Add transcription for: Moving Snow Homework.wav

transcriptions/Moving Snow Homework_transcription.json

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+{
+  "text": " We're going to be creating a falling clump of snow that bursts into a soft snow cloud on impact and blowing clouds of snow with some handmade photo bash textures. This will show how to take the event driven particles and apply them to this snow effect with a different texture and material pipeline. Essentially taking things like where those particles die, which will open up this really cool effect of like if a particle hits a certain surface we can then spawn another particle that can lead into a lot of things like well we'll lead on to our next assignment will be things like blood spatters, things like that. We'll also be using the GPU, WindGust, and WindMesh textures to create a really cool snow-blowing blizzard effect. So looking to the first part of assignment, we're going back into texture creation. And for this part of texture creation for this course, we wanted to look into how to use photo bashing to get stuff like wispy smoke, wispy clouds, stuff that's going to have a very sort of soft falloff to the edge, and how we can get different textures by both going online or just taking pictures with your phone or even working with elements of different 3D softwares. But the end result that you want is you want sort of a nice variety of smoke and cloud textures that have a soft falloff to them. And the thing to keep in mind is to have some elements of noise and some elements of detail to this, but the important thing is to make sure there's a really soft falloff to that detail. There was a little bit of a trial and error in the lesson that you saw and what we're doing is taking out and blurring a lot of that detail that was showing up in the photo bashing. So we can get still the elements of the photo bashing that you're seeing here, but it's really taken into a soft, subtle account when it's being taken through the material pipeline. The other thing that we'll be doing is delving a little bit into different soft, tiling noise textures, which are pretty easy to create. You can create them no problem in Substance Designer. You can create them in ZBrush. You can even create them in Photoshop. We were technically even doing this in our very first lesson when we were making the soft sphere shapes for our fire. So this can be applied really any which way. And the other thing, of course, that we were doing is we went to ZBrush and created a couple different snow clumps and arranged them in a sort of four divided fashion here. So we can have the illusion of a lot of different particles being created. what we're really doing is every time a particle is spawned, it's just picking from one of these four. So instead of the illusion of having four particle emitters, we just have one that each time a particle is spawned, it can pick from these three here, or sorry, pick from these four. So the next part of this is taking those textures that we created and creating this material pipeline setup. Let me go ahead and clean this up here. So we have these dynamic parameters set up here, which controls both the contrast, the linear interpret of switching between these two textures. So if we have two different textures and we want over the particle's life to switch from one texture to another, we have the ability to do that. We have a panning noise mask here that can help influence the contrast or the contrast of the opacity over the particle's life. So we have that here. And we can also create the contrast of the noise. So with this all set up, we can control the time, we can control the contrast of the noise texture, we can control the contrast overall of the final alphas, it's plugged into the depth fade, multiplied by the particle color, and then channeled into the opacity here. And we can also control the rate at which we want to switch from this texture to this texture over the particle's life. We're also going to set up just a very simple sphere falloff that I'll include with this lesson here. But really all I did was, for this, I just created a sphere, I think in ZBrush, I rendered it with the normal map filter on it, and then I just blurred it in Photoshop, and that's That's how you get this result here. And then the particle color, I'm just multiplying by emissive here, and I'm also just plugging this into the base color here and the emissive color. And then I'm sending this to translucent and volumetric directional here that you can see. And then for the material instance of that, all I have is the depth fade, which I can control here and I can also control if I want any emissive color coming from here because snow is very, has a lot of subsurface scattering to it. And I can in theory apply the subsurface scattering pipeline to this if I wanted to, but this is a little bit more simplistic for the result that we need here. The next one is building the snow clumps material, which is extremely simple in comparison to the other material. I just have this set up going into the opacity. I have this particle color going into the base color. I have a depth fade just so there's no clipping here. And then the normal map is just going into here. And I just have this set at a translucent volumetric directional. And then with that, the other thing we want to do is with the dynamic parameters that we have set up, if this is coming off as black, don't worry. The translucent materials that have a volumetric directional assigned to them, because it's taking the normal map into effect, it's getting this kind of weird burned normal map effect. It just shows up. I'm not exactly sure at this point how to get rid of that, but just know that Even though it looks like this here, when you put it into your scene, it's probably gonna look a lot different, like something like this here. So just keep that in mind. With this, we really want to take