Day 47

Today I went commercial for my cracking. I spend the day to redo my entire file in the commercial version. I requested for jia bao file, which contains the texturing and lighting. I was surprised as his scene has so many nodes. And I needed to rop out everything in a single node. I consulted Mr Ron regarding that, he tried converting all the lights in the scene into an otl at first, but it failed because the lights has references from elsewhere. Lastly, he introduced bundle to me. How it works is, it is something like a group and you can put everything inside a group, but the cool thing is, the group can be referenced anywhere.

After setting up all the bundles for the terrain, lights, rocks, etc. He created a new geometry container, and created a object merge node. He then brought in all the bundles and he asked me to rop it all out.

I decided to rop out the entire sequence first, then copy the shader over to the new file. However, after ropping out, I copied the shader over, and tried to render it, there seems to be a problem. I keep getting black screen in the render. Not knowing why, I consulted jia bao. At last, he fixed it for me, by removing the material under the geometry container. It somehow works though. He also told me that the arc and rocks positions weren't finalized yet. So I thought it would be safer to do it on the original terrain first. I managed to finish the cracking today though.


Cracking:

At first I managed to create the crack nicely. However, it is opening up in the wrong direction.


Not knowing why, I tried many variations but to no avail. I consulted Mr Michael, who was around at the moment. After much reasoning from him, he managed to get it to work. It was just playing around with the expressions.

Below is the expression which opens the crack the wrong way:



And the right way:




I will continue working on the file on Monday.