Hairy Gorilla concept

This character was also created by Reza Ramezani who did the modeling, hair and textures using Hamed Kamali’s concept designs. The modeling was done in XSI and ZBrush, texturing was also done in ZBrush

Gorilla in a T stance

We are currently working on the shading in order to fine-tune some small issues and in the near future we will possible start rigging and animating this lovely gorilla, so stay tuned.

In this short post I am going to talk about how we used and integrated built-in XSI particle system to make smoke simulation for our pipe smoker character in Vishka Studio’s current short animated movie Baran.

Please notice that I’m not going to talk about dynamics here, I just want to talk about the look of smoke simulation here.

At first I started to look what XSI gave us to make smoke! After a short time I decided that there is no built– in appropriate fluid system — at least for making phenomenon like smoke– I’m not going to complain about XSI, but there are many smoke simulation tools in Maya, Houdini and plugins like FumeFX for 3ds max. Maybe the developers of XSI just wanted to stick to the animation part of XSI which is the excellent section of XSI in my opinion.

I don’t want to stick so limited number of software because I’m at first a software engineer but there is some limitation and difficulty in our process to export animations and, character’s mesh translation between different 3D platforms. So after some talking with my technical supervisor Mr. Ghobady we decided to make the entire simulation completely in XSI.

The point was, we may have the same result as fluids do but with some tricks in rendering and simulation.

With much more particle rate and smaller size we have the first step of making smoke. The rendering result is not much interesting but after applying another built-in XSI tool –compositing QuarticBlur filter– we have the final smoke result. Easily

First try with default particle parameters.

Second try with more particle rate and smaller size.

The same simulation with applied Quartic blur.

Smoke

When this project started out we knew that based on the story we had we would have to create a few effects but the further we went into the production, the more we came across scenes that needed some kind of simulation. The first obvious ones, not surprisingly, were the rain effects (the movie IS called “Rain”!) but even these were not as obvious as we initially thought.

We knew from the beginning that running a simulation on a scene full of vegetation and flowers would be impossible so we had to come up with optimizations.

Since we had a plethora of models we had created for this scene, I decided that one solution would be to use instances and XSI’s particles system but I forgot to test one step before we went on with the final production. I thought that instances could interact with particles and I should have tested it before we went on but I made a mistake. It finally turned out OK but it wasn’t as simple to manage as our initial plan.

We laid out our scene using instances and when the layout was finalized, converted them to models and deformed them using wave deformers that mimicked the movement of the vegetation in the wind. A particle system was created to interact with the leaves and flowers, made up of a textured sprite of a raindrop that died on impact but created splashes of blob particles. The result was quite believable and considering the fact that we were not goilng for a realistic look, it was quite production-ready. Another advantage was that it was quite portable and for scenes that needed this effect, all we had to do was to change the flower and vegetation models’ positions and re-run the simulation.

Another effect which still included rain was medium shots of Roshanak at her window where we would see drops of rain falling on the window sill and into her hand. This was handed over to Reza Ramezani and due to the limited number of scenes for this effect we used Realflow and the effect was not too difficult to reproduce. The results were quite good too.

The one effect we really had a problem with was fire and it took as lot of testing to finally obtain the result we needed. We started out testing XSI’s particles but after extensive testing we just couldn’t get the visual results we needed and concluded that we would need extensive scripting to reach an acceptable result. We started looking into plugins and we finally decided to use FumeFX in Max and render out a sequence using an animated camera imported from XSI. The result was quite satisfactory but we are still looking to find a solution for creating believable fire for our next projects.

For those of you wondering what our title means, it is a temporary title for our movie which means “rain” in {en:Persian}