The Rice Bag

This week I was thinking of nailing my idea down a little more but I still wasn't 100% sure what was the requirements so I made it my job to pitch this idea and ask Grant about the module and how free it was and did it need to include expressions or just scripting.

I wanted to pitch this idea to do something that I saw in the trailer of Uncharted 4 and try to re-create the same idea as I thought it would make an interesting module topic.

Below are some pictures of the rice bag and it's dynamics which was taken from the Naughty Dog HeadSpace VFX video from week one.

Uncharted 4 Tech Art Demo - [Link]

As you can see the bags (circled in red) are used for cover, when they are hit by a bullet the rice sack would then begin to leak out the rice (the purple circle). The bag after a time will begin to deflate as you can see from the last image clearly.

I wasn't sure how I would achieve this and I asked a guy I know who worked as a VFX artist at Bioware how they normal go about creating VFXs for games and do they just use Maya as I wasn't sure if I could or wanted to do everything in Maya as I wanted to special in games which use engines.
His reply was "making rice come out of a bag will be tricky but can be achieved by using the volume of particles to drive the bags mass".
He also said Maya is normally great for prototyping but they wouldn't normally use just Maya to create all the effects.

I wasn't really sure how I would do this in just Maya or what to even start with, but I made some guesses that the bag might be achievable in Maya and having a particle emit from a set point where a bullet would have it to have rice drop out.

Maya 2014 nCloth Inflation Tutorial by Stuart Christensen