In the Clouds

This was the final project for my year long 3-D Maya software class and it was a huge undertaking for me. I wanted to incorporate different types of physics directly in Maya which is not usually recommended, since unlike Blender, Maya doesn't have a strong physics engine.

It all began when we were asked in class to create an animation inspired by the idea of a Rube Goldberg machine. My original concept involved a complex setup for making water fall from the sky, powered by a magical machine. I’ve always loved animations featuring big, beautiful, puffy clouds, and I wanted to try my hand at creating them.

The project took me about two and a half months to complete mostly due to long render times, since I had little experience optimizing them. Volumetric particles are notorious for having extremely high render times per frame. The computers we were using in class could only handle about two clouds at a time, so I had to get creative to fill the space.

In post-production, I used After Effects to duplicate and blend more clouds, like the ones seen at the beginning of the animation. The hardest part of the entire project, by far, was the hourglass. It took several days to perfect the glass texture so that it reflected the gold particles like sand and caught the light the way I envisioned. This project also taught me how to set up separate scenes and cut between them to create the illusion of one fluid, continuous animation.

What could I have done better?
I ran into a lot of issues with the second half specifically, once the sand leaves the hourglass. Maya's physics engine kept crashing, and I didn’t have the time to re-render a new particle flow. I wasn’t satisfied with the water wheel sequence; if I could go back, I’d completely redo that section and fix the textures for both the pathway and the wheel. I’d also add more clouds to balance the composition.

Despite the challenges, I learned an incredible amount from this project. I now feel confident that I could recreate something similar in less than a quarter of the time it originally took.