For these eyes, I motion tracked the paintings an image of the holes in the wall in AE: instant creepiness! For added creep, I used a procedual eyeball and rendered out a short sequence of the eyes looking as she walks past.

Used the exact same method as the attack, but because this is a close up paint effects looked a little dodgey. So I animated an extruded NURBS surface along the animated curves and applied the goo shader onto that to get it looking good.

Finally after a whole semester procrastinating.. I have finally completed THE GOO.

Chris has been sending me source files throughout the semester as I have been saying early on, how daunting I found creating the goo. A couple of his files involved hair follicles which gave some really nice and easy dynamic movement. However, when I used this method in my scene, especially with the collisions on for each body part and the ground, the scene became very sluggish. I also found I didn’t have enough control on each hair, especially when the goo strands float between being agressive and passive. So I decided against hair, and chose to animate the curve points instead. This might have been more time consuming in the long run, but I had a lot of control.

After much, much trial and error, the following is the process I settled upon:

Created curves leading up to the important parts of her body (neck, torso, left and right arm, left and right leg). I rebuilt these curves with 25 spans and applied a modified intestinal paint effect to it. I rebuilt them back to 2 spans - that way the paint effect would still be smooth.

Created 4 Point on Curve deformers on each curve, so that a smaller joining curve could be constraint to the deformers. The end locator was then Point constraint to the nearest joint on the body.

Keyed each Point on Curve deformer and paint FX, making sure their movements matched the mannequin’s body movements.

Repeated process for the smaller point constraint curves, which I scattered randomly between the big curves. I created a cluster deformer in the middle of these ones.

For the goo that wrapped around the body, I converted the paint FX to NURBS or polygons (depending on the number of faces) and soft binded them to the skeleton. Painting the weights on the torso wrap was very tedious.

In the end, it probably took the better part of three days for this scene. And the process was very simple because I had some base scenes and methods sorted already. I didn’t have to be so scared of it.

Using blendshapes again, leakage was pretty simple. Just two NURB spheres, on inside and one oozing out.
NEXT UP: goo attack - no more procrastination!

Turning something to dust is actually quite simple - it’s just a surface emitter with the same animated ramp plugged into Texture Rate as the ramp that is connected to the transparency of the object shader. The only difference is that the ramp for the particles is strip of white rather than a block.

I then applied a Uniform field to get the particles going in one direction and a Turbulence field.

Chris was kind enough to help me out with the shader, and sent me a couple of files. I couldn’t do half the stuff he did with the nodes. The shader basically makes sure the objects acts like a proper plastic shiny object. As you may remember, my first couple of renders had the mannequin too reflective. This shader uses a facing ratio of a sampler info node plugged into the U and V coordinates of a crack image to control how much reflection are at the edges. While the LatLong image plugged into a spherical environment node, cuts down on raytrace time.

I modified it a little, layering two shaders - one that makes the smaller cracks and reflection and the other with the deep cracks - that way it’ll be easier to animate.

I’m staying up and up later and later…So it’s 2.30am. and I’m up trying to get my bump maps to appear like they should. Modifying the colour offset attribute of the file does work on the image, but the changes doesn’t show up on the bump itself.

I totally caved just now and emailed Chris about it.

*falls asleep*

Started tweaking shaders today. I remember asking Chris early on, what was the best way to go about this. He told me to animate textures. These could then be plugged into Texture Rate of a particle emitter.Thought the quickest way to make my crack bumps is to use the crack paint FX and modify them to fit my UVs in Photoshop. I made the borders of the cracks displace slightly up, because as a surface cracks, paint flick outwards.

I love Zebruv mel script as much as one could possibly love a script. SO GLAD I had a feeling to look for a UV helper. Basically the script creates perfect UV’s for you. All you have to do is select the seam edges and press a button. VOILA!

Only problem I stumbled upon is that the script fails on my torso mesh. Tried a whole number of seam variations. Nothing worked for it. So I ended up UVing the arms seperately, then the torso itself.

Still, the script rocks my socks.

The hallways took form according to my sketch. Building the walls and doors were easy as pie. The only annoying part was positioning the portaits in a unique way on every wall, careful not to have two duplicates next to each other.
I have finished making objects! NEXT UP, finishing the animatic, then onto animating!