Week 6:

4/27/10
I got the look down for what I want the spheres to look like. Of course there is some tweaking that has to be done with the reflections and the glow effects but over all it is a good simulation of close to what the final renders are going to look like. I do need to change the dynamic simulation of the spheres, I can't have that single sphere hovering there so still, it is too much of a distraction. So after some a few re-sims of the streamers and the spheres they should be good to go and some touch ups on the renders.
The smoke is coming along. The fluid simulation looks good but I am having trouble getting the high-rez to come out. It gets held up at frame 260 but I have been working with the low-rez in the mean time to get it to look right in case the high-rez doesn't get finished. I think what I am going to use it for the low-rez will be fine. It is really just being used for filler and atmosphere.

4/29/10
The smoke video below is the low-rez somke that I have been working with. I have rendered every 12 frames so I could have a quick preview that is why it is scrubbing through. By looking at it now I can tell that I need to work with the shader more and probably turn up the frequency and amplitude on the shader. I left the orange orbs float through the smoke so I could see how the light interacted with the smoke. You can't see them since I turned off the objects but the lights are still emiting. It is a bit too many lights moving around the smoke and it is flattening it and making it come out too orange and red. I am going to do some more renders with the tweaked shaders and only link blueish and greenish strobe lights to the smoke and exclude the orb lights. This should give the smoke a bit more deffinition.

Here is a re-render of all the objects from the first video above. The main thing that has changed our the spheres that bounce around. The animation of them has changed a little bit so that they stay constantly moving and the shaders on the chrome looking spheres has been changed to glass only I changed the index of refraction to that of diamonds. I thought the look would be more interesting when other objects passed behind the spheres and so far it is. I am very pleased with these results.