Day 46

Firstly today, Mr Ron helped me out with loading the demon geometry to the particles. We used delayed load, instead of copy stamping,and it's so much faster than copy stamping. We had to edit the bgeo animations first though,before we could load them in the shot. We had to make sure the textures and the bgeo animations are still there when we load them in the shot. So, before we put them in a shot, we edited each of the sequences in another hip session. We made sure the demons are at the origin, 0 translation in all axis. Then used a timewarp node to output the range at 0-99 frames instead of the 1-100 frames we had, to make the sequences loop. We then rendered that out into a new sequence.

With the edited sequences, they work smoothly in the shot 5. The textures were loaded okay.To make life easier Mr Ron created 3 attributes in my demon falling geo level, SEED, OFF(offset) and CYCLE. Each of them had an expression on them:

SEED: rint(rand($ID)*#

OFF: rint(rand($ID)* 100

CYCLE: rint($F + OFF)%100

The new variables are then placed into certain parts of the directory path for loading in sequences and stuff. So, this makes the system automated. All I have to do to bring in more demons is to update the seed integer at the end with an increased number.

I opened up shot 2 to bring in my crowd system. I painted on the terrain where the two armies should spawn at. I found that my convert and creep nodes cook really long,so, I cant see the particles movement on the wavy surface. I tried the ray node just for kicks but it still has the skipping issues.