Week Two
- gracieszymanski04
- May 17
- 5 min read
Posts arranged newest to oldest.
To do:
Finalize Particle Sims
Ripple effect and lookdev for water
Atmospheric fog sim
Floating environment sparkles sim
Composite render layers to liking (plan to render well before deadline since I am going to need multiple renders)
5/17/25
I began today on continuing to refine the sparkle popnets I created. Keeping in mind that I will be copying star models to the points of these popnets. I did a little work on the floaty stars since the last test I posted. The main thing I changed was adding a pop speed limit node to the pop net in order to slow them down to a more floaty pace.
For the trailing popnet, I played around a lot with the life of the particles and the variance. I played with adding curl noise to the particles and played with the amplitude of the wind force that was affecting the particles. Here is what I ended up with after a lot of tweaking:
To be honest, I am not liking how they are looking. I think it is going to be too much to have these trailing particles on top of the floating particles and the main body particles. I think I am going to pivot and instead of doing a backwards trail, focus more on just adding some wispy particles that align well with the smoke simulation I did. I know I want more particles than just the ones stuck to the body, but I am just not liking how this is looking.
I found this tutorial online that I think I will be using to get this effect.
I did not completely throw away this pop net that I was playing with but instead, I toned back the particles and just adding a bit to the other floaty particles I had. I will be using these two sims as purely floaty sparkles now. Here is what the sparkles and the smoke look like together.
With doing all of these sims layered on top. My biggest priority for next work session is testing out my rendering pipeline and my compositing. I think what will be best for me is rendering things out in layers so I can individually adjust them in compositing. This will give me more control over how much glow or blur I add to each simulation. I am going to be doing some further research on using render layers in Karma, but I am expecting to just have to render multiple files on the farm. With that in mind, I want to test out this pipeline as soon as possible so I can prepare for how much render time I will need for this project before the deadline.
Another thing I started refining today was the environment of the cat. Using my references of magical cats I showed last time, I came up with the idea of having the cat standing in shallow water. I obviously did not want to do an actual water sim but I did some research and found the ripple solver node. This node is very useful for me for this project. I can just take a grid and every time something intersects with this grid, the ripple solver creates a ripple.
I started playing around with this node with my cat model and a simple grid:
After some testing, I plan on not using the actual cat model for the intersecting points but rather adding sphere that tap the grid at the same times that the cat's feet lift up. I want to have some ripples all around the grid as well appearing to contribute to the environment. I am keeping in mind that the cat appears from thin air in the first few seconds of my shot when I further refine these ripples.
Thinking about the further background and horizon of the scene past the water, I knew I did not want to composite anything as it would be hard to pull off a realistic integration with the time I have. Instead, I thought about adding atmospheric fog to blur away anything in the background. I found this tutorial online for lingering fog from a SideFx discussion forum from user iamnelsonlim. I think it will be perfect for creating a background for the cat that also fits in the mystical and magical scene.
That all being said, today's work session was all about refining my ideas and locking down what the final scene for my cat will look like. Going forward, everything will just be refining and making it look good.
5/14/25
Today, I added the smoke layer to my magical cat that I spoke about adding in the previous post. To do this, I used a very simple pyro simulation, not changing much besides adding some turbulance and increasing my dissapation. In addition, to create more visual interest in the smoke, I did not just scatter points over the geometry of the cat, but rather, I created a noise over the geometry of the cat and used that as the density and smoke spawning points. This noise was almost the same as the vein noise I created for my particle simulation as I used the same type of VOP noise for this effect. Here's the resulting pyro sim:
The next thing I wanted to test today was how I wanted to do the eyes of the cat. With just the particles and the smoke, the eyes were getting completely lost in the simulation but I wanted them to be more prominent. I thought about having them be in their own seperate particle simulation. I used a boolean to isolate the eye geometry from my cat mesh and created a separate pop net. Here is that result:
After viewing this sim in the stage, I did not like the result. I wanted the eyes to be more solid than they were looking as particles. I then thought about adding a pyro smoke layer to the eyes to help with that.
I then did some testing with adding a seperate smoke trail to the eyes.
I played around with this seperate smoke sim for a while, and though I know I could have refined it more to be less smoke or more refined wisps, I was not happy with how it was looking.
I decided to scrap this idea as well. I ended up landing on just taking the eyes as separate geos into the stage and giving them their own emissive material that was a bit brighter than the body. After all that testing the simplest way to do the eyes ended up being how I liked them. Here's a still frame of my magical cat so far with the particles, smoke, and emissive eye geo.
The last thing I wanted to start working on today was adding a trailing particle simulation. I wanted to add sparkles that sort of drifted back and trailed off behind the magical cat. To do this, I used a pop net with wind and pop attract to create a trailing effect. Here is my first pass at it:
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