After completing my FMP, I reflected and took stock. I learned a lot during the project, I tried different production methods, I learned new software and different MAYA modules, I applied a lot of different knowledge to my work, I also used some easy modelling methods. I have also improved my modelling and texturing skills, my ability to solve problems quickly, and my ability to create particle effects with Brifrost. I want to work more efficiently, build more complex models and create better and more detailed textures, and I need to learn more skills. I was able to create a snowflake scene for the first shot, but when I rendered it, the snowflake animation didn’t work as planned, so I didn’t use After Effect to add some snowflake effects, and secondly I planned to use Houdini to make I ended up using the MAYA FX Fluids module for this scene. Due to the slow speed of my computer, after I had added the two example smoke modules, my computer was too laggy and I couldn’t produce a scene that exactly matched the smoke of the train. I had to adjust the parameters and render individual frames to see how the smoke would look, and the final result was not very satisfactory. So in the coming years I will continue to work hard to produce a better product with enough time to add quality work to my portfolio and continue to learn different software such as Blender, Unity, C4D, 3DMax and other effects software. My goal is to become a VFX supervisor and FX TD (Effects technical director) and I will continue to work towards my goal. The Maya effects module has a powerful fabric system, a cloud and smoke system, an ocean creation system, a water and liquid module, and a complete dynamics system; the AE+C4D particle effects can easily achieve a variety of complex effects at the blockbuster level; Nuke is a digital node compositing software with the ability to seamlessly combine the final visual effects with the rest of the film and television. I will continue to keep my dreams alive and work hard for them.

Final Major Project

Resource:

My project mainly illustrates a snowing village within a crystal ball. There is an old saying in my country that snow symbolizes the start of romance. I used to enjoy snow days when I was younger. I was living in a town where it frequently snows every winter. After a snowy day, the entire city becomes to a fairy tale realm, and people living there will enjoy the cleanest snow with their family and closest friends. So I made this Snowtown crystal ball to reminisce about my childhood

For my project, I need to make a snow town, so I need to make some house models, some simple amenities, etc. Next, I need to make a train, some trees, etc. I need to make a courtyard, and finally some smoke and fire and snow effects. I need to make a courtyard and finally add some smoke and fire and snow effects, I am going to use Maya and After Effects to do this. I am not very good at making snowflakes, I will watch tutorials to learn and get good at using this module.
I will complete all the mapping of the models this month and the pyrotechnics and animations next month. My final goal is to make a courtyard in a crystal ball, the crystal will hold some models to showcase my models and I will add some smoke and fire effects to make the scene more realistic and some animation effects to the scene such as trains going through the courtyard and planes flying through the sky.

First, I made three different kinds of wooden houses

I found some tutorials for making snow on houses and plants

I make rocks and snowy mountains

I made a wagon and some tents

Next, I created the texture of the model

Rendering of the model

Train:

Light

Snow

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Vo4y1Z73k/?spm_id_from=333.337.search-card.all.click

First I will create a sphere as a snowflake, I will lower its segment a little to make it easier to see when I simulate it, then I will select the Mash node to create the snowflake, change the distribution type to volume and increase its number, this will show them all. I set the number of snowflakes to 4000, the volume could be smaller, and then make the snowflake model a little smaller. Turn off the ground and add a collision checker. Add a collision object to it. Then turn up the collision boundaries in its solver a bit.
Fine-tune it a little. Until the particles don’t spill out. Then I need to make the snowflakes feel like they are flying, I add a turbulence to the settler, then select turbulence and then select our solver, create a mechanics field, then find its attenuation, turn it down a little bit, the whole direction, the intensity is a little bit bigger, the snowflakes are flying up less, the value is adjusted to 50. The snowflakes are simulated by Mash, which needs to be tested repeatedly.

Smoke

Today I am making smoke of a train. First I’m going to create the animation of the train.
Then I switch to the FX function module, create a 3D container in the fluid menu, hide the ground model, select the fluid emitter separately and delete it, then create a sphere model, resize and position the model so that it can be hidden right inside the train’s tailpipe, select the 3D container, open the property editor, in the fluid shape tab auto resize, check the auto resize item so that the container can change its size with the In the Fluid menu, add the edit content item, select Emit from object, set the sphere as the fluid emitter, select the sphere model, then add the rocket model, establish the parent-child relationship, play the animation, the sphere will move with the rocket, and the sphere itself produces the smoke effect, but the smoke is not In the fluid shape properties tab, set the basic resolution to 50, select the fluid emitter, and in the basic emitter properties bar treat the emitter type as reverse and the rate as 1000. in the fluid properties bar set the density 10. in the emitter velocity acceleration mode as replacement, the parallel light rate is unique. Since the rocket smoke is ejected in downward direction, set the direction outward to 10. Play the animation again to see a clearer smoke effect. The following further increase the smoke variation, select the mountain container, in the dynamics simulation item, the gravity as 0. Continue to test, and constantly adjust the parameters. Let the smoke can be better to simulate the smoke of the train.

Diamond material

Glass material

I used After-effect to edit and create the background

Finally I use Final Cut Pro for compositing

Final rendering video

After completing this project, I reflected and took stock. I learned a lot in the process of doing this project, I also tried different means of production, went to learn new software and different maya modules, also practiced a lot and used some easy modelling methods. I didn’t understand enough about UV editing before, but in this project I was able to solve it quickly even if I encountered a situation where UV was missing.

During this project I have improved my skills in modelling and texturing, as well as my ability to solve problems quickly, and I have also learnt about Brifrost’s particle effects, and there is still much I can improve on for the future. I want to work more efficiently, build more complex models and create better and more detailed textures, and I need to learn more skills.

