Canary Wharf Comet: Particles

Now we have entered the last stage of the project. With the majority of the work done and now entering the final parts of rendering, the last major effect still remained although one of the first scenes to feature into the film. This shot comprises canary wharf being showered by meteors and eventually the tower being hit by a comet.

My and Greg teamed together to work on this scene.

Having done some research into mayas fluid examples, there turned out to be an import that could have been used as the final project. On discussing this with Greg, we eventually decided that it would be better for us to create our own custom made comet trail, but we still had a back up should that have failed.

We decided to begin working together on the comet trail. With much experimentation we managed to find and tweak the necessary attributes that made a smokey effect. We then needed to experiment with particle lifetime expressions.

We also began uncovering many attributes that are not readily available in the attribute editor. I made a set of experiments to find out how to manipulate certain attributes.

Here are the results of some of my experiments.

In the above examples I established that attributes such as "Life Colour". I managed to provide ideas on particle emmisions.

I also experimented with lifetime opacity and sphere size (for ember styled particles)