Day 12

Today, our toilet choked in the morning. Hence, I had to wait until we arrived at SESI before I could even use the toilet. Gosh, what a day to start. We arrived at SESI and helped Aliza moved the computers to her car for tomorrow's VES event. We got to reach SESI by 7.30am. Can you believe it?

Anyways, I started re editing my previs. I will post the updated video here once I get home later. But below are a couple of screen shots.







Okay, I will explain. Steven told me that I should add spheres on the wave itself so that it will be easier to visualise. I could also use the spheres for the transition effect. However, when I tried it, it was too heavy as what I am doing is that I am grouping the top points of the wave and copying spheres to it. I do not know if that is the best way of doing things though, but it didn't work.

I thought of another way and it is by using the same group but emitting sprites instead. I managed to did it successfully as shown in the screenshot above. I suddenly thought of a idea for the transition while I was thinking of how to do the transition using the sprites.

My idea was how about as the camera is panning up, a debris flies towards the camera, knocking the camera before cutting to black. I do not know if that will work though. I will compile it into a video and send it to Steven tonight and see what he says.

After so called "completing" my previs, I moved on to do the ripple fracturing effect. I started off with putting the ripple grid below the fracture terrain. I then set collisions for the metaball against the fracture terrain. But it ended up not working. I decided to ask Eric on how to proceed from there. Eric told me to try to do it using the simplest method. Which is velocity.

He showed me an example,



The way of how the velocity is created is based on point position distance. Using the same object, He duplicated it and scale it smaller/bigger. Then a point sop is used to calculate the difference.

This is how the expression looks like:



What this expression does is it takes the bigger object with a higher point position and minus the smaller object with the smaller point position. That outputs a direction vector which then can be used as the velocity.

To adjust the velocity I could just scale the smaller object.

It is all done by scaling.




BEFORE:




AFTER:



Note: The orange lines is the velocity vector.

After that, I applied it to my scene.

I duplicated the metaball system which drives my wave.




I adjusted the size also, and I did a point sop. Exactly the same as the help file Eric provided me with.



I then did an attributeTransfer to transfer the velocity attributes to the terrain.



It works as my ripple works. I then brought it into dops. However with this setup, I couldn't break the pieces up. I do not know why, but I think I will call it a day now. So I will settle that on Monday. However I posted my problem on odforce, hopefully someone could give me a solution by Monday.