Category: Maya

While originally this week was meant to begin a new project for us it would have to be delayed due to issues coming up in the project that our instructors and course leader would need to address first before being able to go ahead with it. As a result this day was instead to be used for people to catch up on any project and get help from the instructor. Essentially a free time. I spend this class time working on Nuke and Collaborative project work that will be reflected in my blog updates on there.

This week was reserved in class for final touches and access to the render farm to render out our final pieces. As I, and the people I showed my project to, were satisfied with my work all I did in relation to this course was loop my animation in Premiere Pro and upload it to make the transition smoother.

However I did not waste my time in class as I instead opted to work on my Cat model in class while I had access to help from my instructor.

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.

While last week was focused on the development of the basics of the animation this week I spent focusing on another important element of satisfying scene composition and that was color and texture. My original vision had me wanting to strive for very bright, neon-like colors as I felt that the outlandish color scheme would provide a more abstract air to the piece. Unfortunately despite my best efforts the piece never looked how I wished and would more often prompt people to avert their eyes than engage.

Though the exact color choices were poor they were at least grounded in theory as I used ColorHexa.com to find complimentary colors. At the suggestion of others I went for more muted colors and came to this.

As you can see I did still stick with the original color ideas of pink and green though shifted them to be more muted and I think it was a significant improvement.

Another big thing to tackle with the piece was lighting. One thing I noted while watching the videos is that the lighting for the other pieces was that they were flat in their lighting. Few shadows and what shadows are cast are pale and indefinite. With that in mind I created this lighting set up to imitate it.

3 spotlights light up the main scene with a wide dispersal cone to get everything as evenly lit as possible. Then I used soft area lights over the scene and the background to balance out shadows and create that uniform lighting over the entire scene which can be seen in the shots above.

This marked the first week in our next 4 week development project: The Oddly Satisfying animation. While the title of the project seems to be quite vague it is based on a series of animations that can be found online that have become somewhat generified. An example of a compilation of such animations can be found here.

While they can vary wildly in tone from realistic to abstract in both content and color palate I have decided to go with a more abstract piece as to further differentiate this from the last project where I aimed to create a more realistic looking piece.

While I was stumped for a while on what to actually produce I eventually had an idea for a machine that I would deem oddly satisfying that I did a quick sketch of.

The basic idea would be that a ring flows down from the top, onto an arm which then has the ring slide, just perfectly shaped to fit, into the tube and from there the animation would loop infinitely. The abstract comes in as the machine doesn’t resemble anything all that realistic and its purpose is entirely left to interpretation and the oddly satisfying elements would come from its motion down the arm and the tube.

While I eventually figured out how to create an initial prototype I had to modify quite a bit as the perspective of the machine revealed more of it than I had originally planned and while I wanted there to be only one central piece that all arms connected to I, after animating it through a combination of edges converted to lines and line constraints, that the donut would have to phase through 3 other arms to slide down the first arm. This would be too egregious of a breach of realism and turn the animation off from being satisfying. Another issue I had was, to fill up space, it was recommended I added a plate that the tube could come from and make the scene more visually interesting

As I hadn’t made this first version in the center of the world or with any precision I was left with the choice to start again and be careful setting it up or attempt to make it symmetrical by hand. After trying by hand I realized it’d be useless to do so and instead recreated my progress in a new scene where I was careful to make everything symmetrical.

Another facet of this week’s class was MASH. A powerful motion graphics system in Maya. While I experimented with it I did not ultimately use it in this current version of my animation. This is something I want to change as I should try to learn as much of Maya as I can so this weekend I will watch MASH tutorials to get a wider grasp on what MASH can do so I can implement it.

I also made some slight modifications to the camera work of my Rube Goldberg machine and re-rendered it. As my instructor Nick pointed out that my cut goes against the main idea of Rube Goldberg machine animation where it is meant to be a single continuous shot to show off cause and effect.

This week was spent mostly correcting the issues present in the UVs from last week which was quickly solved thanks to Nick’s aid in fixing some outstanding issues with my model. Namely adding creases to keep the model in a more refined shape and inverting normals that had become flipped during modeling. Past that what was most engaging about the week was rendering. Toying with the different setting to make the most clear image I could alongside keeping render times down. As I had 672 frames I aimed to have each frame render in around 30 seconds as to keep the render time down to 5-6 hours as that would be able to render in our class time so I wouldn’t end up using the computer while another class needed it for their studies. Below is the final output.

This week was focused on finalizing, for the most part, the entire Rube Goldberg machine scene. It took a long time to bake my simulation as a series of errors kept occurring that eventually my classmates and I figured out a work-around. After successfully baking my animation it was time to move on to texturing.

I got my textures from Quixel Megascans and I had to research again how to properly set up textures on Arnold using the hypershade tool. Mostly the issue was figuring out what to do with the Normal Maps I received on some textures. Though some UVs were/are difficult to handle and have resulted in some strange texture issues that I need help in figuring out.

Beyond that texturing wasn’t a huge issue, though I’m having issues with the metal textures as they all seem to show up pale white which resembles a totally untextured object yet I know they are linked up properly. This is something else I’d like to look into. Beyond that the scene is totally finished and ready to be rendered out once these issues have been addressed.