rain scene WIP
 

hey, I'm making this scene for my Maya Dynamics class, it's based on the fencing from Jurassic Park, its also going to raining, have trees on the other side of the fence (if I can get the paint effects trees to work), and have my T. rex walk through the scene, comments and criticism is welcome. thanks in advance.

The fence is nice, the mud looks a bit like water to me at present; perhaps make the surface more irregular and less uniformly wet overall?

yeah, I'd also add some vegetation, rocks, etc to make it seem less like a muddy river.

It might be a good idea to read up on Alias' foot prints tutorial so your dino can make real prints in the mud.

here's an update on the mud, the part I want it to look like is at the bottom, but the bump map I have just kind of goes away as it gets farther away. is there a way to stop this?

what kind of lights are you using?

If the bump map is a texture, there is an option called filtering. This fades the details as it gets further from camera to prevent aliasing. Try change the filtering method or turn it off (might get artifacts at distance though).

I'm using a few directional lights and a spotlight, and for the bump map i'm using a brownian. where is this filtering located? thanks for all your responses

never mind, I found filtering, I'm working on the lighting now, and the actual rain on the T. rex. The rain falls just fine, it falls using expressions (required by the project guidelines), and there's a collision event when it hits the rex. my problem is that when it hits it turns into water droplets that should run along his skin, but it doesn't, some do, but most fall through and collect on the inside of the model. is there a way to fix this?

i see no problem with that, because if it's raining it is going to be wet all over, aslong as the rain makes splashes or whatever when it hits the floor and dynamically alters the terrain when the dino is walking it'd look fine.

well, here's an update, I decided to go with more of a wet gravel than pure mud, like in the original scene, still haven't figured out why the water droplet particles pass through the skin and collect on the inside of the T. rex model...

well, here's an update, I decided to go with more of a wet gravel than pure mud, like in the original scene, still haven't figured out why the water droplet particles pass through the skin and collect on the inside of the T. rex model...

I have a tip for you, things look good so far but that gravel looks like a maya default procedural. Tweak it out more because when I saw it.... it look very default or very original. Spend some times getting some good looking patterns and pay attention to how things would look like in the real world.

Found a few refs for th ground in you're scene http://www.gavinrymill.com/dinosaurs...RexFootMud.jpg

http://www.supostal.com.ar/wallpaper...assic_park.jpg

http://www.tvguide.com/movies/dbpix/images/35826a.jpg
this one show what looks like gravel, but i'm just now realizing is the heavy ripple from the barrage of water droplets.

Interestingly enough they had a huge mechanical (anamatronic) Trex for the scene, and the were actually dumping tons of water on the set, and onto this huge robot, so after every half hour or so they had to stop filming, and wipe down/dry out the big guy, this took closer to an hour and a half. This movie (and scene) also had some groundbreaking CG creatures in it, in the long shots when he's walking around hes completely CG.

They though about using stop motion, and more specifically a modified version of it with some heavy motion blur, they called it GO-motion. But pretty close to the last minute they decided to use CG, and since they already hired the clay posing guy (who was like really good or something) they built this mini robot thing with cervos and wires and such shaped like the trex that was actually used as input for the cg creatures animation!

well, here's an update, I've been busy making it rain on my T. rex, these are paint effects trees converted to polygons