Friday 22 October 2010

Gnomon Dynamics 1 : Galaxy Spiral

Today I decided to approach the Gnomon material, giving 'In Silico' a rest before starting on the more complicated MEL scripting chapters.

Gnomon's Dynamics 1 disc is designed as a basic introduction to dynamics, and according to the package, introduces the following tools;
Particle Tool, Create Emitter, Directional Emitters, Volume Emitters, Various Fields, Hardware Rendering Techniques
Quite an extensive list for an introduction, especially with a runtime of only 110 minutes. I say only... after getting about 9 minutes in, my imagination was already running wild and I had been well and truly distracted by the possibilites of 'painting' particles directly into a scene.

With the addition of two fields (Turbulence and Vortex) I had created a swirling galaxy system using only particles. I knew that I wanted to develop this scene further and see what I could do with it. I created a basic ramp shader and using a simple expression, coloured the particles based upon their distance from the scene's origin point.

After an hours worth of tinkering and playing around with these simple tools in Maya, I remembered the Gnomon Dynamics tutorial I should have been watching - not that it felt immediately important, I had created something really spectacular all by myself...

No comments: