Day 66

Today, my cache files managed to finish over the night without failing. Lucky. I went ahead today with the re-tweaking of the lights. In the end, I decided on one look that I was satisfied with. I then proceed to throw the file into the render farm. I decided not to render a specular pass but instead render a Z-depth pass for the first shot. I asked Bryan on how to set it up.

I then moved on to the dust. I re-tweaked it a little more before I started rendering it. I then took a frame and compared it. The dust looks over-exposed.



I did a quick comp, and it looks quite bad. I then went back to my scene and started re-tweaking the lights. After much tweaking, I switched off the front and side light, keeping the spotlight and the point light on. Just keeping the spotlight on makes the dust looks quite dark.

After I did a render, I did a quick comp and the result was much better than before. I asked Tanner whether it looked okay. He told me the dust ring should be much bigger, the pieces that just started to crack should have dust.

I then went to do some tweaking. Initially, I was tweaking the velocity attribute in the source pop. The result is more like a cheat, as it translates the whole simulation. It looked like I could just get away with it in the beginning. But nearing the end, it started breaking apart.

I then decide to re-make the group that emits the particles. In SOPS, I did a group node that groups the points over time, and I made that group slightly bigger than the group that groups the points for fracturing. I then made a inner ring group that de-selects the points. I then subtracted the inner ring group from the main group. The result? I get a group ring that I could emit particles from.

I then used that group as the source group instead. I then also played with the impulse birth rate and the constant birth rate. I decide to put a much higher value on the impulse birth rate. I then increased the size of the initial size of the sprite. The end result was decent I would say. I then threw in the files to render locally.

Looking at the render farm, I decided to set up one of the renders just in case it couldn't finish over the weekend.