I spent this week polishing and finalizing the ‘Satisfying’ animation. Having shown it to a lot of different people they were adamant that the machine was a donut machine and many suggested I turn the non-specific ring into a donut as many would find that addition more satisfying.
Taking that very common piece of feedback into account I modeled a donut based on the original torus and it was here I found an opportunity to use MASH. As mash has a ‘placer’ node that takes an object that has been converted to a MASH set up and allows it to be placed on any surface. Using that function I created a small cylinder that would be used as a sprinkle and using the placer node added it to the surface of the donut.
I also made use of the modelling tools in Maya to add slight imperfections to the donut and it’s icing to make it slightly more realistic. Afterwards I parented it to the two original rings so I wouldn’t need to re-animate anything.
The hardest thing for this week was setting up the mash placer node to function correctly as several times I tried the sprinkles would be placed sticking upright into the surface of the donut which would look bizarre. I also did try importing the exr into after effects to add some smoke and light in post to give the idea of ‘something’ happening to the donut after its gone down the tube however I could never get it to look good. Either the smoke disappearing looked unnatural or the glowing from the hole seemed bizarre. I decided to instead abandon the idea and focus on fine tuning what I already had.