STUDIO 3 JOURNAL ENTRY: WEEK 7

This week predominantly consisted of particle effects and rendering. LOTS of rendering...

I began the week off by watching a bunch of tutorials on how to make particle effects look like fireflies and an aurora borealis. From there I made some test pieces:

This test was learning how to create particle effects that follow a locator. My original idea was to make the fireflies dance around the screen, however I decided to simple have them vortex towards the sky, which i think looks better.

I created the Aurora Borealis by following a 3DS Max tutorial (which was very difficult to convert to Maya) however it didn't really work, so instead I used the texture map that I created from that tutorial and put it on a cloth simulator. Previs Below:

This previs shows how the particle effects work in the scene.

I then decided to render out a 720p render of what I had done so far, however the Aurora didn't come through for some reason and there was a harsh line in the horizon:

I was very confused why the aurora didn't work, however I render farmed the render so maybe that was why (as in I used 4 computers to render at different point in the animation, so that may have interfered with the particle effect). This was how it should have turned out: