Friday 29 May 2009

Swinging Spikey Ball!

Mine and Nathan's spikey pendulum ball! =D We used joints and created cylinders over them, then animated each joint individually and parented spikes and a ball so it all moved together!

Candle!

I made the first model of my animation!! I used the smooth tool and the soft modification tool to make it look as if the candle was dripping!! The fire is made using the fire effect tool in dynamics.

Animation Test!

Here is another animation test where I have tried to experiment with timing and how how things are distorted when they bounce. Using this ball, I have made it squish when it hits each plane of the box, and distort lengthways when it's in the middle of bouncing. By distorting it lengthways in the middle, it looks as if it's going faster. The less its distorted in between and when it lands, the slower it looks - but if it moves quickly anyway then it wont look natural if you don't distort it accordingly.

Rough Sketch Idea

This is my first draft for the idea of my animation. Everything connects, but I'm sure that it will be changed a bit when I actually go to make it.. anyway, I'll give it a go!

Amzing Car Advert!

This advert was on telly the other day and it's an amazing example of a domino effect! Apparently It cost over $116 million and over 600 takes of film!!

Thursday 28 May 2009

Fireball and Revolve Tool!

First drawing a curve in a weird shape and then using the revolve tool I created a pot!! Quick and effective! Drawing a sphere and using the fire tool in dynamics i made a fiery ball bounce on the pot! Yay!

Springy Spring!

This is a spring - made using a curve and a circle surface, extruding it up the curve and then making the rotation greater.  By editing the circle you can make the spring fatter or thinner and then I finally animated it by stretching the spring up and down - using the key frames.

First animation!!

This is the first thing I've made move! Yay! =D It's not great, and the animation is reaaaally kind of slow, but at least its a start! hopefully I'll actually get the hang of this one day!

Animation of ball going through a lattice -


More models!

I was just messing around with some of the tools that Kelvin had shown us how to use and i made a table, a weird twisted shape and a ball that distorts through a funnel! The sooth tool i found really useful as, like the name it smoothes everything by creating more polygons to get rid of some of the blunt edges - making it look a bit more realistic.

I also used extrude to build up the twisty shapes and give variety to the thickness and shape.

The ball is going into a lattice - a polygon object automatically deforms when you pull it through a lattice. You can also use lattices to edit the curve of an object.

First 3D Model!!!

My attempt at a 3D chair!!! =D I'm quite proud as it actually looks similar to how I intended! Yay!

Wednesday 27 May 2009

Idea!!! =D

Ok, one idea I has was to make an animation in the style of the olympic torch! In the previous Olympic games in Beijing there was a domino-like effect starting from the torch that a runner brought in which in turn caused various other things to light, and then fire twisted up the massive olympic torch and lit the big flame. Maybe I could make something similar to pitagora suichi but with fire!


3D Pitagora Suichi!

Someone made their own 3D version of pitagora suichi!! Looks really good! - I guess this is similar to what i should be making.

Dominoes Everywhere!

Actual dominoes! It's a good idea to look at actual footage when animating things or trying to get an idea, that way you can make the animation as realistic as possible!



This is someone's 3D animation using dominoes! The movement is pretty good but i think it's quite slow. Useful for reference though!



This one is particularly amazing:



And the world record!!

Thunderbirds are go!

I was watching Thunderbirds... as you do, and realised that they had their own launch sequence dominoes effect!!


Research!

This video shows a series of different domino effects using random utensils and everyday house products. It's particularly clever as at the end of each domino effect the words pitagora suichi join up after going through a pretty complicated chain reaction.

Thursday 21 May 2009

Where to begin? o_0

Right, so we've been told we have to make a "little" 30 second CG project on maya - which is prettttty daunting but hey, gotta start somewhere!


So the theme is Domino Effect - starting off a chain reaction to make things move and resulting in an overall task.




Literally using dominoes might be a little obvious so I'm gonna go and research and brainstorm some ideas.