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:
the pied pixel 