Effects!

While applying to jobs, I was asked to produce 6 effects pieces, to show how familiar I was with particles and effects work. For all the pieces I used my old buddy Johnny the Box (I hid his face for simplicity though), all the images were created in Photoshop, put together, and playblasted out of Maya.

Ice Blast

An attack with an "Ice Blast". I animated a small sphere (Just to have something solid in with all the tiny bits), then parented a few emitters to it. One directional, emitting streaks with a color and an opacity ramp, one omni emitting sprites with 5 images. The sprites have expressions on them which give them a random range for starting scale, rotation, and opacity, which then decreases over time. The sprites are being pulled upwards by a gravity field into a very light turbulence field just to keep them from repeating motions. The impact is a 1024X1024 sprite sheet, applied as a texture with an animated U and V offset, to a plane in front of the box. This was the first sprite sheet I did, and I made it 5 sprites by 5 sprites, which may have been the worst idea I've had in a long time. Finding the exact measurements was a real pain, and it ended up just being faster animating the U and V by entering number estimates, scrubbing through time and then adjusting the numbers make sure it transitions well. Lesson learned, make my sprite sheets easily divided. There is also a surface emitter that creates "Steam" sprites with the same scale, rotation, and opacity expressions on them.

Teleport

Johnny teleporting across the screen. The blur on this one was a 1024X1024 sprite sheet (4X4 this time), animated, then applied to a cylinder. The smoke is made of 3 sprite images, which have a random range for starting scale, rotation, and opacity, which then decreases over time.

Transform

A sphere being transformed into a cube. There are 4 emitters grouped, then parented to the sphere. The group is then rotated over time. They are emitting sprites of 3 images, that have the same Scale/Rotation/Opacity expressions as the sprites in the other animations. There is a second sphere around the floating sphere, with a 1024X1024 sprite sheet to make it glow (I was off on by a pixel on a few of the sprites, but in motion it isn't noticeable ) The puff is an volume emitter using the same sprites as the other emitters, but with a color ramp to make them darker and more saturated.

Super Powered

Johnny going super powered. There are two spheres spinning around him in opposite directions. The outer sphere is acting as a surface emitter, emitting multistreaks that have color and opacity ramps on them. They are also being influenced by a vortex field. The dust on the bottom is a 15 frame sequence applied to the sprites. there are two of these sequences, one pointing right and one pointing left. The sprites are being emitted by 2 surface emitters. One on either side, to send the sprites in the correct direction. In the future I'm going to try to figure out how to flip the image for certain sprites, so I only have to have one sequence. I think I can collect the direction they're facing from their acceleration, and go from there.

Flying

Johnny flying across the screen. There is a surface emitter on the bottom of Johnny that is emitting sprites with 3 images. These ones only have the Scale and Opacity on them, I tried it with rotation, but they didn't look quite right (Possibly because if the rotated in the wrong direction they didn't seem like they were being rotated by the force of Johnny's flight?) Then there is an omni emitter attached to the bottom of Johnny, but slightly offset, it's emitting points, that have color and opacity ramps on them. They are being influenced by gravity and a turbulence field that is slightly below and parented to the omni emitter. This just disrupts them a little bit before they fade out.

Floating Orbs

Johnny floating along in a bunch of orbs and smoke. The sprites are coming from a surface emitter, they have expressions that assign them a scale and rotation from a random range. They also are assigned a color from a random range for red and green, and 256 for blue. The rotation, red, and green all increase over time. They are being influenced by a light turbulence field. The orbs are coming from a surface emitter, just above the smoke emitter, they are being influenced by a light turbulence field as well as a newton field to keep them from going too far screen right. There are 5 orbs, each one has 3 layers of geometry, along with a surface shader for each of the 3 layers. The outer 2 surface shaders have tile-able textures with the UV offset animated in opposite directions. They are being instanced to the particles. The particles have a random range for particle ID, and scale, which chooses which of the 5 orbs to instance, and how big to make it. Both the smoke and the orbs are being contained by a cube with which they collide, but have low resilience.

Post Mortem

I like how they turned out. In the future I would definitely plan more. Even just a simple sketch in Flash to make sure I had a more solid idea going into Maya. This way I could maintain a more cohesive look to all of the pieces. I would, as I said make sure that my sprite sheets where much more easily divided. In the future, I would take the time to write my own Sprite Wizard. Maya's gets the job done, but it's always been a bit hard to work around, it locks out the lifespan, which can be fixed by commenting out 3 lines of code, but if I'm going to make changes to their code, I might as well right my own. Last thing I know I would do is I think it would be beneficial for me to work a little more on custom expressions. It might also help to learn about incorporating soft/rigid bodies, but that's just a whim, not something I know I would use almost every time.
-Campy