#maya fluids

My Process: The Blog Post

So for my next post, I would like to talk a little bit about my working process.

Last week I wound up finishing my Layout early which opened up some nice R&D time for me to work on the cloud sims that my film involves.

If I've learned anything about Simulation work since falling in love with it all those years ago is this: nothing will ever work ever if you try it so give up now.

TECHY LAME STUFF: I made my clouds using Maya Fluids, but they are not a dynamic simulation. The shape of the volume is driven by a billowy fractal noise pattern. This lets me animate the motion of the clouds using the movement of the noise, but does not allow for any collisions or dynamic motion. This method is much faster than entirely dynamic clouds and provides nicer (fluffier) results. The problem is that in a few of my shots I need interaction between the clouds so I got to spend a whole day working that out. (6.5 hours)

So in order to avoid me crying myself to sleep at night I try to take everything in little tiny baby steps.

This video shows a shortened version of my baby step process, each step of this I show also has it's own breakdown baby step process. It's a fractal of sad (I think I found a new blog title).:

1) Running the Fluid Sim, testing the shading, and testing dynamic interactions with both static and keyframed Geometry.

2) Testing the fluid with rigged, static geometry (Not the most aerodynamic little fella :3 )

3) Testing the fluid with Animated, rigged geometry

4) Final Sim test, putting together everything into the final environments and seeing how everything plays together.

Now, these aren't final shots nor are they the final sims I will have in my film. They are simply R&D tests so that when I actually go to finish the shots I am not wasting time stabbing in the dark.

Particle advection using fluids.