Rough Weather - RIG.B FX Entry
The RIG.B robot scans its surroundings, detecting an incoming storm. Small rocks are blown around hitting RIG.B, before it deploys its drones to shield itself.
Update - 11 Apr 2023
Final entry:
-Unfortunately my computer couldn't handle higher voxel sizes for the smoke and would crash when rendering with Mantra. So I have a flipbook render to just to show the FX I have completed.
Update - 3 Mar 2023
Idea shift
I decided to shift the idea from an energy shield projected from the drones instead to a shield made out of ice/crystals which form when the drones spray out mist which solidify into an arcing shield.
The crystal shield was created using multiple copy to points/named primitive loops with varying seeds based on ptnum. I used a ramp falloff on the y-axis/height to make the crystals near the top smaller while the crystals near the base were made bigger.
I created two versions, the first one had more detail in the crystals and had to be packed geometry due to how dense the scene was. The crystals themselves had little variation between them apart from their overall pscale/size but had details included such as edge deformation and shatter lines. The second version had less detail and would rely on displacement maps to add additional detail, but it has several variations between crystals such as height, size, crystal extrusion amount and scatter.
Choosing which version I will go forward with will just depend on how the crystals will look with a displacement map and whether the increase in detail or variation is noticeable to the eye or not.
Crystals forming
Initial effect was created using a grid with animated noise, blasting out the areas based on the noise and keyframing the grid upwards. The empty areas of the mesh were filled in using a polyfill node. If I use this approach for the final version, this means that the crystal shader should be procedural as it would not be possible to keep a consistent UV map on the crystals.
Update - 12 Feb 2023
Update 13/02/2023
To make sure the drones know what shield plane to head to, I blasted out all rocks with a low area value and would collide with the shield. This is so that the small debris pieces are not picked up by the attribute transfer. When the pieces are detected to hit the primitive of the shield, a point is created in the center of the primitive and that point is used to create a path for the drone to follow, sorted based on a count/age attribute created in a solver.
Although the collision points and the path generated will be procedural, the carve node which determines the position of the drone on the path is currently hand-keyed. I might have to figure out if it is worth making that procedural or just hand-key the second-U value instead.
Test for shield geometry and moving position (placeholder path animation for now)
Update - 9 Jan 2023
Update 09/01/2023
Created some small procedural ground rocks that are blown in the wind, colliding with the ground geometry and the robot
Mesh Prep - Reduced the polycount on the geometry for simulation using point deform
-Fixed the issue from before preventing the point deform from working correctly
Update - 2 Jan 2023
FX Plan - Sketch
RIG.B Import and Prep
-Removed placeholder FX elements from provided animation in 3DSMax and exported as alembic
-Removed small detail meshes for collision mesh
-Generated temporary collision geometry and collision VDB + cache
-Created placeholder terrain/boundary + cache
-Need to figure out how to get rest pose for point deform, so I can remesh the geometry
Shield drones setup/testing
The robot will deploy 3 small drones to create a shield to block itself from the incoming storm of rocks and debris. In this test, I had to figure out how to designate/split up 3 drones to the rocks that hit the shield collider geometry. I also have to figure out the order which the drones fly to the shield hit points and the flight path/curve which they will take.
At the moment I have:
-Collision detection using ray sop and using point intersection distance attribute as a life/age attribute
-Split up the incoming rock hitting the shield into 3 groups by using modulus of id attribute and number of drones (may require changes to more evenly distribute)
-Sorted point numbers using the distance/age attribute as the point number is used as the order for the curve
-Created curve based on points and tested carve sop for animation along curve
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