Virtual Environments Blog: No place like home…

As previously suggested I desired something extra within the sky-scape of our fictional version of Pearl Harbour, originally in an earlier post it was thought that an infinite waterfall into the skies would be quite nice however with the discovery of the vortex modifier that all changed.

A Tornado, this seemed a much nicer extra piece than the waterfall as it is something more sky related than the waterfall. The tornado was crafted by merging the base shape of Ford Island into a new file and scaling it down to create a new island shape. Once done for a little difference and an area which could be said to encompass the tornado some mountains were dragged up. These mountains were crafted by a very small inset performed multiple times, as many as possible until the plane began intersecting, and then using the soft selection to pull areas upwards to form mountainous peaks.

The Tornado itself was crafted via the method of creating fire which was provided to us as a tutorial. Utilising a super spray the spray was set to fire upward from the island position and values suited to the height and width desired were input into the base modifier of the super spray. The main element of the effect is the material, you utilise a gradient on the opacity channel and a noise texture on the diffuse fill. In the original tutorial the colours used were based on it being fire, therefore orange and yellow, however with this being a tornado I chose dusty, sandy colours to suggest dirt being picked up via the winds.

Once the super spray was spraying the facing particles the effect was almost complete, but the Tornado was quite flat, it had no rotational movement which meant it looked like quite a weak puff rather than the raging Tornado I desired. This was where the Vortex modifier came into play. I had never experienced the vortex until recently and only then had stumbled upon it by accident, whilst playing around with other particle systems. It is fairly self-explanatory in that it takes particles and spins them around in a vortex. You can reposition the vortex and this adjusts where and how the particles spin. This was used to add some extra motion to the Tornado as I could auto-key the vortex to move up and down in order to adjust precisely how the Tornado looked at any time.

During the crafting of the Tornado Island a little extra back story for the overall piece began to formulate. This Tornado would invariably be an object of pure awe for any developing civilisation, thus it is safe to conclude that lore and myth would have been created surrounding the existence of a seemingly never-ending Tornado. This lore could plausibly be an apocalyptic style tale where the people believe that if the Tornado ever stops then it will mean their island is about to plummet to the abyss below.

With the strong winds of the Tornado it would also be reasonable to conclude that the people on the island would likely find a way to harness that as a source of energy and/or profit, this is why I designed a simple wind turbine to feature upon the island. These wind turbines were based on a futuristic style that we wouldn’t necessarily regard as wind turbines as they are not the conventional fan style; this seemed to go nicely with the fantasy styling of our tale.

Looping the animation proved an impossible task and thus alternate thoughts have had to be made. Looping the motion of the vortex going up and down was fine, a simple case of using the curve editor with an out of range controller type being set to loop. Unfortunately keeping the spray and vortex effect infinitum has eluded me. It seems the life and time off statistics will have to be manually set for the duration of the animation or scene the Tornado will feature in.

Video of the Tornado in action: