Nira's VFX Blog
A journey through my master

Tag: River Simulation

Categories
Advanced & Experimental Personal

Week 10: River Simulation Fix, Lighting, Camera Movement, & Render in Maya

In this week, I decided to fix the river simulation (as I was having issues with the water speed and density of the flow), to then illuminate the scene, and prepare the camera movement following my initial story board.

River simulation fix

Since my previous river simulation was way too heavy and it was giving me problems to see the actual speed of the water (I needed to render the whole simulation if I wanted to see the effect as the playblast was not showing the effect), I decided to find another way to simulate water that was not that heavy on the scene. So I found in YouTube this tutorial that uses a noise shader instead, and then I could just use the glass texture and coloured it to make it look ‘wet’.

Water simulation tutorial (SYIA Studios, 2020)
Adding some subtle colours to base and specular and give some contrast
Render of water simulation to see the colours applied are appropriate
Render of water simulation to see the colours applied are appropriate
Render in darker lighting
Water simulation play blast in Maya

I then also considered in polishing my river water simulation effect, as the waves were looking a bit too big for a river. They seemed to be more for a lake or a pool, but a river has smaller waves as it is more like a flow of water that follows a unique direction. Then, in the noise shader, I reduced the scale of the waves and added a bit more noise.

Correcting water simulation noise shader in Maya

Lighting, camera movement, and render

For lighting conditions, I searched in Polyhaven for HDRIs that simulate the light we experience at sunset. It should be subtle, yellowish, and that projects soft and stretched shadows. I found an HDRI that was not giving me the exact light conditions I wanted so I also tweaked the amount of light the it was producing and make it slightly darker.

Once the lighting was done, I started to do the camera movement is my scene. I did not want to show only that outer side of the environment from afar, so I made camera to pass through the rainforest to show the trees, palm trees, and foliage, to then jump over the river, going around the scenario in circles, to finish climbing up the pyramid up un til ending in a long shot of the environment.

Camera set up

In the following render of the scene, it is visible the camera movement I set in the scene, however, I noticed that I had some texture problems with the trees leaves, so I will need to revisit the textures paths, relink them properly to avoid this issue, and render again the scene.

References

SYIA Studios (2020). Maya Easy Animated Water Shader (online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVjc3vvvJfo&list=PLAlv9GvsMvnMCUwPx_gcXaCj_yHYdIPqD&index=1&t=62s [Accessed 16 June 2023]

Categories
Advanced & Experimental Personal

Week 3: Scene Concept Art, Storyboard, Floor Plan, & River Simulation in Maya

This week, I focused on planning my story board, scene assets and floor plan. I also started to model the base of my environment and learnt how to make a river simulation in Maya.

As I needed to organise this project’s weekly tasks in order to meet the deadline of the project, I decided to make a story board first of how the scene would look in camera. Also, as I think the most complicated bit of this project is going to be the trees and plants of the jungle, I will start focusing in this first and the pyramid afterwards. I found some good references of jungle trees and made a rough sketch of what elements I wanted to incorporate. Since in the jungle, trees, bushes, and rest of the plants are kind of mixed up and entangled together, I thought of incorporating this in my design to give the feeling of a dense rainforest.

Moreover, I also made a floor plan of the space to figure out the dimensions I have to aim for and the composition of the scene.

Storyboard and tree sketch made in Procreate
Trees moodboard made in Photoshop
Floor plan made in Procreate

Before starting to figure out the trees, I thought of begin with the ground basic shape and the river simulation. I used Maya’s different brushes to give some texture to the ground and make the river’s shape. Then, using a sphere, made some deformations in it and used the ‘Shatter’ tool to brake this deformed sphere into pieces so I had rocks in different random shapes. After I positioned all my rocks, I researched the best way to do a river flow simulation and I found the following tutorial:


River stream simulation tutorial (3D Splanchnic, 2019)

This effect seemed simple but it is quite challenging to get a believable effect that looks realistic. I used ‘Fluids’ tool in Maya and used the option of ‘Emit from object’ to create this water stream coming from a plane (this would be the emitter). Then, I played around with density, velocity, colliders, and resolution to create a texture that then I used as a bump map of the water. Lastly, I used ‘deep water’ preset to give water-like transparency and corrected the transmission colour to green to give a jungle tone.

I think the first test with water simulation went ok, however, there are a few corrections I wish to do, such as reduce the speed of water, reduce noise added, and maybe try to reduce the density of the effect.

References


3D Splanchnic (2019). River Fluid Texture in Maya (online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=975S-9URarQ [Accessed 30 April 2023]