More Rain Atmospherics.

Yet another render of the fog atmospherics. Playing about with silhouetting some geometry.

I would like to try and simulate a lightning strike as-well.
I really need to try and lessen the render times though, as rendering the volumetric fog as-well as layers of refractive material takes a long time.

Fog and Crepsecular

In adding some more atmosphere to the scene I changed the way the fog works.
Now there is another particle system consisting of sprites that have a fog texture/material applied to them, however there is also an environment fog pass shader in the scene to add just that bit more overall.

I also decided to add a strong light to simulate the sun shining through the fog, which lead to some really cool crepsecular (god ray) effects.

All passes rendered together.

The environment fog pass.

The ground model pass.

The rain pass (including IBL background for refractions)

The sprite fog pass.

Fog

A volumetric fog effect that I created. However it is inefficient as it takes far too long to render. I have a simpler solution to create this which should hopefully provide better and quicker results. At the moment its just particles with a volumetric shader applied.

I am going to switch it so the fog is an environment shader and the particles are sprites with a texture applied.

Rain Effect Part 1

In creating the rain effect I used a scene I already had lying around that already had a water material within it.
First off I set up the lighting for the scene using an IBL, I usually use IBL's as standard in scenes anyway, however, given the reflective/refractive nature of water It was important to have something in the scene that can provide reflections/refractions from every direction.

The scene I was using as a base just has a standard piece of "island" geometry surrounded by water.

The material being used for the water. The most important part is the Fresnel reflections/refractions and the IOR. As the IOR of water is 1.33, it is important that this matched to create as physically accurate a material as possible.

This is what the water material looks like when applied to droplets of water that I modelled.

A basic rain-type effect being emitted from the surface above, there is a gravity force acting on it aswell so that it falls realistically.

I experimented with instancing physical geometry to get the right look for the raindrops, however this proved impractical as the poly-count always made the simulation run very slow. The geometry I was using at this point did not look like rain either.

 Using just points I was able to create a much better effect, aswell as making use of the "strand" system in ICE to create particle tails that mimic streaks of rain.

This is the node setup for the effect, the effect also has a "wind" force acting on it to create a bit of turbulence and to produce a more realistic effect.

This image just shows me experimenting with how to light the effect, in the end I tweaked the IBL to look more like a stormy overcast day, I also had a front light to mimic a weak sun shining through the clouds.

This is a very simple composite of a few things in Photoshop. The Raw render, a blurred version of that render and a blue-ish colour grade. I could achieve similar results in 3D with Motion blur and a grade added within the compositing software.

However before I do that I want to add the "misty" effect that you often see with heavy rain storms, I also want to change the wind so that it blow the rain more violently.

Research and References

This stage is just me gathering a load of research and references for when trying to create the effect.

I found some useful information on the characteristics of the individual droplets, their shape and how they fall.

(From Wikipedia)
At sea level providing there is no wind.:
0.5 mm drizzle impacts at 2m/s
5 mm drops impact at 9m/s

As you can see the raindrops here are very different to how they usually look in photographs, their "tail" is a lot less apparent. I think this is partly due to the fact that during a rainstorm there would be very strong winds that would blow out the tail of a raindrop (very similar to how comets and solar winds work). Another factor I feel would be the cameras not quite being able to keep up with the speed and amount of rain falling, and creating a kind of "motion blur" effect.

Some reference images of rain taken from far away aswell as close up. Ideally I would like to shoot my own footage aswell but I shall need to wait for a rainy day to do that.

I found this video aswell which is a good reference for rain, however it does not look like there is much wind in this video.

Some beautiful reference for lightning (not sure I will do lightning as an effect, I want to focus on rain for now)

This is good reference for water as a material, as I will have to recreate the effect including materials.

The next step is to start building up a basic raindrop effect to start with. 

Rain!

Rain I feel is such a necessary effect to be able to reproduce, and as such it will be the first of the systems I will be trying to reproduce. I am going to look at how it is done within games and within VFX in an attempt to produce a dynamic solution that will work well for 3d artwork. I will be experimenting with creating the effect within both Maya and Softimage, with a look to have a render done using V-Ray (which I only own for Softimage so far).

Here is some example of the sort of effect I am trying to reproduce for this part of it.

Cloth simulation.

These are parts of some characters I am modelling for another module. For the knight on the far left I used a Syflex Cloth simulation In order to get the fabric to drape better around the reference model I was using.

Timelapse

It was a useful technique I found to help bring a bit more realism to the character, and saved me a lot of time to the alternative (taking the model to ZBrush).

I will have a number of systems to create for my Computer Arts Practice module. So I will be studying how to make them the best I can within this module.

Dynamic Destruction

For a model I created last year, I was never happy with what I was able to accomplish with it, so I decided to try and create a small scene to place him in. The image below was created using dynamic to accomplish the shattering effect.

I created a polygonal cube and using the demo version of Exocortex Implosia FX proceeded to slice it into chunks.
Then I ran a simulation in which the cube was shattered with a sphere, using the creature as collision meshes.
This created the basic shatter effect I was looking for, but then I froze the simulation and used some more traditional modelling methods to improve the look of the effect.

This was essentially a "sketch" of a scene so I didn't spend a lot of time fine tuning it, but it does demonstrate the sort of things I'm trying to accomplish and how I'm using dynamics in my work currently.

Dirge.

For scripting and dynamics this year, I am very keen to study the aspects of this field that can enhance my 3d artwork. I have been doing some research and performing some preliminary tests and have found that there is many things that I can use dynamics for.

A fantastic example of what Im talking about is illustrated in this video.

"Dirge" by Alex Alvarez

Effects such as the instancing of the locusts or the atmospheric particles (I know for a fact the fire is composited stock footage) I believe could really enhance my work.

Even in the little things such as in this image.

"Gathering" by Alex Alvarez

The hair and fur on the character aswell as the candles and the atmospheric fog in the background. Subtle effects like this I feel could really help enhance my work and help me learn more about dynamic systems.