27/03/2015

Progression of my project.

Recently I've noticed my work shifting further and further from he character design roots and more to making a final image. The influence of surrealist artists has definitely had a strong impact and I've started focussing more on the presentation of my work and less on the technical detail.

Ive been experimenting with sculpting using far more abstract forms, but trying to anchor the designs to reality using recognisable parts of anatomy. 

I would say the Vision Statement of my project has changed over the recent months and it has taken me a while to really nail down what i am doing but I'm confident with the direction that i have been going in, i just wish that i had the major break through in thinking a few months ago.

My new vision statement is 

The portrayal of surrealist imagery using ZBrush.

Flame with sparks.


Using a cube as both the emitter for the liquid container, and simultaneously as an emitter of nParticles that i was using to represent sparks.

The n particles are too small and un noticeable at the moment, especially in the final render.

The scene has three expressions running in it, one for the wind direction for the nucleus responsible for the n particles, one that changes the initial velocity of the liquid to simulate it being under the same wind effect as the nParticles, and one that changes the turbulence of the liquid to make it more natural looking.




Using the opacity graph i shaped the flame, using a slightly broader and longer flame than the candle.


Using the incandescance controls i linked it to the temperature of the flame, so the flame has realistic shading.



I wanted to make the flame have these small bits of flame left behind when it moves fast,  like in the top of the image but the effect is hard to reproduce and often looks bizarre.








25/03/2015

Conjoined Sculpt

This idea, whilst not particularly original, has been floating around my head for a while.

Moving forward with more of the surrealist ideas that i had been working with, the manipulation of form, or rather lack of form, was something i wanted to examine.

Whilst trying to maintain anatomical accuracy i wanted to combine two bodies into one another, one almost tearing free from the other, but how would that work in 3D , could i maintain the sense of movement, but also the sense of ambiguity.

Starting with a sketch to establish the main blocks of anatomy i wanted to be in the final image.




I started out experimenting with the head, exploring the facial expressions and the way the skin would merge between the two.



Looking at ways other Zbrush artists worked, i decided to split the hands into separate tools, so i could easily manipulate the fingers and make the crease that appears between the hand and the shoulder more realistic.



The final composition.


I was greatly inspired by the sculpture "The Rape of Proserpina" the way the hands and the body pressed into one another, giving a real sense of weight and tension throughout the sculpture.

Whilst it would be vastly over reaching to say i aimed to get a look as refined and beautiful as this sculpture i feel like examining it helped me understand how i can bring some life into my sculpture.









18/03/2015

Starting Torch Simulations.


After using the fluid dynamics i wanted tot try something a bit different and perhaps more suited to games. Using nDynamics i made an emitter, and told it to decrease the size of the particles the longer they were alive. It certainly doesn't look as impressive as using the fluid dynamics but it is so much faster to simulate that i may look for a way to incorporate it into my project.

After that i made a simple torch model with two parts, and made a fluid container using the head of the torch as an emitter. Using the auto resize option for the container i animated the torch moving from the upper left to the lower right, similar to what i will have to do in the final piece.

I encountered a few problems with this method, using the fall off shape for the fluid container for instance. Because the fall off shape seems to be applied to the container as a whole rather than from the emitter, if the emitter moves to the edges of the container the flame starts to disappear at the bottom. 

As the flame moved it also left a trail behind, which isn't really what fire does, unless it is moving at a ridiculous speed and with a liquid fuel.

Next ill start working on adding sparks to the flame, and making the flame more realistically shaped as it moves.



15/03/2015

Motion Fields in Liquid Containers.


Ive experimented with adding motion fields to props and moving them through the flames. Using the Vector Draw option in the Fluid Container you can see every force affecting a simulation.

Using Dynamics rather than nDynamics means that this is the only way to get my flame to interact with outside objects, so it was very helpful to learn.

However with the focus of the project being games, every extra calculation i add to the simulation makes it less and less suitable.

12/03/2015

Liquid Dynamics for Flame.


To make the flame a realistic shape i used the opacity graph to only make certain areas of the flame visible.


This is the shape i was looking for, and to get the fade at the bottom of the flame i used a fall off shape. In this case i used a sphere. 





A final render i did of the candle flame. I was happy with how it turned out, and i think it will be very useful for my final project because it taught me the fundamentals of using the fluid dynamics and fluid containers in maya.