Day 25

Today, I continued doing the ripple effect as usual. Actually, I didn't really do much today. The computers were letting me so so down. I do not know why my scenes are much laggier today, compared to the day before, even with the same scene. I had to restart computers around 5 times so far. God, maybe there was really something wrong with my scenes.

And my latest versions of my files, the fracturing pieces doesn't break! God, after restarting the computers many times and frustrating myself with the killer lag, I just realized that at around 4pm. I quickly rushed to get the previous file versions( luckily, it works ).

I quickly did fracturing test for a different number of scatter points, 100, 500, 800.

I hope they can finish before Steven reaches.

Anyways, I didn't slack of when I was waiting for the simulation to cook. I went and did my meteor trails. I went to odforce and saw many threads. The one that I did initially was following Miguel's meteor tutorial. ( I didn't get to see the tutorial, just the file ) He was using sprites to create the trail. When I did it and tried to add motion blur to enhance the effect, it did not look good at all. I wonder how they did it. I have seen some people who followed his tutorial and produced decent results. But there isn't any files from them. Some I saw are:

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/7353-how-to-render-color-on-sprites/page__hl__meteor__fromsearch__1

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/5414-meteor-impact/page__hl__meteor__fromsearch__1

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/5377-meteor/page__hl__meteor__fromsearch__1

I found a post which was discussing about the FXtool Heavy smoke in Houdini. I suddenly remembered that that tool produces quite decent smoke. I went and played around with the parameters and indeed it does. But there may be some problems which I have not notice....



I parented a sphere to this "smoke heavy" system.

Steven went through with me both my fracturing system and my meteor trail. He told me a couple of things that needs to be improved.

1- The fractured pieces should be affected by gravity and be pushed down instead of just staying put after the ripple.

2- The effect is too fast. And, a way that I could tackle the problem of simulation time and scale is to break the terrain up into different set of pieces. Then using different scatter points, pre-fracture the different pieces.

3- For the meteor trail, there has to be some sort of ramp color instead of a flat color.

4- Do more research.

I will tackle this problems from tomorrow onwards.