VEF2 (Visual Effects 2) Project 3

Reference Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rizIJyY5DP0

Alright, so for this project I wanted to replicate a being poured into a glass cup. I decided to have the water coming out of a faucet in a kitchen sink. I looked around the internet for a while until I found a slow motion video of water being poured into a glass. The video showed the action at normal speed and then at several other slower speeds. This video was perfect. I knew the effect wasn't exactly what I could produce in the amount of time allotted. But it acted as a base that I could use.

Later I went into Maya and modeled out a glass cup, the cabinet with sink, and finally the faucet. This took maybe half an hour to do. The longest part was just finding some reference that I liked. I then exported the geometry out as objs and imported them into Houdini. But I had forgotten to put the models at the origin. So this took me a few tries to get everything right. Once all the models were in Houdini. I needed to scale them all down quite a lot. Everything ended up being set to 1/4 the original size.

Now I needed to create my water. I went about this by creating a sphere and used the "emit particle fluid" tool to make the shpere an emitter for my water. I had to scale the sphere down a little so it would fit inside the faucet. For a while this would cause me problems. It wasn't till I remembered about the particle seperation slider did things start working correctly again. I had to go down from the default setting of 0.1 to 0.02. Using values close to the default would only give me fluids that would break after a few frames. So at this point I was pretty happy. That issue had caused me several hours of trouble.

So at this point I had a liquid that was working and was the right size. The next thing I did was change the color of the basic liquid shader. I changed it to be a color of white. Next I added a marble shader to the cabinet and sink. I changed the base color to an off white with a subsurface of a pale blue. I lowered the reflect and refraction just a hair. Then I moved to the faucet. I used a stainless steel shader and simply darken the base color. Next came the glass cup. I added a glass shader and pretty much left it alone.

At this point I made the glass cup into a static object so the water would actually collide and work with the cup. But I was getting some leaking issues. I fixed this by unchecking "use volume based collision detection" in the auto dop network. My cup held all the water perfectly after that. Now I needed to mess with the physical setting of the water itself. I did this by turning on "use friction and bounce" in the flip solver node. From there I went into the flip object node node under the physical tab and added a bounce of 0.25 and a friction value of 0.062.

Now at this point I had changed everything I needed to. So I created an environment light and mapped a kitchen HDR file. The single frame renders that I did seemed pretty decent to me. So I went ahead and rendered out the simulation. Next I created a Mantra render node and rendered out my effect. IK want to point out that my stainless steel and glass shaders had some minor issues in the single frame renders. But if I increased any of my settings, I would get a much longer render time. After all, I was looking at a 9 hour render with the current settings. So I decided to leave the settings alone. I wasn't too sure how the final render would turn out. But I had no choice but to go ahead and a render it all out. This took me all Sunday night to complete. So my render wasn't done till around 5 in the mourning on Monday.

After the render was done, I went into Nuke to see how the Render turned out. I could see some issues with the shaders of the glass and stainless steel as predicted. But The water itself wasn't quite looking like what I wanted. But there wasn't much I could do with a 9+ hour render and less then that till the deadline. So I went into Nuke and did what I could, which didn't fix much. So in the end it didn't turn out too bad. But I still had some problems with the look. I was simply out of time to make any more corrections. I will admit, I didn't anticipate a 9 hour render time for this project. So that defiantly caught me off guard. But all in all, things didn't turn out too bad.