Smoke (ANI304)

In this week, I made smoke for the kitchen scene. In the last term, i made smoke with maya fluid for the scene when we did the second pitch before the break. But for the final footage, i decided to make smoke using method called sprite.

Sprite is one of the Particle Render Type and it is commonly used for volumetric smoke, clouds and sand storms. It takes much less time to render than fluids or nDynamics because it's only mapping the images on the particle elements and the sprite images are always facing the camera. So when particle emits, it looks like the images are emitting instead of particles.

The first image shows the particle sprites are emitted and it looks the images are coming from the emitter in the rendered shot.

then I added expressions so that the size of images are randomly different and get bigger as it goes higher. Also added rotation expression so the images don't look static.

 

The images in the video shows they are emitted in different sizes and tilted in different angle. 

Then I added opacity to the particle using ramp, so it looks like emitting from in the air, not suddenly emits from certain point. Also it disappear smoothly at the top.

Then I added the colour on the particle so the images look much whiter and also removed the black edges. The first video is from the primary setting of ramp, and the second video is that i changed to white.

Then I changed noise value of the images to see how the smoke looks natural for the scene. When I rendered those images, i didn't check on the Depth Sort option of the render type. That's why the sprite images look thicker and overlapped with other images at the back and forward. 

The first footage is when i checked on the depth sort and the second footage is when i turned it off.

Then I changed the image material from lambert to blinn so that it can be looked brighter when it's under the lights in the scene. Below images are showing how it looks in the rendered shot depending on the eccentricity, specular roll off and  reflectivity of the material. When the values are too high, it reflects the light too much and eventually it makes the smoke looks unrealistic and too flat.

the final smoke in the animatic