Visual Effects 1

Visual Effects 1 concentrated on legacy particle creation, rigid and soft-body simulation.

For lesson 1, we were required to create a simulation involving a pinball that progressed through a rube-goldberg machine.  The project called for use of Maya’s dynamic fields such as, gravity and uniform.  Using these in combination with dynamic constrains and collision solvers made it possible.

Lesson 1 – Rigid body simulation in Maya:

Lesson 2 consisted of particle simulation using Maya’s legacy particles.  Although my shading and lighting need some work, my particle simulation isn’t half-bad.  For the coffee (ick, needs to be re-rendered) I used Maya software’s blobby particles.  The steam was Maya software’s tube particles, and the sugar pouring from shaker was hardware multi-points.  I also included nParticles for the sugar sliding around inside the glass shaker.  This simulation took more time to cache and render that I estimated, therefore some of my shading suffered.

Lesson 2 – Particles simulation:

Finally we had to do a simple soft body simulation.  I decided on an ice cream cone falling to the ground and then melting slightly.  This involved animating between 5 goals.  The most challenging thing was transitioning the animation between the goals for the ice cream melting effect.  The cone has some slight deformation to it as well, and involves a soft body with springs attached.

Lesson 3 – Soft Body simulation:

 

Character Animation 1

Character Animation 1 piggy-back’s off FOA and is a more in-depth instruction of character walk cycles and key poses.  This includes things like the foot roll, blinks, breaking the wrist when swinging the arms, etc.

Our first assignment was to give a character without arms a walk that concluded with a turn and a jump.  The reasoning for omitting the arms is to give students more focus on the lower half of the body.

Assignment 1:

Our second assignment involved taking the rig we would be using for the walk cycle and posing it reflecting several different emotions.  The poses required were: relaxed, fear, anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, and balance (on one foot).

Assignment 2:

For our final assignment, we needed to complete a walk across a platform, turn the character and press a specifically placed button.

Final Assignment 3: