My task

My task in the group is to create elements of the environment. My aim to create water (or some other liquid) that will be held in a container as if it were to be fed through the pump. And fire, which of course provides the steam to power the pump itself. I will also be modelling parts of the main pump itself, to which we are referring to as the 'right' side of the pump.

I started first by attempting to model water. Seen as I thought this is a pump and the water will move I looked into the particle systems in 3ds, for example the hose effect. This was simple to set up and after a couple of quick renders I made a short video, shown below.



However after seeing this I decided that perhaps this is not the best idea. I couldn’t make the material fluid enough for a liquid and so abandoned the idea of having moving water coming out of the pump.

I moved on to thinking about water in a container above the pump, as this would not be moving. The main modelling aspect to this would be the material, and so I created a basic pebble like shape from flattening a sphere so I could morph it later to a water-like quality. I set about creating my water material following the basic principles of glass.

The ambient and diffuse colour settings were set to black, with specular level at 275, glossiness 45 and soften 0.1. I then added a falloff map to the opacity channel, the settings of this were kept to default except for the falloff type which was changed from perpendicular to fresnel. The material itself was now clear but too smooth, so a bump map was needed. Set at a level of 30 I added a noise map into the bump adjusting the size and phase levels of the noise to a level I thought was acceptable. Finally a refraction map was added with raytrace qualities set to 80, this would give the water its liquid appearance. A short animation later, after cloning the material and changing the phase in the bump map to create a slight rippling effect, I had the ‘pebble’ of water moving about. This was due to simply dragging a few vertices about with soft selection on and tweening. Here is the video:




I still wasn’t satisfied with the water effect so attempted adding the melt modifier to it; this looked really good whilst it was melting but soon disappeared for unknown reason as shown below.



In the end I decided not to include water in the project, as it seemed rather troublesome to make and I would still have other parts to model. So I decided to move on to modelling the fire.