire to use in our animations.There's alot of step to get to the final fire effect but it's worth it.

Firstly i selected superspray and placed it on the work area, i then went to the superspray settings and changed the spread to '15' under the basic parameters, and selecting mesh. I then changed the percentage of the particles to 100%, the speed to 0.2, and the 'use total' to 200.

The particle timing is important for fire as i want the flames to stay constantly burning, therefore i changed the emit start to -100, the emit stop to 500, the display til 500 and the fade to 30, and changed the particles to facing. We now need to give the particle rotation to make it look more like fire. Under the Rotation settings i changed the spin time to 1, the variation to 0.5, the phase to 180, the variation to 1 and ticked face map.
Now that the setting for the particles are correct i can add a material.      

I opened the material editor and added noise to the diffuse channel, and changed the colours to yellow and a dark orange. I then ticked fractual and added a gradient to the opacity channel, and ticked radial. I then added a face map to the material which adds the material to each particle.

By then changing the noise to 0.7, the size to 5 and the noise threshold to 0.5 and 0.5 the fire was made

  
We will hopefully be using fire in our animation, but due to time constraints and whether we have the models made in time would reflect heavily on render time.