Maya Fireworks Or Trapcode Particular Fireworks...hmmm

[goesb]

Ok, so I'm doing this 3D Flythrough of a city, and it has fireworks that need to be added in Maya or in After Effects. The way I see it, I have two options.

Maya option:

I know I could do it with Maya's particles, but it seems to not be incredibly efficient considering all the particle caching etc. However this would give me nice reflections in the windows of the buildings which I think would make the whole composite stronger. I also know it has the Effect > Fireworks but that seems sort of plain and not incredibly interesting. The other thing with the Effect > Fireworks option is that I can not seem to scale it up to my scene's size appropriately. I see options for the burst positions etc., but I can't make the burst bigger.

After Effects / Trapcode Particular option:

I could easily export the camera data from Maya to AE and use the nulls as emitters for Particular. I've tried this before and had decent results, but I'm puzzled on how I could get semi-realistic reflections on the buildings.

I'm also wondering if there's an option I'm not thinking about. Like maybe using normal maps or depth maps with some magical plugin in After Effects.

Any advice?

[joojaa]

Its justa old how to use maya exaple, its not emant for production use. Anyway kill the glow and do that in post.

QUOTE(goesb @ 12/18/08, 06:01 PM) [snapback]297355[/snapback]
I know I could do it with Maya's particles, but it seems to not be incredibly efficient considering all the particle caching etc.

Umm caching is not a sign of ineficency but rather a more efficient work flow that's random acces. Even ae does thsi you know.
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The other thing with the Effect > Fireworks option is that I can not seem to scale it up to my scene's size appropriately.

Erm scale the fireworks group.

[goesb]

Thanks for replying.

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Its justa old how to use maya exaple, its not emant for production use.

Hmm...I wonder why they call it an Effect then.

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Umm caching is not a sign of ineficency but rather a more efficient work flow that's random acces. Even ae does thsi you know.

The caching is a problem because we are sending this out to a remote render farm, and therefore it is inefficient in my opinion. Plus if I have say 100 cache files, I just feel that it's overkill. If this was for a highly detailed city then I would go this route but I just don't have the time to mess with all of this considering our deadline.

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Erm scale the fireworks group.

I wish. I tried a few times to scale up Maya's fireworks example and I could never get it to cooperate. I suppose I could bake it and then scale it up, but the example is not that interesting anyway so I've given up on that route.

At this point I'm looking at exporting nulls from Maya and importing those into AE. Then use the nulls as emitters using Trapcode's Particular plugin. It's just so much faster to use it IMO because I spend less time writing MEL, and more time actually designing and perfecting the look. My only problem right now is faking reflections on a ground plane.

[joojaa]

you should have told me you wnated to foce the answer maya sucks ae is better and i wouldnt have bothered But i dont agree so thats moot, ae quite simply sucks instead, its ok, except for that fact its slow and doesn't do comp very well. But as a animator for motion graphics its pretty decent.

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Hmm...I wonder why they call it an Effect then.

They are just bundled in to the sytem because they vere made, no point in throwing them away. You need to call things something inorder to group them into the gui.

You dont actually need fireworks effect for making convicing fireworks its just a demo on how to bundle up things. You can easily do this with your own emitters. It is by the way a 8 year old demo in that so no woender you find it uncovincing. it was never even supposed to be state of the art even 8 years ago. But rather show how you could sutilize particle systems innovatively.

QUOTE(goesb @ 12/21/08, 07:20 PM) [snapback]297506[/snapback]
The caching is a problem because we are sending this out to a remote render farm, and therefore it is inefficient in my opinion.

Instruct the remote farm to redo the cache. Anyway maya can render it without the cache, its just that if you have 4 computers rendering then they would all need to revisit all frames because a discrete simulation is dependent on the previous frame. Meaning youd waste this time 4 times. Even ae would have the same problem. Now since 4 machines are doing this its possible one of them would go wrong and youd have to re render that slice.

So in way its a security issue. If a renderer fails it dont need to start over form frame 1.

Now lets push this image intoa farm with 1000 computers and you are rendering 2000 frames. Now each computer would spend a minute or so to update the simulation state and 30 seconds rendering the frames. So what you have done is billed yourself with 3000 minutes worth of computer time usage versus 502 minutes of work, billing yourself 6 times more than you would need just because you feel its frivillous for you to send files.

