Finding a Problem

After speaking with Grant I learnt that we didn't need to have the use of expressions in this module, for that reason I began to think more of what I could do.
I really wanted to do something that would require texture and shader work but I don't know how to write HLSL and last time I touched CG was like very basic stuff back in 2011.

For what I wanted to do with textures I thought I could create something like a shader for lets say for example a Molotov hits a wooden floor and in a game it hurts a player, but what does it do to the environment?
Nothing most of the time, so here I have a problem I could solve.
The reasoning to me not continuing with the rice bag concept was that Naughty Dog made it, it's not a problem in games either. I wanted to create something more dynamic in relations to materials with a problem on which I could solve.

With this fire burning wood if hit by a Molotov I thought it could be a great idea, but it seemed like a very small concept.

As I wasn't too sure how I would work this with the shaders inside of Maya because I only had done something with shaders inside of UE4 before, I went into research what Maya had to show. I then remembered a shading module called ShaderFX and knew this worked with the Viewport2.0 and used PBR (Physically Based Rendering) textures.
I then went from there to do some research on this tool as it was a node based shader development which was almost like the Unreal Engine one.

One of the first things I searched was ShaderFX and Python, to make sure I could very much control the shader through Python, I didn't find much but from what I found it kind of showed that it was possible to do this.

EDIT - The video that used to be here demonstrated a random shader assignment using Python and ShaderFX but the author appears to have recently deleted the video so it can no longer be used.

Another video I found was even more helpful because not did it only just show the tool but it also made the python script downloadable so I was able to look into the code to help me work out how I would do something with ShaderFXs. 

[Downloadable Link]

This was great stuff and super helpful as I was able to know that I could work with both ShaderFX with the Python scripting.
I kept the wood burning idea in my head and waited till the weeks lecture started so I could ask Grant about it.

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This weeks lecture was super helpful, we were shown previous examples of what students had done in the past, great! Now I was getting a more concrete idea of what I could develop and achieve.

Thought the wood burning one would be good I didn't really know if it was big enough or how I would go about making a area of burning effect.
From the lecture I was hit by the weather effect one, I was like hmm, I wonder if I could make something a bit more advanced from that.
Last semester I was doing freelance work for a tutorial studio called 3DMotive, it's like Digital Tutors but more aimed towards video game tutorials.
One of the materials I did for a recent course [Link to course] was creating a dynamic material that would go through change if it was raining, snowing or sunny.

I then thought, what if I created a dynamic weather system that effects the environment?
This hadn't been done much in video games to my knowledge and it could be a great place to start the research and find out what to do with this.

Thus began my journey on pushing forward with creating a dynamic weather system inside of Maya which put the focus on texture changes from the weather.

I spoke with Grant and he seemed okay with this idea...Great!