Time-Lapse Sky with Clouds

[suonlim]

Hi,

We just bought Maya recently and now trying to create a 30 secs time-lapse sky with dramatic clouds effect, from morning to night and sunny to stormy. There are several default clouds effects in Maya but we find hard to achieve what we want, here's the link for the example what we are looking for, it's a showreel from planetpoint and that's what we're trying to achieve.

http://www.planetpoint.com/

(this site is only for registered user, you can easily register with them and then access to DP>Cinematography>Ben Butin>Motion Control Demo)

Do you think Maya would be able to achieve this?? Any tips or links to tutorials will be grateful!

Thanks in Advance!

Suon-Oon Lim
Wishing Well The Imaging Station

[jtk77]

there was a demonstartion tutorial on imelapse , though in the owrld of 3d is far easier and better to mix real elements in with your 3d peice. ANyway
http:www.aliaswavefront.com ..again they did have a cool tutorial on how to do timelapse(sortof) in maya .
OR this could be a clever question asked in order to get epople to regester with creativeplanet ...mmm ..haha , anyway good luck with it .

.............

[mestela]

http://www.3dluvr.com/pixho/tutorials/skylight_anim/skylight_anim.htmhttp://www.3dluvr.com/pixho/tutorials/skyl...ylight\_anim.htm

A start maybe? I really think you'll need stock footage to get it looking correct..

-matt

[tolerate]

got to aliaswavefront site, there is a tutorial on how to do that there

[carmine-1]

I agree with mestela...sometimes the best way is not CG...final out put is what it's about...not how you arrived there.
I believe Artbeats has a library of time lapse skies that are decent enough. Or you could just shoot it yourself on DV or betaSP?

[suonlim]

Hi,

The problem here is it's quite difficult to get nice clouds and blue sky in this monsoon season, and furthermore, we are going to animate a foreground objects with camera moving which is supposed to interact with the weather condition, such as cloud shadow and sun direction. Another reason is to understand how far Maya can achieve, that will be a good selling points if we can do that in solely one package.

Please correct me if my idea is being too wild.

Suon-Oon Lim

[mestela]

Well, i don't want to hamper your enthusiasm, but i have a feeling that even a place like ILM would think twice about the sort of shot you describe!

Off the top of my head, I can only think of maybe 2 movies that have done hardcore thunderclouds/monsoon effects, and both were ILM; twister, and the perfect storm. Both involved some hardcore programming, and substantial modifications to off-the-shelf tools. The best commercial tool for sky and sea effects, arete, does littly fluffy clouds beautifully, but I've not heard of anyone using it for thunderclouds.

I just get the impression that you'll spend a lot of time fighting particle systems and sky plugins, and still not get anywhere near the result you want, whereas you could grab several cloud timelapse elements, either from stock libraries or shooting it yourself, and comp them together in flame/inferno/blah. Same goes for interaction with cloud elements, it'd be much easier for a flame operator to fudge those effects. Maybe even a cloud tank? Controllable, and easier to blend with 3d elements (just use green or black stand in physical models that you can replace with 3d), I believe most of the cool cloud elements in 'james and the giant peach' were done this way.

Pass it off to the 2d department, you'll be busy enough learning maya...

-matt

[suonlim]

Hi Matt, thanks for the valuable advice on this issue.
Well, I just saw some very nice clouds in nextlimit's gallery website, do you think they use 3D clouds??

http://www.realflow.com/

suon-oon

[aaron_johnson]

I have a question that's kinda related to this thread...
I've got a fairly nice lookin' envSky but it's
sorely missing a lense-flare for the sun position....
does anyone know how to achieve this effect...? i would
REALLY appreciate any info

Paul Gunson
Cipher Animation Studios
Auckland - New Zealand

[carmine-1]

http://www.artbeats.com/store/product.tpl?...artat=1&page=TL

http://www.artbeats.com/store/product.tpl?...rtat=1&page=TL2

You'll save yourself a few hundred hours of work with these links...

Unless I was doing research on computer simulations of clouds, I would just use this source material, otherwise then I might do it in 3d (but probably not Maya for simulations of clouds).

If you're doing post or animation and just need a background, I'm sure you'll find this a much better solution than trying to do it in 3d.

[mestela]

I'm sure it is 3d clouds (after all it's what their plugin is meant to do!), and if it looks like what you're after, by all means, go ahead. Just keep in mind that

-the only feature film work to date involving completely cgi thunderclouds were done by ilm
-no commercial plugin to date has achieved this effect convincingly.

If realflow does it, hot damn, I'm buying a copy tomorrow, but the cynic in me has doubts; plugins that promise a lot work fine for simple cases, but often break when used in production. Just watch your back is all, you really don't want to be caught promising something you can't deliver!

-matt

[mestela]

lens flare as in a bloom around the 'real' sun, or lens flare as in lens reflection elements that track around the real sun?

The tutorial at pixho covers the first case, and I'd say afterFX, or any decent compositor would cover the 2nd.

http://www.3dluvr.com/pixho/tutorials/skylight_anim/skylight_anim.htmhttp://www.3dluvr.com/pixho/tutorials/skyl...ylight\_anim.htm

-matt

[stuartscanlon]

I am currently doing a 2:30 sequence that involves flying through the clouds. I am on a tight deadline so I did not have enough time to fully get into DNT but I will say that in my limited experimentation I was able to get nice results. So, we ended up licensing footage. This was not however a cost saving decision. The license was over $10K.

have a lovely day

[suonlim]

Hi all, I'm back!

My director has been convinced not to use any thunder clouds in the whole sequence, now is only normal clouds with realistic lighting simulating dawn to sunset.
I've achieved the afternoon sky with env sky and paint-effect clouds in layers, which the agency has bought the concept to do the whole commercial in 3D.

Now I have to solve these problems:
1. The painted clouds become pixelise when it's closed to camera, is there any solution for this or I have to keep the clouds far enough from the camera to avoid this?

1. Anybody knows whether the Final Fantasy clouds was done Maya or any other package?? It would be great if the painted clouds can be interacted with the angle and colors of the sunlights.

I will try to upload my experiment file later after I got my cute ftp fixed.

Thanks in advance.

[luiz-siqueira]

-