To start this module off, we started looking at more advanced VFX work on maya, the first being a tool called ‘Bullet’.
Before exploring this tool however, we practiced the animation skills we would need for later. We created a stairs and a sphere to represent a ball that would be seen to be falling down the stairs.
We then made the animation on the animation graph editor as this way we can edit the exact bounces it would make by adjusting the X and Y marks it would change as it went down. We did this by breaking the tangents on new set keys so we could adjust the angles of whihc it would be falling at and make them all similar.
I had to edit my graph and make the curves more exaggerated so that the ball would bounce more.
We then added another ball next to it, and applied the same methid but this time adding a more flat fall.
We added a background lighting and made a playback blast to document how this ended up looking,
The Bullet tool helps you create movement and direct animations of shapes colliding with other shapes. The two main functions of this tool is ‘active’ and ‘passive’ rigid bodies. Passive being something that makes the shape almost like a wall, a surface that doesn’t move, active being one that falls and collides with other active bodies, or against passive bodies.
We first tried just creating a cube, rising it above ground, making it an active rigid body and then playing the animation.
The cube fell and bounced off the ground. We then created a slightly more complex practice model of a ball colliding with dominoes, subsequently knocking them over. For this we had to make sure the sphere was an active rigid body, it’s collider shape was set to sphere, and that the slope the ball fell down, the plate for the ground and the dominoes were all passive rigid bodies.
I also added an active body of another sphere to delevop this animation of a cause and effect chain.
Work From Home
We were told in the forthcoming weeks we had to develop design ideas for a simailar but more complex Rube Goldberg machine project we were going to create with bullet. I researched some design ideas and physics ideas for what I could create.
I decided I really liked the idea of playing with gravity and a loop system to create a satifying factory like machine. When I thought about playing with gravity and reversing it, I then thought of a floating ball, perhaps a bubble I could incorperate wihin this.
When looking at design ideas for a Rube Goldberg machine to do with bubbles, I was inspired by a pastel colour pallette, with the idea of a ‘bubble maker’ incorperated which created the solid bubble to float somehere in the animation. I decided this would be what I would develop within this project.