Blockout in Maya for Particle Systems

So for the group animation project we needed to do our blockout as part of the process pipeline – to see what a simplified version of our animation would look like. I was tasked with showing the change in seasons and some dialogue between the main characters, the fairy and the clockbird.

I really wanted to be able to use Unreal to show this as I actually had successfully imported the fbx file into Unreal.

Anyways it wasn’t to be so I set about creating it in Maya.

My main plan was to layer in quintessential elements of autumn and winter by using elements in the foreground (trees, leaves) and moving particles(leaves,the effect of snow).

This is what I came up with:

(I used the same again for day-time)

For autumn, I photoshopped some leaves and animated them moving across the scene. Funnily enough, trying to select a decent image of the tree was the hardest part. It was quite a pixelated shot so Photoshop didn’t know wihch particles to pick. While this is very basic, I tried to base it on scenes from Disney’s Pocahontas:

At the end of this I realised how much I want to learn about particle systems in Unreal. I am very excited about this and I found some really interesting tutorials to follow.

Especially as I found the tutorial on realistic rain:

This tutorial here is also really useful – it was posted in Unreal Engine’s Youtube channel.

Next time I will try the Unreal Engine tutorials and see how I get on.