care and pay a lot of attention to the dynamic parameters. Because we have all four of these parameters set up, we really want to isolate and hone in on what these different parameters are doing. For every one of these pretty much, let me double check and make sure, it's just set at a spawn time only float uniform for the values. So it's just choosing between one texture or another. It's choosing how much contrast to do between those two textures. And for the panor effect of the noise going over it, it's just every element of this is trying to choose a random number. That way we eliminate the problem because these are very big sprites moving across the screen here. We wanna make sure that we, as much as possible, eliminate the chance that we'll see a repeating pattern. So you can see that there's some distinct patterns in the texture here. We want to make sure that we never see that the same way twice when this large sprite is panning across the screen here. If you're dealing with things like mist, fog, blowing snow, things where you have very large sprites covering up a lot of the scene, you really want to make sure that you're paying attention to that, that there's a lot of factors set into motion here where you'd never see like a repeating texture going across the screen. So that's being set here. We also have the floor one set, which is just the pretty much the exact same set here. We just have a lock to access at Z and we're setting it on a initial location so it's kind of hugging the floor so it can move across the base of the floor here as you can see. So something like that. This is a really cool effect if you want to have like sort of blowing mist going across a floor like in a temple or something like that. It's a really cool effect. So you can set that there. And then for the GPU sprites we're essentially just taking the pretty much the same setup that that we had for the leaves in the last lesson. But instead of a leaf texture, we're just using this very small, it's the embers texture that we had set up in the first lesson for the fire embers. We just don't have that sort of red hot color applied to it. It's just this sort of white snow that you can see. Let me turn down this backroom color. And you can see we just have a lot more of them, and they're just blowing through, getting tossed about by this local vector field that you can see here. So a really cool effect gets a lot of the job done for that sort of blowing blizzard snow effect and it's very easy to set up. It's essentially the same thing we set up for the blowing leaves. And so with all that set up, we have this effect being taken into account. And then for this one, what we want to do is we want to set up the event generator. So we have these falling snow clumps here. For the individual clumps of snow, we just have this set up where, Let me just restart the sim here. Get a better look here. Let me find it again, there we go. We have this where we have the required, we have the sub UV set at random with two horizontal and two vertical. And then we have a sub image index set at, at the beginning of the particle's life, it's set at zero, at the end of the particle's life, it's set at four. So it'll pick from those four different sections on the texture, which is a really nice way to get a different effect here. And then on this part here, we want to set the event generator on the particles death. We'll just name the custom name gen for the event generator. And we have these two event receiver spawns here. We want to make sure that's following the death of that name, G-E-N or gen. And then for that, we want to make sure that for a spawn rate, we have that set at zero because the spawn is set at the event receiver spawn here. And for that, we just want to set these two burst elements here. And in order to troubleshoot this, you just want to make sure that you can turn on player collision under lit player collision to make sure that you have something that the particle can collide with. In this case, I have the ground set up with a very simple box collision mesh, and that should, I think, just be included by default here. Let me double check and make sure. If not, you can just do collision, add box, simplify collision, and you'll get something that the particle can collide with. And for that, just be patient with the event generator and event receiver. There's a couple opportunities where some things could be missed and things cannot generate in the proper way. You can look at that into the particle's lifetime, the particle's color over life. We cover in the lesson there's a lot of factors that can come into play here. So when in doubt, make sure that the alpha is set up in a very certain way. You can just set it at default, add a default of one, so you can make sure that there's no chance that the opacity is not turning on. Same with the initial size, you can just set it at a crazy big size to make sure that those are being set in a proper way. You can set this at wireframe to make sure that these sprites are spawning. So even though you might not be able to see anything, you can make sure that those sprites are showing up. they just don't have an opacity setup for whatever reason. And with that, yeah, just be patient with yourself. I know I say that at the end of every assignment, but it really is true. Part of working as a VFX artist is you just wanna make sure that you have that mindset set aside for troubleshooting because it's almost inevitable that something is going to go wrong or some factor is not going to come into play, something's gonna be missed and you'll have to kind of backtrack and see where there's a flaw in the logic or flaw of all the different checkboxes being checked the right way or all the values being punched in the right way. So just be sure to set your mindset instead of anticipating if something goes wrong, just assume something's going to go wrong and it's just very much part of the job with working with VFX. So just keep that in mind. Thank you.",
