This month, in Visual Effects class, we started off learning about rigid bodies and fields in Maya. The first project primarily focused on learning how to properly utilize active rigid bodies, passive rigid bodies, and constraints. Active rigid bodies are applied to a mesh that you want to interact with the environment around it. For instance, a hammer hitting a cup; both need to respond to each other so they would require an active rigid body. The table that both of these objects are sitting upon only require a passive rigid body though, since the table will not be acting upon either objects. Constraints limit the actions of an active rigid body to force it to comply to the movement you want. There are nail, pin, hinge, spring, and barrier constraints that can all be applied to rigid bodies. I started off with the scene provided below.
As you can see, this scene emulates a Rube Goldberg Machine. There are several objects that interact with each other to push the action forward from one end of the contraption to the other. The first step was to try and conceptualize where I would place my rigid bodies and constraints. I mapped these out using Photoshop CC 2015.
The next step was taking these ideas into Maya. I pretty much followed my "storyboards" once in Maya, but soon realized some changes would need to be made. I also ended cutting the total time down and ended my scene where the last cup gets knocked over. I had a lot of fun exploring the rigid bodies, as there is a slew of different options you can change to get the desired outcome. Some of these attributes include mass, dampening, drag, and bounciness. I also used fields, such as gravitational and uniform to keep the geometry behaving normally. The Dynamic Relationship editor was most beneficial for keeping track of these relationships between rigid bodies and fields. After all of the active rigid bodies were set up and working correctly, I baked the simulation to animation keys. This way Maya would simply have to compute the animation of the objects moving instead of the physics simulations each time.
Once I had the scene set up to my liking, I added some textures and began to render using Mental Ray in Maya. I ended up with 1400 frames of animation. I will admit that the render time greatly exceeded my expectations. It took a good 48 hours to render with mental ray. I rendered out in batches of 200 frames at a time so I could check for any mistakes or errors present. If there was an issue with how something was rendered, I could simply fix it and re-render that batch of frames.
After the render was complete, I used fcheck (integrated with Maya) to check the .iff files that were rendered. I then arranged the video in Final Cut Pro, adding some ambient music to set the scene as well, and came to a final animation clip. It is important to note that all the animation seen here is simply simulations baked to keys.
Once I had the scene set up to my liking, I added some textures and began to render using Mental Ray in Maya. I ended up with 1400 frames of animation. I will admit that the render time greatly exceeded my expectations. It took a good 48 hours to render with mental ray. I rendered out in batches of 200 frames at a time so I could check for any mistakes or errors present. If there was an issue with how something was rendered, I could simply fix it and re-render that batch of frames.
After the render was complete, I used fcheck (integrated with Maya) to check the .iff files that were rendered. I then arranged the video in Final Cut Pro, adding some ambient music to set the scene as well, and came to a final animation clip. It is important to note that all the animation seen here is simply simulations baked to keys.
Overall, this was a great introduction to particles and physics in Maya.
Some things I would have liked to fix are the pole on the hammer (jerking around a lot), the balls falling out of the cup (appear very suddenly), and the overall speed of the process. This project was done on a time crunch, especially with 48 hours of rendering, but in the future I will definitely use better time management to fix any issues that arise in the production process.
Some things I would have liked to fix are the pole on the hammer (jerking around a lot), the balls falling out of the cup (appear very suddenly), and the overall speed of the process. This project was done on a time crunch, especially with 48 hours of rendering, but in the future I will definitely use better time management to fix any issues that arise in the production process.
No comments:
Post a Comment