Likewise you could say that its a impossible thing to get tghe files out after all you get ione file per frame out of the farm too.
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, I just feel that it's overkill.

you do understand that if you render with something like prman, it des generate some 6 files per every frame ever rendererd (and as a result does not need a particle cache), theese files are being huge too. And that my firend is as state of the art as it gets.

Anyway its a system that needs to scale to those complex scenes yes so in the end it uses same mechanism.

Besides the number of filesis not a issue to the computer jsut your sense of whats worng. the cache could be jut one file if you wished but it wouldnt change anything. Now atleast its easyy to use system tools to make changes to individual frames.

On this note if your farm supports remdering mi files directly then you dont need the cacehe files just the flat out scene description expotrrted to one file if you wish, tough having one file per frame is more flexible.
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I wish. I tried a few times to scale up Maya's fireworks example and I could never get it to cooperate.

oh deary deary me. Open the outliner and select the object named Fireworks and scale it up. The relative size of the burst is controlled by max burst speed.

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It's just so much faster to use it IMO because I spend less time writing MEL

you dont need to write a single line of mel to make a fireworks type effect with particles or even coregraph them, what do you need? I mena you can easily mould the shapes of the fireworks.

Anyway this feeling is mostly just bacuse your better at using ae than maya.
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Then use the nulls as emitters using Trapcode's Particular plugin

you could do this in maya too.

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My only problem right now is faking reflections on a ground plane.

make the particle system a a comp then make a second comp that has that comp and a flipped version of it for the flor. Not accurate but a widely used trick that fools humans 99% of the time.

If you want to be proper render a copy of the effect with a camera that is mirrored across the plane and comp those two together. Basic computer graphics 101 pixar has some papers decribing how to get the position calculated if you dont know how.

[goesb]

You are very knowledgeable in Maya, and I wish I had that talent, but you are treating me like I'm a total idiot and you are Nick Burns (the computer guy from SNL). MOVE! lol.

I do appreciate your comments, I love Maya, and I NEVER said AE was better than Maya. I simply did not have luck with their Fireworks example. I did try to increase the scale of the Fireworks explosion, and I'm telling you it DID NOT WORK. Perhaps my example is broken, not sure. I tried grouping, I tried changing the burst speed, and nothing worked for me. I'm on OS X and I'm using Extension 2. Like I said before though, I couldn't find a way to make it very interesting anyway, so I abandoned that effect.

Regarding the render farm, I'm simply saying it's inefficient because I'm sending this to a remote render farm. I know enough about particle caches to know that they can get to be 1 - 2 gb in no time. Now if I have 100 varied firework explosions and they all average 1gb for particle caches, that's 100gb of data I have to upload. That would take too long and therefore that's why I think it's inefficient. If it was a farm here locally, then I could grab a hard drive and be on my way. Please enlighten me if I'm missing something here. I guess I could bake them all prior to sending it to the farm? I'll need to use an instancer anyway to render in Mental Ray right?

Do you have a link to something for mirroring a camera's data in AE? That's what I've been trying and I agree that this should be easy. But for some reason I can not make the duplicated camera's (reflection camera) movement a mirror of the main cam. I flipped it to be upside down, but then the ground plane is off and things moving left to right on the screen go right to left. I hope I'm making sense. Here's a test file I had posted for a Trapcode forum.

http://ericsbowman.com/storage/particular\_...eflect\_test.aep

Again, I appreciate your suggestions and I'm not entirely opposed to trying Maya again.

[joojaa]

Well i have to assume something to communicate. and in general i lower the ar at each subsequent post.

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Now if I have 100 varied firework explosions and they all average 1gb for particle caches, that's 100gb of data I have to upload. That would take too long and therefore that's why I think it's inefficient.

then you culdt send a batch commend to your commercial farm issuing a regeneration of the particle cache on their end its just as simple as that or just dont send it at all (tough this can end in a world of pain). It uses up some time one one computer. Anyway the particle caches are very uncompressed so zipping up a 1 gb particle cache file would probably compress it to 1/10th of the size. Also prsumably your not billed for the transfer.

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love Maya, and I NEVER said AE was better than Maya.

no i suppose you didnt.

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Do you have a link to something for mirroring a camera's data in AE?

No but ist not hard to calculate even manually its just a matrix multiplication after all. Ill look at m ae before i go home today.

[goesb]

Very good point about the cache file. It is just text so I bet the compression will dramatically reduce the total size of that file. However I've never sent a batch command before, and I'm not sure if there's a way to do it with the service we are using. I'll ask tech support today about that, or just zip the cache and try that.

