V S C Honours-Track

The movie below had I made inbetween the Pre-Viz and the presentation. It presents the rough structure of the animation in Maya, with also the timing (by adding text) added to it:

Rough animation in Autodesk maya

Last friday I presented the work I have done until now to a selection of the Catalysis Engineering group, which is the group I am also working for, doing my animation.

I told about things that have to be done before starting animating, after that I told about animating (the stage I am busy with at the moment) and at the end something about finishing the animation (with editing software etc.). After that the audience asked me questions and some people had nice suggestions about what I could adjust or add. I have received a movie from a staff-member, which is about zeolite surfaces and I will probably use this as reference for my animation. You can watch this movie right here.

Also I was sent some other reference pictures, to use in my animation for more realistic zeolite structures:

I have been very busy with making a rough Pre-Viz of the movie in Maya and also adding the text to this structure to get a feeling for timing and camera settings.

After that I focused on scene 2, which is about the top (inlet) of the reactor, where you will see gas and liquid entering the (top of the) reactor, and after that get a closer view at the liquid-distributor. I am using RealFlow to visualize a viscous liquid that will be distributed by the liquid distributor, in a way that it will be evenly distributed over the whole top surface of the packed-bed in the reactor column. Calculations for all the particles takes very much time, but the result is worth it.

After loading the mesh of the particles into maya, a material has to be assigned. The heavy liquid is going to have a bronze/orange color which will give it the looks of a dense, heavy and oily compound. See the image below for a first impression of the material.

In this series the sticks are also of the same material as the spheres are.

In this series of images  I used another material that gives the edges of the spheres another color than the middle of the spheres because of their angle with respect to the camera. I have not (yet) made the sticks of the same material, I want them again to go from light (hydrogen atom) to dark (carbon atom) and also have the material of the following series. I am working on that (see next post).

In the following series the same materials are used for two different series, but now I have used the more realistic visualization of the molecules, with the overlapping spheres.

The past time I have been busy with getting to know Real-Flow by watching tutorials and I have also been busy resolving the issue of finding a way to visualize chemical structures in Maya scientifically correct.

To get an idea of what is possible in the visualization of and use of materials for the propane molecule and the Platina-cluster, I have made some different renders. I have used a modern form of the ball-and-stick visualization and also a more realistic form, where the atoms of the molecule are big spheres that intersect each other.

The first series is of the ball-and-stick molecule, where I used simple matte materials. The second series consists the ball-and-stick molecule with shiny materials.

I have added some more details to the previous PreViz and also colored it: PreViz

Some colors are not the final colors that I want to use,  I am not sure about the color of the gas and the liquid, I think that I will make them colorless or something in between colored and colorless. When zoomed at the zeolite crystal everything will be in grey-scale to stress the microscopic effect. When then again is zoomed at the structure of the zeolite and the atoms appear, the colors will return. Oxygen is usually visualized with a red sphere, and thus shall I also use red for oxygen. The same holds for hydrogen atoms (white) and carbon atoms (black), see the following visualization of an ethanol molecule (C2H6O):

The Pt-atoms are in the PreViz green, but I am thinking about making them silver-colored. I want to experiment with this further because the hydrogen atoms are white, which will be close to silver colored and then you maybe will not be able to see the difference between the two sorts of atoms (which I do not want to happen). The silica atoms are yellow/orange in the PreViz and I think that I want to keep them that way.

Here are some images of liquid distributors, for the shot when the reactor opens up and the gas and liquid enter the reactor. With these liquid distributors the liquid is equally distributed (in the ideal case) over the whole width of the column. This gallery also includes one image of so-called Taylor-flow, which will happen inside the monolith (see “Some clarifying pictures (3)” below).