+  "segments": [
+    {
+      "text": " We're going to be creating a falling clump of snow that bursts into a soft snow cloud on impact and blowing clouds of snow with some handmade photo bash textures. This will show how to take the event driven particles and apply them to this snow effect with a different texture and material pipeline. Essentially taking things like where those particles die, which will open up this really cool effect of like if a particle hits a certain surface we can then spawn another particle that can lead into a lot of things like well we'll lead on to our next assignment will be things like blood spatters, things like that. We'll also be using the GPU, WindGust, and WindMesh textures to create a really cool snow-blowing blizzard effect. So looking to the first part of assignment, we're going back into texture creation. And for this part of texture creation for this course, we wanted to look into how to use photo bashing to get stuff like wispy smoke, wispy clouds, stuff that's going to have a very sort of soft falloff to the edge, and how we can get different textures by both going online or just taking pictures with your phone or even working with elements of different 3D softwares. But the end result that you want is you want sort of a nice variety of smoke and cloud textures that have a soft falloff to them. And the thing to keep in mind is to have some elements of noise and some elements of detail to this, but the important thing is to make sure there's a really soft falloff to that detail. There was a little bit of a trial and error in the lesson that you saw and what we're doing is taking out and blurring a lot of that detail that was showing up in the photo bashing. So we can get still the elements of the photo bashing that you're seeing here, but it's really taken into a soft, subtle account when it's being taken through the material pipeline. The other thing that we'll be doing is delving a little bit into different soft, tiling noise textures, which are pretty easy to create. You can create them no problem in Substance Designer. You can create them in ZBrush. You can even create them in Photoshop. We were technically even doing this in our very first lesson when we were making the soft sphere shapes for our fire. So this can be applied really any which way. And the other thing, of course, that we were doing is we went to ZBrush and created a couple different snow clumps and arranged them in a sort of four divided fashion here. So we can have the illusion of a lot of different particles being created. what we're really doing is every time a particle is spawned, it's just picking from one of these four. So instead of the illusion of having four particle emitters, we just have one that each time a particle is spawned, it can pick from these three here, or sorry, pick from these four. So the next part of this is taking those textures that we created and creating this material pipeline setup. Let me go ahead and clean this up here. So we have these dynamic parameters set up here, which controls both the contrast, the linear interpret of switching between these two textures. So if we have two different textures and we want over the particle's life to switch from one texture to another, we have the ability to do that. We have a panning noise mask here that can help influence the contrast or the contrast of the opacity over the particle's life. So we have that here. And we can also create the contrast of the noise. So with this all set up, we can control the time, we can control the contrast of the noise texture, we can control the contrast overall of the final alphas, it's plugged into the depth fade, multiplied by the particle color, and then channeled into the opacity here. And we can also control the rate at which we want to switch from this texture to this texture over the particle's life. We're also going to set up just a very simple sphere falloff that I'll include with this lesson here. But really all I did was, for this, I just created a sphere, I think in ZBrush, I rendered it with the normal map filter on it, and then I just blurred it in Photoshop, and that's That's how you get this result here. And then the particle color, I'm just multiplying by emissive here, and I'm also just plugging this into the base color here and the emissive color. And then I'm sending this to translucent and volumetric directional here that you can see. And then for the material instance of that, all I have is the depth fade, which I can control here and I can also control if I want any emissive color coming from here because snow is very, has a lot of subsurface scattering to it. And I can in theory apply the subsurface scattering pipeline to this if I wanted to, but this is a little bit more simplistic for the result that we need here. The next one is building the snow clumps material, which is extremely simple in comparison to the other material. I just have this set up going into the opacity. I have this particle color going into the base color. I have a depth fade just so there's no clipping here. And then the normal map is just going into here. And I just have this set at a translucent volumetric directional. And then with that, the other thing we want to do is with the dynamic parameters that we have set up, if this is coming off as black, don't worry. The translucent materials that have a volumetric directional assigned to them, because it's taking the normal map into effect, it's getting this kind of weird burned normal map effect. It just shows up. I'm not exactly sure at this point how to get rid of that, but just know that Even though it looks like this here, when you put it into your scene, it's probably gonna look a lot different, like something like this here. So just keep that in mind. With this, we really want to take care and pay a lot of attention to the dynamic parameters. Because we have all four of these parameters set up, we really want to isolate and hone in on what these different parameters are doing. For every one of these pretty much, let me double check and make sure, it's just set at a spawn time only float uniform for the values. So it's just choosing between one texture or another. It's choosing how much contrast to do between those two textures. And for the panor effect of the noise going over it, it's just every element of this is trying to choose a random number. That way we eliminate the problem because these are very big sprites moving across the screen here. We wanna make sure that we, as much as possible, eliminate the chance that we'll see a repeating pattern. So you can see that there's some distinct patterns in the texture here. We want to make sure that we never see that the same way twice when this large sprite is panning across the screen here. If you're dealing with things like mist, fog, blowing snow, things where you have very large sprites covering up a lot of the scene, you really want to make sure that you're paying attention to that, that there's a lot of factors set into motion here where you'd never see like a repeating texture going across the screen. So that's being set here. We also have the floor one set, which is just the pretty much the exact same set here. We just have a lock to access at Z and we're setting it on a initial location so it's kind of hugging the floor so it can move across the base of the floor here as you can see. So something like that. This is a really cool effect if you want to have like sort of blowing mist going across a floor like in a temple or something like that. It's a really cool effect. So you can set that there. And then for the GPU sprites we're essentially just taking the pretty much the same setup that that we had for the leaves in the last lesson. But instead of a leaf texture, we're just using this very small, it's the embers texture that we had set up in the first lesson for the fire embers. We just don't have that sort of red hot color applied to it. It's just this sort of white snow that you can see. Let me turn down this backroom color. And you can see we just have a lot more of them, and they're just blowing through, getting tossed about by this local vector field that you can see here. So a really cool effect gets a lot of the job done for that sort of blowing blizzard snow effect and it's very easy to set up. It's essentially the same thing we set up for the blowing leaves. And so with all that set up, we have this effect being taken into account. And then for this one, what we want to do is we want to set up the event generator. So we have these falling snow clumps here. For the individual clumps of snow, we just have this set up where, Let me just restart the sim here. Get a better look here. Let me find it again, there we go. We have this where we have the required, we have the sub UV set at random with two horizontal and two vertical. And then we have a sub image index set at, at the beginning of the particle's life, it's set at zero, at the end of the particle's life, it's set at four. So it'll pick from those four different sections on the texture, which is a really nice way to get a different effect here. And then on this part here, we want to set the event generator on the particles death. We'll just name the custom name gen for the event generator. And we have these two event receiver spawns here. We want to make sure that's following the death of that name, G-E-N or gen. And then for that, we want to make sure that for a spawn rate, we have that set at zero because the spawn is set at the event receiver spawn here. And for that, we just want to set these two burst elements here. And in order to troubleshoot this, you just want to make sure that you can turn on player collision under lit player collision to make sure that you have something that the particle can collide with. In this case, I have the ground set up with a very simple box collision mesh, and that should, I think, just be included by default here. Let me double check and make sure. If not, you can just do collision, add box, simplify collision, and you'll get something that the particle can collide with. And for that, just be patient with the event generator and event receiver. There's a couple opportunities where some things could be missed and things cannot generate in the proper way. You can look at that into the particle's lifetime, the particle's color over life. We cover in the lesson there's a lot of factors that can come into play here. So when in doubt, make sure that the alpha is set up in a very certain way. You can just set it at default, add a default of one, so you can make sure that there's no chance that the opacity is not turning on. Same with the initial size, you can just set it at a crazy big size to make sure that those are being set in a proper way. You can set this at wireframe to make sure that these sprites are spawning. So even though you might not be able to see anything, you can make sure that those sprites are showing up. they just don't have an opacity setup for whatever reason. And with that, yeah, just be patient with yourself. I know I say that at the end of every assignment, but it really is true. Part of working as a VFX artist is you just wanna make sure that you have that mindset set aside for troubleshooting because it's almost inevitable that something is going to go wrong or some factor is not going to come into play, something's gonna be missed and you'll have to kind of backtrack and see where there's a flaw in the logic or flaw of all the different checkboxes being checked the right way or all the values being punched in the right way. So just be sure to set your mindset instead of anticipating if something goes wrong, just assume something's going to go wrong and it's just very much part of the job with working with VFX. So just keep that in mind. Thank you."
+    }
+  ]
+}