Soi Park
Week 4
Sept 30, 2024 - Oct 6, 2024
On Tuesday, we had a Q&A session with mentors instead of pitching what the teams got done due to the hurricane.
I asked to mentors if they, professionals, also use tricks when they have issues with something as my collision issue between particles in asteroid FX hasn't been solved. They gave a lot of good advice as well as emphasized how important to communicate with teammates about the issue and find a solution or an alternative plan.
Since our team has been developing and settled with what we had discussed during the first couple of weeks, nut planet is the identity of our project and the asteroid is a significant factor in it. Therefore, I was obligated to solve the issue as I also wanted to fix it. ​
Professor Fowler set me up with Sean Fitzgerald, an MFA Visual Effect student who has been creating VFX with Unreal Engine at SCAD. He went through all the parameters of my asteroid Niagara system and came up with a possible solution which is changing the values of attraction strength and attraction radius under the point attraction force.
While I was playing with numbers in the system, I finally found the solution! It was actually ridiculous that I couldn't find the solution earlier. I was captivated by grid settings but not the collision radius which seems more intuitive as of now. Once I increased the number, each particle got more space around them and didn't collide with each other.
I needed to change the mesh since they all are high poly and I spawned a bunch of them, my graphic card was having a hard time performing it and the Unreal file kept crashing. My teammate, Wyatt, got me a low poly version of the meshes for a placeholder before our final render. :)
Additionally, I separated the emitters based on the meshes to give them a different speed, also I don't want to have tons of meshes in one emitter system using the array. I prevented the issue from colliding by putting four particle readers for each emitter so they could recognize each other. After that, I gave them a different vortex force amount value, which I believe differentiates the speed of the particle. However, all of them are rotating at the same speed. Also, all the different settings I applied to each of them didn't work as I expected, but I am not sure if this is a technical issue or if it doesn't work that way.
​Here is my final render for this week until I confront a new issue to solve. I am not satisfied with what I have done this week, but pretty happy that I finally solved the collision issue!