If I do go the AE way and use Trapcode however, I'm still puzzled by the camera reflection/fake reflection technique. I tried a few things with mirroring the comp, flipping the comp, flipped the camera, tried using pickwhip expressions to tie one cam to the other then tried to multiply by -1...etc. I just could never get it to the correct position because I'm flying through the fireworks. If it was a stationary camera then I of course could just flip the comp, but this seems more difficult to me with the camera in motion.

I'd love to hear if you get something out of AE. It seems like such an easy thing to do, but for some reason I just can not make it line up correctly. IN the meantime I might just try it in Maya again.

[joojaa]

no matrix math oh well i have to write it out then... just a question are you animating both point of interest, and orientation?

[goesb]

Yes. Both. I'm using a script I found here on Highend3D.com (MoCon). It lets me export my Maya camera to the OBM format, and then I of course have a script inside AE that allows import of this. When I look at the values it seems all of these are animated:

Point of Interest
Position
Orientation
X Rotation
Z Rotation

I have not heard of 'matrix math', but you have sparked my interest. I'm actually fairly smart, contrary to what you probably think of me right now. haha. I'll keep researching.

[joojaa]

Well i will have to factorize this into a expression (well most likely mathematica wil do it for me but i will have to build it up before factorisation) but im i bit busy right now so i will have to postpone it slightly. Anyway i assume nothing about your characters. Everybody has a capacity to learn its a choice to do so or not that counts.

matrix math is not very hard to understand, the standard affine 3x3 matrixes of 2d and the 4x4 matrixes are just simply, representations of linear equations where three and respectively 4 of the basis vectors of the coordinate system are stored. The nice thing about them is that the linear combination theorem applies normally making for easy calculation notation.

Wait a second you say at this point, 3 dimesions have 3 basis vectors what the hell is the forth. Likewise for 2 dimension whats the 3rd. Welll the last component is offset f the center of the previous coordinate system. So basically a 4x 4 affine matrix is:

CODE
Xx,Xy,Xz,Xw
Yx,Yy,Yz,Yw
Zx,Zy,Zz,Zw
Wx,Wy,Wz,1

The w values do have meaning they represent the perspective trasform but for normal trasforms they are 0, also vectrs are usually ahving 4 dimensions too where the last signifies if the compyuatational entry is a point or a vector (vectors dont gain offset so their w is 0 weraas points do their is 1).

http://www.sosmath.com/matrix/matrix.html

Now he cool thing about matrixes is that multiplication calculates the bembination of 2 matrices and inverses calculate the operations other way around. And that the opration is very computation friendly needing no higher level inteligence.

[joojaa]

Ok i figured out the easiest way. move a null layer where you want the plane to be (this will work as long as you dont need animate the position of this plane in 3d all rest can animate as much as they wish), create a copy of your camera, parent the plane to the camera. Using pick whip in expression link all tha transform attributes to this new camera. Move the plane into mirror position, and orientation. Parent camera to plane scale plane z by -100% your good to go.

[goesb]

JooJaa, you da man! I think that will work perfectly. I'll have to try it later.

Unfortunately I couldn't get my camera animation to line up inside of After Effects. I read probably 15 articles/tutorials on the subject, and apparently there's issues with AE and how it handles world units. Maya is affected by this the most, while Cinema4d works like a champ. Maya's camera and locator nulls come in out of scale, and adjusting the camera zoom would not fix it. I used MoCon, and it worked fine on a test scene, but not with mine. I was using rather large scene units though because, well, it's a city.

From what I gather though, Maya is aimed towards film/visual fx, and Cinema4d is more of a motion graphics tool so it makes sense that most people are using Nuke, Shake etc. for compositing instead of AE. I know Shake well, but AE has all of our purchased plugins that we would like to have at our disposal. Long story short I'm using Maya to do everything now, and although I'm having serious bugs with Maya 2008, I'm happy I'm going this way.

OH, and the Matrix math stuff, I read a lot before you posted your explanation, and I guess that's just one side of my brain I'm having difficulty with. I'm going to try and study it more though, because it is interesting and I'd love to know how to put it to use.

Thanks for all the help, and happy holidays!

[joojaa]

Try adjusting your ma file and set the unit to something different taht what you have. cm is a good guess.

Anyway its ae that's doing the thing wrong not maya tough to be honest whoever made the gl

[goesb]

that's the first thing I tried. It's strange I baked the camera, made sure my frame rates were correct everywhere, and did what you said. I even tried all the units as separate files to try them all. I tried every single unit, and in my case they matched up the best in CM, as expected, but the locators still drifted after the first 100 frames or so in a 900 frame animation. But then at the end I do a 360 sort of, and the rotations go crazy in AE, looks fine in Maya though. I even ran a Euler filter in Maya that someone suggested, and it made the keys smooth in Maya's hypergraph and looked better in AE. But it was still off. I zoomed the camera in AE to try and compensate and it helped some, I tried scaling the locators. blah blah

I had this work perfectly in two test scenes, and I used it a month ago on a project and I was amazed at how easy it was with MoCon. But there's something about my scene file it does not like. I'm starting to think it was because the cam was on a motion path but I baked it so I don't see why that would matter.

I'm clueless right now.

[joojaa]

Ok come again how did you change units? Inside maya or by manually wrting in the, ma file? The later provides a conform whereas the former would just make the problem persist.

Anyway ive always disliked ae for number of reasons, most notably just because adobe seems not to be able to get comp stuff at all. I mean some of the easiet operations in the world are impossible in ae.

Have you adjusted the cameras more esoteric settings.

[goesb]

Ya know I did try one time to look at the MA file and change the units there - found that suggested elsewhere. It was set correctly though when I viewed the MA.

Yeah I hear ya about AE. I think for compositing it's not all it could be. I love Shake in comparison, and haven't used anything like Nuke or others.

So yeah at this point, I've spent so much time trying to get the damn camera into AE, I just gave up. I spent more time reacquainting myself with particles in Maya, and I think it's going to be much better.

[goesb]

New problem, probably should create a new post, but I'll ask you here first since you seem to be a wealth of knowledge JooJaa.

I'm using Tube S/W render type on my particles, with the Maya software renderer for final output. I do have it all cached too, and it seems to be right (ie. I can scrub forward and back with no probs).

I'm rendering two passes, one pass for the fireworks themselves, and one reflect pass so that I get nice reflections on the side of the buildings. Here's the issue though, my reflect pass is flickering. My fireworks pass is totally fine so I assumed my camera's clipping planes were set well enough, and I've adjusted it many times to see if it would remedy the situation, but it does not.

I also tried to up the number of rays in raytracing options, found in maya software's render globals. They were set to 5 initially and I bumped it up to 10 and then 20 to see if it would help, and as expected it did not help.

Any suggestions?

[joojaa]

are you using glow? if so disable auto exposure. I'm a bit preoccupied with a party, four girls are distracting me so dont take this as one of my average good advice check tough. Ok so I'm multitasking as well as reserved

if not elborate, please.

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I'll ask you here first since you seem to be a wealth of knowledge.

Sometimes, if one is willing to trade in my mistakes. No seriously free only as long as i feel communication is worth it. Payment is in exchange of knowledge. I'm present as long as somebody doesn't make me feel bad about what i do. Mostly my answer span is between 6h to 32h. But sometimes my presence costs me in personal life so i have to be away.

So on a normal day i exchange your not knowing something with me not understanding what there is not to know. It is a good deal for me. Sometimes i feels like selling my soul, tough for you it should feel like that too.

[goesb]

YO,

Thanks for the reply JooJaa, and dude get back to that party. You are a multi-tasking genius if you have 4 girls, a party, and Highend3d taking up your time.

Ya know the shader glow was the first thing I looked at, and I had it shut off completely since I plan on adding my glows in post. I went ahead and shut off the auto exposure checkbox anyway, but I assume it's not the cause of my problem since it was set to zero for halo and glow.

After messing all day with this, it does seem to be a problem with my clipping planes but they are reacting very strange. I don't know if I need to keyframe my clipping planes or what, but I'm not able to keep it at one setting and successfully render the entire scene. It seems very random, and it might be due to the large size of my scene file. I need it to have a close clipping plane because I'm flying through fireworks, but need the far clipping plane - well - very far away because fireworks are going off in the distance. I just set it to 10 for near and 1,000,000 for far clipping and it looks like it is rendering one of the previously black frames.

Again, thanks for all the help you've provided, and get back to that party.

[joojaa]

QUOTE(goesb @ 12/28/08, 01:29 AM) [snapback]297770[/snapback]
Thanks for the reply JooJaa, and dude get back to that party. You are a multi-tasking genius if you have 4 girls, a party, and Highend3d taking up your time.

No worries i type 120 wpm looking the other way, so no answering does not use up my thinking much.