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Feb.6th "Not as late" Blog post #3

Alright this one's a doozy. Not going to post any pictures of the water sim because it's basically the same as last time. I got the water sim file size down even more (down to 17GB), but for some reason the playback in Maya is choppy and I cannot fathom why. I learned about substepping in CGForge and am moving towards the VDB section which should be helpful for troubleshooting the water sim. The next call is a week away and I will be discussing the playback speed for my spectra's being off in Maya for no apparent reason. Going to lock in and do my best to have the VDB section done and hit 70% completion of the course before the call. Using the substepping knowledge I made a portal animation in Houdini, so that's pretty cool.



 
 
 

1/30 2026 "Definitely not late" Blog post #2

Alright, so I got a ton of stuff done. I ported all the spectra's I made last semester into the :X Drive, and divided them up among the different scenes. Ported the scenes themselves into Houdini and blended the spectra's in. I managed to get all them them done except for about 2. I also made progress with the water sim. There are still a lot of big things to work out, but I cut the file size down to 22.5GB's and although it has a mysterious pacing issue, it runs somewhat smoothly and doesn't crash the PC. So yay!





I also got a bit further in my CGForge work. The Particle reveal affect finally works the way it should and i correctly shaded the bubbles.



 
 
 

1/23 2026 My "definitely not late" first post of my last semester

A blogpost being due with us being back from break for 3 days is wild 💀


Anyways, my break wasn't spent on anything related to Sunstroke.

I fully committed to strengthening my VFX foundations and doing my course work in CGForge (after all, the work I'm doing on Sunstroke is advanced VFX work and I can't do it if I don't know the basics). I scheduled a call with the head of CGForge to talk about my progress, questions about both Sunstroke stuff and learning stuff, as well as career advice for today. I got a lot of advice and was finally able to push through the rut I was stuck in on the first big homework assignment. The advice I got for doing water was that I should complete the course I'm currently on as well as the VEX 1 course before going all in, I also learned that basically the only ways I can get the water to be not zipbomb size was to reduce the detail using the polyreduce node and to make import the camera from the Maya scene and make it so that the camera culls all the water not shown on screen. I will be trying the polyreduce method in the upcoming week. I am planning on waiting for the shots to be solidified before I try the culling method because If a camera angle gets changed I figure I would have to restart the entire thing which would be a massive pain. My plan for next week is to see how far I can polyreduce the file size of water sim I made last semester so Maya won't lag like crazy from a 60GB file size.


I have another call with the CGForge head on February 13th. So I'll plan on using the PolyReduce technique and pumping out spectras for all the shots that need them by then.


Below is some procedural grass chunks made for an assignment and an early in progress shot of a character reveal technique I learned.



 
 
 
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