Tea Time Redeux

It has been some time since I visited my tea room. I decided to come back to it to make some improvements.  Now, it should be known, since I'm going to be using this piece in my generalist reel that when I modeled the assets in this piece, they were intended to be more cinematic.  This means that they have way more geometry then they should. There is no way that I would want these assets to be used in a game.  And that is my only regret.  Had I extra time to do a major overhaul of this piece, I would remodel the assets so they only have as much geometry as needed.

That said, I did add some dynamics to the scene.  I have a reputation of wanting to throw dynamics into everything, which is the reason for most of my head-bashing later on.  In this particular instance, I added steam to the teapot and water pouring out to make the matcha.  Again, because of time restraints, they aren't as polished as I would like, but they serve their purpose.

The best part of finishing this scene (worst, really) was when I rendered the beauty with all of its dynamics.  I spend quite some time getting the water to pour out of the pot in a believable way, and I think my attention to detail for the pour itself took away from what happened AFTER the pour. Because, when the teapot tilts back to stop the flow, this happened:

Haha, yeah. Water isn't supposed to splash upwards and defy gravity.  Unfortunately, I discovered this like....they DAY BEFORE I needed the final product.  Like I said, big time constraint.  What's a girl to do?

Playing with the dynamics and re-rendering the entire segment again was out of the question.  I needed a quick and dirty solution that would be believable.  The problem area was only in the last 100-ish frames, so I decided to only re-render THOSE FRAMES...but without any dynamics. It wouldn't take long to do because, well, no dynamics.  In post I put the two layers on top of each other.  Then I got my rotoscope on in After Effects and masked out the crazy-gravity-defying-water so all you can see is the clean, dynamics-free layer.  Phew!  Not the best way to solve the problem, but it was the best I was going to get in the time I needed it.

So enjoy my traditional Japanese style tea house, complete with self propelled matcha set!