Final Project/Final Post

Let me start by saying this has been a really great class. I never really pictured myself doing visual effects stuff, but I really enjoyed learning it and experimenting. Thanks to Ben, Maru, and everyone in class.

Here is my final project. Many complications, but I think it turned out well overall. A few things that never worked quite right... I couldn't get the tornado to work properly in 3D space by actually moving the emitter. I wanted to do this so that the tornado would twist and bend in a natural way, but I was only able to move the entire layer. Also, I wanted to have a layer exploder particle layer on the barn, but this didn't work either. Well, actually, I don't know if it worked. I made this layer, but could not watch it. The ram preview took 10 min to load less than 2 seconds of it - even on 1/3 resolution. I tried to export it all so I could see it and then tweak it, but after several failed exports, I had to turn the layer off, as I was worried it was not going to work and didn't have time to do another export.

Why this is so late: I was expecting a long render, but I was not expecting a 13 hour render. I started the render the first time on Thursday night, left it running over night, only to come back the next morning to discover that the server had filled up mid-render, and so it did not complete. I started the export again immediately, it took until after the labs closed Friday night. I tried to go in first thing this morning to get it, but all the labs were closed until noon. I got it as soon as they opened, and finished the audio.

Here is the final product.

Tornado Alley from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

Thanks again to all of you. It was a great class.

Ryan

Final Project: Third Week

Still behind this week. I blame it on having my last two final exams ever tomorrow. After Thursday, I'm expecting some dramatic accomplishments on this project. Some work that was done this week...

I've started working on importing the tornado into my footage and plotting it's path. I thought that I could motion sketch the path, but when I converted the patch from 2d to 3d, it went a little crazy (y and z values were all over the place, only the x value was actually relevant to my sketch) and was unusable. Which means I have to painstakingly plot each point of the tornado's path, but i have experimented with the motion tracking of the emitters, and it looks pretty cool.

Also been working on the destruction of the barn. This will take several layers. One layer will be the actual barn, which has a mask that wipes over it (to erase the barn as it is destroyed). The other layers will use the exploder from Particle Playground to take the image of the barn and shatter it up into the tornado. Looks like a good start so far. The next step is to get shapes (splintered board and such) for the particles to form to, so the barn doesn't look like it is just braking apart into perfect little squares.

Video to be added to this post soon to illustrate what I'm talking about, but again, not till after Thursday.