But there are still many things that I am not satisfied with in this project. Firstly, the particle effects part, the first shot of the sea of clouds, I did not follow the plan to create, secondly I planned to use Houdini to do an explosion scene, the building collapsed and shattered, this scene also did not complete, due to the slow running speed of the computer, I did not achieve the plan, so the learning of Houdini did not continue. Thirdly, my spaceship and scene were rendered on the same layer, I did not do a layered render of the spaceship and building, so in terms of nuke compositing and colour grading, I would always feel that there was a shortfall, and the light effect part of the scene was not well displayed.

In my next project, I will continue to work hard to produce a better product with enough time to add quality work to my portfolio. I feel the enthusiasm and joy that learning brings to me in the process, and I enjoy it, especially when I see the finished film, I have a great sense of achievement.

After rendering all the shots, I composited the backgrounds in Nuke. I will be colour grading in nuke to make my scene look more realistic and better lit.

Prior to this, I designed the start and end seconds of the motion graphics for my piece. To make the whole piece look richer, my original plan was for the first shot to be a multi-layered cloud, with the spaceship breaking through the clouds and appearing in the shot, but as the computer needed to solve too many model maps and particle effects, the computer would become very slow in post, so I abandoned this plan and I added some smoke effects to the opening credits instead of clouds. The effect was not very good, but the picture was not so monotonous.
I then went on to add some dynamic effects elements such as the energy ball on the tail of the plane, the plasma acceleration when the plane charges up and rushes the sub, and the star cluster in the last shot.

Later on I downloaded some audio of the ship for editing, I had to edit the audio according to the orbit of the ship and the speed of the ship, especially the space jump after the ship’s energy rush, I downloaded a lot of audio and edited it.

In the first shot, I left an extra 72 frames in front of me to add some cloud cover in post.
1 The first shot is of the spaceship swooping down, this shot requires a panoramic shot of the spaceship.
2 The second shot is of the spaceship flying through the city, this shot is a tracking shot
3 The third shot is of a missile being launched from the spacecraft, a close up of the missile is required.
4 The fourth shot is of the building breaking up, part of the building is destroyed by the missile, I will try to use Houdini to create the explosion effect.
5 The fifth shot is of the airship flying away and disappearing into the sky.
I have also left an empty scene in the back to add the portal.

After editing the animation, I edited the animation curve, and in the final accumulation acceleration scene, I adjusted the angle of the curve to make the ship accelerate

This week I started painting textures for the scene, in this plugin it comes with some scene textures and then I downloaded some texture images from the website myself and added them to my scene model

Writing Introductions and Conclusions: The session will provide tips for effectively structuring and writing with clarity and authority.

Introduction·

Film and television are audiovisual media that have emerged alongside the development of modern science and technology. Every innovation in film and television technology has pushed the medium forward: from silent to sound, from black and white to color, from film technology to digital transmission, and in 2015, when Virtual Reality, VR technology, met the medium, a variety of VR products were presented at the New Technology Showcase. Zuckerberg declared 2016 as the “Year of VR”. From here, VR and film began to come together and grow exponentially. Virtual reality (VR) screening platforms are also growing in popularity, as evidenced by the increasing availability of screening devices and the rapidly growing amount of virtual reality content for film – some of which is being shown or well presented at film festivals – and the term virtual reality for film includes immersive 360-degree and interactive film-like entertainment ( MacQuarrie & Steed, 2017; Mateer, 2017)

Conclusion

So to understand the ways in which film genres develop and change is to open a window on the forces that shape … on the processes by which filmmakers draw on and transform the language and properties of their artistic tradition VR（Lichtenfeld, E., 2007）At present, there are still many technical challenges in VR film and television, such as motion sickness for viewers, frame rate, GUI and other design issues that cannot yet be overcome. Of course, as research and development progresses, the technical challenges of VR film and television will gradually be resolved. The application of VR technology in film is still in the initial stages of experimentation, with many technologies still immature and many technical hurdles to overcome. The charm of the film.

This week I started to edit the UVs for each part to ensure that no UV stretching occurs in order for the texture to be better given to the model

My design for the whole model is a solid colour ship, like the TIE Fighter, Millennium Falcon, Super Star Destroyer, Snoke’s Supremacy Flagship, Interdictor Star from Star Wars Destroyer, all in almost solid colours. So I did the basic colouring in PS

I searched for some on material sites. Include diffuse, specular, SSS , metallic textures so that I could create a more metallic looking ship

I added materials to the model and tried to apply different textures to different parts of the ship’s creation, but it just applied the same textures to the whole ship, and after I kept testing and rendering, I adjusted the results to my satisfaction

This week we continue our study of nuke compositing as we add layers to enrich the realism of the image.
We started by keying and layering the objects in the image in Photoshop, then imported the ps file directly into Nuke and split it to get the following nodes. After that, we merged in Nuke, deleting some nodes and making changes to each layer. Finally a card node was created for each layer and the scene and camera were connected.

We create cards for each layer of the scene

Then overlay each layer

Last week I finished building the models. My plan is to fly a spaceship in a city, so I need to create a lot of building models to support my project, but creating a lot of building models, which I need to do one by one, may make me very short of time when I finally submit my work, so I installed a building generator plugin QTown, this plugin inputs various I don’t need a very detailed building model, the main focus of my work is on airships, so I generated some simple models to create.

I went on to add some fog and other particle effects to make the city shrouded in fog.