BSA326 Advanced Animation

Animation tests - June 28 Doing tests for the various physic objects that would be on the characters in Skyway Robbery. Test 1: Skirt Basic test making sure that I can attach cloth items to moving objects without hinderence or bugs. Test works fine, cloth object follows the primary object fine. Need to remember caching process, making a mistake would break the system. Have yet to test the system with legs/ moving solid objects. Could cause problems. Will test soon. Next Test: Hair Need to figure out how I plan to do the hair for my characters, particularly Julia. I would like a solid/cartoonish look to it rather than strands as it would fit the style better and take less time to render. Some examples shown below. The problems is I would like these to move in the wind. The question is can I get this sort of thing with physics objects or will I need to use blend shapes. The other alternative is using XGen but I'm not sure that is the way I want to go. ...

April 9 - Hair! We worked with the basics of hair generation today. Some interesting stuff although I don't imagine that I will be using it as part of my own project. Hair usual created using a helmet like model around the character's head.   The system does cause a lot of lag on the computer, so using this system with caution would be a good idea. Rachel's computer crashed while she was trying to show us these processes. Had a fiddle with the settings, managed to create a few weird hairs styles... Took a while, but with Rachel's help I got the hair to render with a more realistic colour. Need to remember to attach it properly through, Visiblity > ai Hair shader. Looks a bit like Bob Ross...

Maya Particle effects Learned the basic of creating particle effects in Maya. Seems pretty interesting and VERY useful. Will have to think about how to apply this to my own work. It will probably be used in the cloth physics for the airship, but I'm sure there will be other uses. The fist picture shows my test with particles and the volume field curve.   This was a test with an emitter and a physic collider. This was rendered version of the test (turns out Arnold lights are pretty soft).

Pipeline plan Just a quick brainstorming of a possible pipeline. This will probably change as I develop my project. Background = Vue, Maya, Photoshop Weather effects = Nuke, Houdini, Maya 3D models = Maya, Zbursh 2D animation = Toom boom harmony Compositing = Nuke, Toon Boom Harmony, Adobe after effects  Special Effects = Nuke, Houdini Parts that I will need Clouds Skyscrapers  Wind  Cloth Dust Emitters/lighting/lens flare Characters 3D models Had a look at Toon Boom Harmony, Nuke and After effects for their particle effects/ particle simulations. Some interesting stuff in there, will have to look at Houdini to decide what programs I will use to create the effects and particles for my own project.