Steel Mill Particle Simulation

For this project I really wanted to give a different vibe than my first visual effects project, my first project was bright, colorful and happy. I wanted to make this one a bit darker and even unsettling. I think experimentation in different styles is very important even in CG.

The steel mill scene was provided to us along with all the geometry and lighting. We were responsible for the particle effects and the overall entertainment value. I learned a lot about particle simulation with this project.

Particle emitters produce the particles but only affect them until they leave the emitter, after that they react based on the world around them. This can mean a variety of different things: A gravity field will cause them to fall on the axis you set the gravity to, setting the particles to collide with geometry will do just that (based on the settings you can have them stick on a surface or bounce off of it, or react in other ways), or they can just go on forever if you have nothing affect them.

Point particles with a gravity field

Point particles set to collide with geometry

Point particles with no additional fields or settings

I tried many different effects for this project. The fire was multistreak, the water and lava was blobby surface, the smoke was smoke, and the sparks were tube. My favorite effect though was the blobby surface, there is just so much potential with those particles and I love how they clump together based on their proximity.

The thing about all of these different particles though is that some require maya hardware rendering and some require a software render, like maya software or mental ray. So rendering in passes is almost a requirement, and certainly recommended if you want to alter the effects individualy in a compositing package like Nuke or After Effects (I used After Effects for this project.)

Count on particle simulation renders to take a while, especially with mental ray, rendering this all in passes took around 28 hours.

Why so Spoooky?
Like I mentioned earlier, I really wanted to change styles from my first project but for the longest time I had no inspiration as what to do (I had a simple pan of the whole scene with no real character in the camera motion.) Late one night I decided to make the camera first person to give the effect of actually being there, and then I realized how scary the steel mill actually is and I thought how it would feel to be there alone after hours while something was watching you. That really got me thinking about the sound design and what would actually be the payoff at the end. I decided to go with the Bugsy rig I was using in my animation class because hyper-extending the jaw is really creepy. Hope you can sleep easy after this and I'll see you next time.