Director's Cut

Today our group is working on the "Director's Cut" alternate ending for our animation. This involves a different shot of a pen turning on a computer. I animated this new shot in Maya:

Post Production

At the end of our meeting on Friday, the group had several different rendered shots/scenes assembled in Premiere. I then took this video and added some post processing (e.g. freeze frames, title cards, etc.) using iMovie. I also used GarageBand to put together a preliminary soundtrack. I mostly used music from my iTunes library, and sound effects I found on the web. I was able to use one or two sound effects that are built in to GarageBand, and I got a sound effects CD from the OSU library that had a few useful things on it (like the sound of the flies buzzing). This post-production stuff is fun, but the timings and video effects will have to be done over again once we have our fully-finalized renderings from Maya.

I added a screenshot from GarageBand and from iMovie to this post. The interfaces are relatively straightforward, but I spend quite a bit of time today learning some of the nuances.

The Plane Sequence

This past Friday during our group meeting at ACCAD, I animated and rendered the sequence in which the plane flies and cuts the string holding up the pen. This involved a lot of experimentation with camera angles and movement. I think being a film-nerd helped me choose an angle and a push-in movement that isn't too jarring to the viewer. Here's a video clip of what I came up with:

Kickstarting the Machine

Our Rube Goldberg machine begins with an alarm clock ringing, and its hammer striking a match. Today I procedurally animated the motion of the alarm clock hands, the movement of its hammer, the vibration of the clock when it goes off, and the burst of flame that it causes. The flame is achieved via Maya's built in fire effect, and it's "density" attribute is tweaked inside of an animation expression to make the flame begin just after the hammer begins moving. Here's a fully-rendered look at what I've just described:

Fly Animation Complete

After making good progress last week with an initial fly swarming animation, I was able to finalize things this week. First I wrote a MEL script that imported Michael's fly model in place of the spheres that I was originally using. I added some randomized rotation to the individual flies' orientation, so that they look more natural and aren't all always facing the same direction. Michael's model included a "flap" attribute that controlled the angle of the wings, and so I modified the expression to control those values with a sinusoid. I found the MEL "linstep" command to be extremely useful here, because it automatically scales values in to the range 0 to 1. A playblast of the finalized fly animation is shown below.

I also continued work on modeling the neighboring house for our animation. I used Maya's paint effects to create some trees and shrubs:

The Flies Are Swarming

Today's usual meeting at ACCAD was very fruitful.  First and foremost, I was able to get my procedural animation of swarming flies completed.  Here's a video:

As you can see, there are 10 spheres randomly distributed around a locator, and they randomly fly around while remaining within a certain radius of that locator.  I keyframed the locator to move around a bit so that you can see the flies really are attracted to it.  Michael helped me with tweaking a few of the randomness parameters and coefficients, but the basic idea is as described in my previous post.  

The other major task I began today is the modeling of the "world outside" of our main scene.  We will be making use of a second house for part of our animation, and we'd also like to have a

simple neighborhood with some paint effects like grass and trees.  The external shape of this house is the same as our main house, but I applied some 2D textures for aluminum siding and roof shingles, based on images I found online.

Progress Report Presentation #2

On Monday we gave our second project progress report in class.  Aside from an issue connecting my laptop to the projector (that's what we get for volunteering to go first...) I think it went quite well.  We demonstrated some new progress that we've made, all of which is detailed on our project website.

I'm in charge of maintaining the project website for our group.  I'm using iWeb, which makes things relatively nice.  Our only real problem along these lines has been some issues with video file formats across multiple platforms/codecs.  This week we collectively decided to only use Quicktime format (.mov) from now on, because it seems to work the best for everybody.

In terms of technical progress, I'm still working on the fly swarming script.  I have a MEL script that creates a locator and randomly distributes some "flies" around it, and an animation expression that controls their basic physics (updates acceleration based on the constraints mentioned in my previous post, updates velocity according to this acceleration, updates position based on this updated velocity).  It isn't producing good-looking results just yet (I'll post a video as soon as it is), but my only real problem along these lines has been the actual syntax of the language.  

I'm familiar with several scripting languages, ranging from the basics like Perl and VBScript to software-specific behemoths like Matlab and LotusScript...but I've never encountered a scripting language as unpredictable as Maya's.  It's still essentially a guessing game for me whether or not an expression needs to be backquoted, or whether or not it is safe to use the return value of some function inside another command, etc.  

One quirk that I had to overcome is that, unlike most other scripting languages, you don't interact with MEL in a REPL.  It doesn't really "print" the results of your commands unless you wrap everything in a "print" command.  This is crucial for debugging.  Much of my coding time thus far has been spent climbing such cliffs in the learning curve.  Thankfully, I now feel relatively proficient and hope to do some more procedural tasks in the near future.

Other upcoming work I'm planning on doing includes adding some 2D textures to the walls of our house and also refining the model for our car.