Day 18

Today I would say was the busiest day of my entire 3 weeks at SESI. Maybe it was a good thing after all. Anyways, we came late today, we sat down and I continuing my ripple effect collision. I just realised something after a short while. The attributeTransfer node which I put earlier destroyed my velocity I create using the point sop. God! I deleted the attributeTransfer node and that gave me a much better result.

Anyways, Zack conducted a class for us today, It was on the basics of rendering. He went through all the different render engines and what do they do. And how do we optimise them.

First up, MicroPolygon Rendering.

Ways to optimise,
- Tweak min/max ray samples first before anything else. Because they are much less computational heavy.
- You could also tweak Shading Quality Multiplier.

Ray-Tracing Rendering.

- Renders polygon rendering the best.( Not nurbs, displacements )

Ways to optimise,
-Under dicing, Rayshading Quality.
-Ray tracing Acceleration
-KD- Tree
-KD Tree Memory Factor, shortens viewing tree time.

Physically Based Rendering.
-Better results, smoother shading, softer shadows, realistic lighting, bouncing lights.
-Volume step size is to improve rendering of volume objects.

Ways to optimise,
- Lower color limit to remove white dots on render.

Under render tab:
- Tile size( Large tile size better quality )
-Pixel Samples, Controls overall render quality for all rendering engines.

Light sampling Quality acts as a sampling multiplier to the Pixel Samples under Mantra.
Hence a 12 for light sampling Quality and a 4 for Pixel Samples in Mantra will result in a 48 sample ratio for the overall sampling rate.

Depth of field, camera F-stop(Smaller value more blur).

Motion Blur, shutter time controls motion blur, turn on geometry velocity blur for blurring of particles, etc.

Rendering wireframes:
- Create facet node under object, turn on UNIQUE POINTS
- Under Output, create wren node and there you go!

Render passes:
- Creates render passes using takes. Add a take, and select parameters to be include/exclude in the take.


Okay, after lesson ended, we went for lunch.

After lunch, I continued with my ripple effect fracturing. I will update that later, but for now, I will explain on the meteor trail I am working on.

I am supposed to create a meteor trail for my rock as it crashes down. I do not want to involve pyro simulations as I do not want to waste time trying to learn it from scratch. However, I found a thread which Miguel posted. He created his meteor trail using sprites and I decided to use that method. The way he did it is just messing around with the color of the sprites. Below is a render with motion blur.



I got no idea on how it will look if I include in the rock, maybe horrible. But I will give it a test within the next few days.

Below is my simple hierarchy:



Okay, now I will move on to my ripple effect collision. I am officially still stuck on that problem I had since yesterday. At least now I knew I could group it with color(thanks to Corinne) And thanks to Eric too!

So I am still messing around with it. Do not have a image to show how it looks but look forward to it!

It is slightly better than yesterday I would say personally!