Duration: 0:39

715 views

1

Portfolio 3 Animation - Fire and Lava Crater

Done in Maya 2010.

Dynamic Particle Simulations:
Particle Collsiion
Fire Particles
Blobby (Lava) Particles

My original intention was to create a volcano with erupting lava and a flaming spout at the top. Several problems tampered my attempt at creating this:

1) The Blobby and Fire particles could not be rendered in the same frame (as dumb as that sounds...)

2.) In this, BOTH particles must be rendered in the same camera perspective and then combined via a video editor such as Premiere and possibly After Effects.

3.) Needless to say rendering is a painfully slow and time-consuming process...

4.) Rendering the lava via the batch render ACTUALLY slowed the lava particles down, and I have no idea how to correct this; this means that the lava will NOT spill over the crater as I wanted. Oddly enough when I run the animation via Maya's Time Slider, the lava spills and bounces about like what a typical volcano would do.

5.) If I was to get the lava spilling, I would've had to increase the number of animation frames above my default 210 frames, which means a whole lot more time consuming rendering.

The end result was that since the lava was unable to spill, there was no reason to combine it with the fire particles via After Effects as the changes are relatively extraneous. So the result was this video demonstrating simply Fire particles and blobby Lava particles instead of a volcanic eruption as I intended. Maybe I'll try to recreate a simple volcano again someday.

The green cylinder isn't meant to be anything in particular other than to demonstrate more direct collisions.

Music is Magmoor Caverns from Metroid Prime.