Week 6: Animation - Rigid Body Dynamics

Late getting the posts out lately since class has been pretty intense this past week. We finished out last week with a short intro to rigid body dynamics. We will go over them in detail during the final week: Dynamics. We got to see the basics of how it works anyway. Rigid body simulations calculate the collisions between hard objects that do not deform or penetrate each other (basically hard objects). Soft bodies are things like rope, cloth..stuff that changes shape upon contact.

It's real-world based in physics so you need to assign things like gravity, mass, friction, etc...to all the objects, so you can get very realistic-looking behavior as things collide. However, the down side is since it's a simulation, you dont have direct control over the result or look like you do with keyframed animation. All you can do is adjust properties and see what happens, so it takes many many tries and the calculations too take a long time. So, its a slow process. That said, if you had to animate with keyframes 100 pencils dropping on a table and make it look realistic it would take much longer and probably still not look natural. But it depends on the scope and particular shot so it really depends.

Anyway, here are some pencils being knocked out of a Styrofoam cup by a virtual wrecking ball. I purposefully didn't spend time on the materials or lighting or add nice effects like motion blur since it takes sooooo much time just to run the simulation and I'm on a lowly laptop here. To see a higher res version click here.

Also, hello out there to my classmate's Marcelo's father-in-law. Glad to know I have at least one reader! haha. Thanks for reading!

Lighting workshop with cinematographer from Jurassic Park

I went to a lighting workshop at Mole-Richardson, a premiere lighting facility in Hollywood. They were offering to show CG artists how set lighting is done for different effects so we can imitate those setups in our software. Really enjoyed it. Finally understand how they light cars for ads (pic above). The speaker was the cinematographer who worked Werewolf, Jurassic Park 3 and Hidalgo. It was so amazing how they can make an indoor set look totally like its outside lighting with the right lights and filters. I think real set lighting could be more fun than CG! ha. They let interested people come on fridays to learn in exchange for helping out a bit. Think I found a new hangout : )

Click here to see this guy's amazing 3d version of Mei from Studio Ghibli's My Neighbor Totoro, as pictured above. Since we studied blendshapes today, which is how character animators get all those facial expressions, our instructor showed us this artist's work as a pretty cool example of it. He did 15 facial expressions in 3d based on the 2d anime film. The models were all done in Zbrush, a popular 3d sculpting application.

Pixar's FX supervisor talks about the movie 'UP'

Tonight was pretty cool..the Lead FX supervisor from Pixar came and gave a presentation on how they did the effects, particularly the balloon and rope effects in the movie 'UP', which I actually haven't seen yet. Based on what I saw it looks amazing IMHO. Pixar just keeps crankin out the hits. He also gave us the low down on what its like to work at Pixar and answered questions. Free beer and pizza too : )

Week 6: Animation - deformers

Yesterday was about deformers in Maya, which can be used to create model or animate with. We were given the challenge to animate the cylinder below in a 'slinky' type move, not such a hard task at first glace. But we were not allowed to use any bones/skeleton or bend deformers. We had to animate groups of vertices (or 'clusters') individually to get the result. Clusters are actually what is going on 'behind the scenes' when you make a skeleton for your character and animate it, so it was the original way characters were animated (we were told) back in early days of CG. Trust me, that must have been a painful exercise to do whole character that way!

I guess they wanted us to learn this super hard way now just to get familiar with the tool/concepts. It was pretty tough to get that little sucker to deform as smoothly as with easier methods, but it's doing the slinky move anyhow..ha. Tedious but a good exercise I guess. Certainly know more about clusters than I ever wanted to...

Week 6: Animation - animated modeling

Today we got into animating using our modeling tools. Normally lofts, sweeps, revolves, etc. are used to create a surface like a wine glass, for example. But the creation process can be animated too, which can create some interesting animations of things building on, like vines growing.

Again, nothing earth-shattering animation-wise, but the potential for very cool stuff is there I think...

Week 6: Animation - just to get the ball rolling

Just to get animation week started, we did the classic bouncing ball with squash and stretch. Nothing mind-blowing here, but was a good start to get used to Maya's keyframing tools. Was kind of nice to do something cartoony for a change : )