Maya Class 02 - Aifog, aiVolumeAtmosphere and Caustics

 AiFog

Experimenting with aiFog, its important to note that it is a legacy system when it comes to creating atmosphere. although this is a faster and more effective way of creating "fog", this system doesn't react well to any lighting set in the scene. In the settings, you can use the distance and height to show how high from from the ground/dense the "fog" is in the scene. The Ground points and normals show which point the fog is travelling from and where it is centered in 3D space. 

Setting up the aiFog

Height

Distance

Changing the Normals/Points

Changing the "fog" Colour

aiVolumeAtmosphere

This variation of "fog" was created via a spot light, adding a Gobo, some factual noise and changing the attenuation. Sampling was also increased to improve quality.

Setting up the spotlight

Adding the aiVolumeAtmospere

Changing the Colour

Adding Factual Gobo

Caustics

Flowing on from doing the aiVolumeAtmosphere, we used some of the same techniques to create a underwater effect. However, the caustics was made via a external program and then placed into the via a image sequence in the spotlight, 

Added Caustics