A smoke Tail Test combining Krakatoa and FumeFx. There are about 3 million particles in this small shot and this is straight out of the 3DsMax.
For colour, I 'd Normalized Velocity of the particles while using a gradient map using the Explicit mapping channel mode.
This animation is an experiment to look in to the possibilities of "Vertex Colour Shading" feature provided by ThinkboX Frost and KCM. I have used Real Flow to prepare a simulation of a paint splash which gets transformed in to a Sony's Walkman logo, the simulation has some issues with the particle drops bursting up in the space.
Anyway, following section will explain my process of creating this animation:
Real Flow Simulation:
I made use of Real Flow Container to subdivide my particles inside Real-flow which made me break down the flow and this allowed me to have more control over my particles throughout the scene. This was achieved by making use of Filters inside the Real Flow. Following are the parameters for the fluid:
Resolution:-3.0 Density:-5000.0 (This is an important parameter as I used this to control Vertex shading of my Fluid) Viscosity:-7.0 (Increasing this parameter above or equal to 10 caused inter-particle collisions leading to abnormal fluid behaviour) Surface Tension:-50.0
The SIM:
(Hmm the simulation is missing the big spherical dot which is done separately and then loaded into the scene by using Krakatoa PRT Loader.)
The simulation is done by using Magic Daemon in Real Flow.
Using Frost to Mesh Particles:
Step 1-Loading Real Flow bin files into Autodesk 3DS Max2012 by using Krakatoa's Prt Loader.
Step 2-Using KCM for creating a Mapping channel:
I used the Magma Flow editor to normalize the density of my particles, so that the values lies in the range of 0 to 1. This was used as a value to colour out mesh later while shading the mesh created in Frost.
Step 3- Using Frost to create a Mesh:
To mesh the particles was a bit difficult job as the animation itself contains fluid moving up against the gravity. As I wanted the mesh to have a paint splash effect, I used following settings in order to achieve the results, one can take this further by tweaking parameters mentioned below:
Meshing: Zhu/Bridson
Zhu/Bridson parameters:
Blend Radius:4.5
Particle Size: 0.2
Meshing Quality:
set to Relative to Max. Radius with values: Render:10.0 (tranforms the mesh at rendering time making it more smoother by subdivision) Viewport:1.0
A good mesh is always a best values given by Zhu/Bridson's Blend Radius and Particle Size.
Here is the mesh result:
Step 4:- Shader Creation
I made use of the Mapping Channel 2 created in Magma Flow to shade the mesh. The material is a common Vray Material with Gradient map applied to its Diffuse and Refraction parameters, both of which are using Mapping Channel 2. The mapping channel contains values ranging from 0 to 1 as retrieved from the Step 2, hence the areas which are less denser will show light orange colour and will have refraction prominent.
Following is the screen shot of the Material used by me:-
base material refraction map diffuse map
Step 5:-Rendering
Render is a 1920X1080 image which is using :
Three Point lighting rig, all of which are area lights ( which cost me heavy rendering time, since I later knew that for area lights shadows, reflection,refraction etc are calculated per light based :( )
Adaptive DMC as Image sampler
- which is the best adaptive Image sampler for rendering animation
-since this sampler uses the average of the sample values collected for a pixel hence unlike it's counterpart "Adaptive Subdivision" it doesn't require all of subdivisions/samples to store inside the memory making it memory efficient.
Indirect Lighting:
Irradiance Map was the best choice for the primary bounce sampler(GI SAMPLER ALGO) among all other samplers as it provides different presets which automatically configures this sampler.
Beside this one can check the Show Samples to confirm if there are enough samples for the scene.
I used Brute force as my secondary bounce sampler.
Here is my Animation, as this is my first time rendering with Vray and Frost C&C are most welcome:
Ohk the most important part of the entire animation is The Rendering TIme which took around 2days and 4 hours :( , which is insanely high, or might be appearing too high to me.
