Earth, Wind and Fire?!?!

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.

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