Real Flow - leading in fluids

I must agree with Wyatt that, yes, Maya Fluid effects are Swiss army knife but the principle behind displacement is used in much more advanced fluid packages as well. I used ocean shader to show how displacement is used in action to come up with decent imagery with what we have on hand at USC. While Fluid effects can have real dynamics and interaction with other objects/characters within the scene, it is true that Maya Fluid is not the best tool available on the market. It is Next Limit Real Flow software that is the leading in this arena (Every kind of fluids but clouds) but unfortunately we don’t have access to it at USC. Here are samples done with Real Flow:

Here is the link to see the reel:
http://www.nextlimit.com/realflow/img/videos/realflow_showreel2007_externalsonido.html
It is really interesting.


It is also interesting to note that although Real Flow was originally a Visual effects tool, a program called Xflow is derived from it which is for scientific and engineering visualizing.
Here is a link to Xflow:
http://www.nextlimit.com/xflow/index.htm

Massive - first impressions!

I just started to do some tests with Massive and read the tutorials. I must say that it is much more technical than what we had been told about. After working with it for several hours, I see that I have to get back to my math books to read about Fuzzy Logic again. Massive is all about Artificial intelligence and Fussy Logic is the way to go. Just look at the picture to see And gates and other stuff in compacted form!


And here is the AI diagram for sitting and standing part:

It's much more complicated than I had imagined!

Prof. Tony Michaels speech about Visualizing science

Here is a part of Prof. Tony Michaels speech at our group seminar on Sep 05 2007 about Visualizing science and how artists can help scientists to come out of what he calls “invisibility to public”. He is the Director of the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies and Professor of Biology at USC. Prof. Tony Michaels is very interested in visualizing science using creativity of artists here at USC school of Cinematic arts.

Getting to work with Massive

We are going to use Massive software for several scientific visualization projects here at USC. Massive software was first developed and used in the Lord of The Rings movie and since then it has been used in a number of movies and commercials. While it was used to simulate a large number of crowds of people in the scenes like what we can see in the battles of Lord of the Rings movie, it can also simulate the behavior of mass number of anything from human to animal to plants! Now they have added robotic controllers to massive as well so that it won’t be used only on screen. "Massive is the premier 3D animation system for generating crowd-related visual effects for film and television. Using Massive, an animator or TD designs characters with a set of reactions to what is going on around them. The reactions of the characters determine what they do and how they do it. Their reactions can even simulate emotive qualities such as bravery, weariness, or joy. The agent reactions can control key-framed or motion captured animation clips called actions. Characters that perform on their own in this way are referred to as agents. Massive is a system for designing and running such agents. When scaled up into the hundreds - or hundreds of thousands - the interaction within the crowd that emerges from these individuals is highly realistic. By building variation into an agent, the Massive artist can populate a scene with individuals who are unique in everything from physical appearance to how they respond." More information: http://www.massivesoftware.com/

Future of Animation and Visual Effects

Theory: The animation and visual effects tendency is towards smaller organizations, and eventually individuals to make feature films; Films that soon might be possible to be made easier and more economical than the ones which employ real actors/environments.
As time passes and technology improves, new tools are being made every day that enable artists to work more efficiently and get the end-results faster and easier. A scene that could have employed 20 people to work on a few years ago, might be done individually today. Every year the number of CG-featured movies is increased. More and more movies employ computer generated characters and environments instead of real ones; Characters and environments that even a trained eye might get confused by watching them wondering whether they were computer generated or real. Will there be someday soon that the majority of characters/environments are computer generated instead of real?