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    ② Week 4


            Bulgari Serpenti Ring      


    Feedback from Mentors (Class 5 )

    1. Ring & Look Development – Refine reflection, edges, and bevels for a premium look. Ensure it doesn’t get lost on the gold branch. Adjust its sudden appearance for better integration.

    2. Transformation & Effects – The dragon should change into jade, then into a snake. Add a snake skin effect in shots 1-2, and skip the diamond element.

    3. Camera & Composition – Refine camera movement (rack focus), adjust final frame positioning, and finalize shot compositions.

    4. Lighting & Rendering – Enhance HDRI by painting in reflections for added complexity.


    Changes made:

    1.  shot 1:  Jade Dragon statue turns into golden material (Snake Scale effect), then a disintegration effect occu

    2. shot 2:  particles (from shot1) change to ring, then the ring roll (with snake shape particle trail)

    3. shot 3: ring landing (background: abstract particle)



    Week 3 Task - FX development & render test

    1.  shot 1-1 : snake scale fx modification & render test
    2. shot 2: snake shape particle trail & ring rolling animation & render test
    3. shot3: abstract particle fx background & render test



    1. Snake scale transformation Fx (shot 1-1)

    Regarding this part of the effect, this week is mainly to solve the problem of material assign, because this is a flip effect, it means that the scales need to be on both sides of the material ( jade and gold), and I used the default material from redshift (jade as well as gold did the testing)

    shot1-1: scale double material (using groups from polyextrude to assign two side of scale material)
    shot1-1: flipbook test
    shot1-1: material assign render test (in Redshift: defualt gold and jade material + one hdri) 




    2. Snake shape particle trail & ring rolling animation (shot 2)

    for this snake shape particle trail, we wanted to simulate the movement of the snake, but we also wanted to add some diamonds to echo the design elements of the ring.

    So I tried many kinds of motion curves for the particle trail and finally chose this one, and to have the diamond sparkle effect, I tried to add trailing glowing particles to the end of this snake trail. I also tried to use instance to give the diamond model to the particles, but I gave up because the speed was too fast and it made the whole picture look messy.  To preserve the snake’s form, I didn’t add variation or noise to the trail. But the render looks too plain—some detail might be needed.

    shot2- test1 snake trail with diamond model
    shot2 - test2 snake trail without dimond model
    shot2 - render test1 snake trail （redshift)



    Technical breakdown 

    - snake trail
    shot2: snake trial step 1 (draw a curve)
    shot2: snake trail step2 (using line+curvesurface+pathdeform to create a moving solid pipe based on a curved path)
    shot2: snake trail step3 (add  apopnet, in here I only use popforce and popdrag and set 0 to life and variation value, to make the particle trail more solid, it is possible to more closely resemble the shape of a snake)


    -  trailing glowing particles


    Here, I just keep it simple. I mainly use the solid moving pipe to create smoke (by pyro), which uses voxel-based simulations to generate particles by extracting density and velocity fields, and then moves them through the flow to create effects like embers, sparks and dust.

    shot2: trailing glowing particle overall nodes
    shot2: trailing glowing particle step1 (using vop to add noise to the moving pipe，removing the black part makes the particle effect more dynamic, natural and detailed)
    shot2:  trailing glowing particle step 2 ( based on the step2 of snake trail, using pyro system to create a smoke, which containing attributes like density and velocity)
    shot2: trailing glowing particle step3 (add popnet, then add popadvectbyvolumes nodes to advect particles using a velocity field/density from a volume. It allows particles in a POP network to follow the motion of a pyro or fluid simulation)



    3. Abstract Particle (shot 3)

    Two versions of the abstract particle background were tested in shot3, and the test2 version was chosen because it was closer to the theme of the desert environment, whereas the test1 version was more like water flow.

    for test 1 tutorial:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pSbrYnRRSs&list=PLcU3Ccn9mkhWlnHUpucMvkdOmHEB8QAe8
    for test 2 tutorial: www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_nD-jhnQJA&t=455s

    shot3 : abstract particle test 1(flipbook)
    shot3 : abstract particle test 2(flipbook)
    shot3 : abstract particle test 2(redshift render, no motion blur)



    Yilin Zhao / SANM560 / SCAD x Harbor