Week 5:

4/20/10
I changed up the lighting rig a little bit. I decided to get rid of the CHOP driven rotation and use the crawling effect for the lights. The crawl speed is controlled with a POP Accelerate which driven by the Synthesizer waves from CHOPS. Also the intensity of the lights are driven by the Synthesizer so that they strobe from time to time. These strobe lights are primarily for the smoke.

A little bit has changed with the smoke. It is still emitting the way it was before and is better on the bass beat now but I have also taken into account some suggestions that were made to me and am happy with the results. The turbulence and noise feilds in the pyro solver and now being driven by the bass beat so the smoke is getting whipped around very heavily when the song is picking up and louder. If the smoke looks to opace right now it should be fine later in the render because I can control the density further in the shader. I have also been working on simulating out the high resolution smoke from the low resoloustion. It is not difficult, it is just taking a good bit of time. I am up to about from 75 with the high rez because there were a few complications in the beginning.

Success with the streamers. I have changed the animation a little bit so they are more organized and not all over the place. They are similar now to something like squids. They are grouping a bit too much right now so I am going to change that so they can be more of their own and from time to time merge back to the squid form when the song slows. The glow though is working perfectly with PBR rendering. I do however want the light to cast out further onto objects far away. In the video I have also added random spheres so that you can see the light thrown onto them when the streamers get closs or pass behind. The effect is starting to turn out very nicely though.

4/22/10
I have started doing some test with sphere objects bouncing around. They are just simple dynamics but I will be using them to primarily create negative spaces and clear the screen so that it doesn't get too crowded. The pulsing/flickering is something I was experimenting with in terms of shaders. I will be changing this so that the bigger spheres will be a dark negative space that will help with the wipes and the smaller ones will be some type of glowing orbs that will be used for a similar purpose. I have also been attempting to add some lens flares coming from the smaller glowing like orbs but I haven't had any succuss getting the flare to animate or emit from the small orbs. If I decide to do something like that, it would probably be better done in post.