Thought I was just about finished, till I showed Chris today. Gave me a list of things to fix up… Gah.

Door too thick

Starting animation needs work: burst of movement, focus on door, mouth movement

Camera cut frames

Fade 11 frames mirror

Paintings specular and more creepy

Particles dust slower

Fall quicker

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.

Totally missed Chris in class today because I was hungry and went to get food. Then when I came back, he’d gone. I sent him an email with my revised playblast and luckily he sent me some feedback. Quite a lot of it:

I think the long shot up her body shouldn’t get interrupted by the dude at the door.
I think that she should “break out” of her stasis by him SLOWLY arriving and SLOWLY reaching up to the door, just before the “she says” and then quickly shutting it (like you have it, but with him glancing toward her ALL the time as if to say “I won’t get caught, I won’t get caught in his head” The arrival of the voice should seem as if it’s shocked him to close the door before he meant to, and in a manner which he didn’t mean to, and this should “shock her awake”, as if she’s hit by a little ripple… and then she settles very slowly…as if he’s the dream, but she can’t remember it on waking.

Her head motion right now looks as if she’s saying “no no”, in a kind of disbelief, but really, she should be not moving side to side, but more slumping up and down, as if she has a very heavy head. This will make her seem as if she’s having an interior experience, rather than reacting to her environment, and judging it as silly.

You have a jump cut when she puts her hand to her head, which reads bady. I suggest that you keep the shot close, and then go long when she puts her hand down. You can lengthen this shot, and shorten the shot of the hand afterward.

Have her look at her hand before it moves away - she looks too vacant when it comes afterward.

Try and mix up the smoothness of the animation, to make it a bit more rickety and sharp at this point. Just get to the keys quicker - see if this works. I think some more erratic motion will help build the sense of anxiety.

When she trips/stumbles, on her left foot, cup her toes if you can, quickly, like a spasm, when the right foot goes back.

When she reaches out to the mirror, move the head a little to the side, in a kind of “huh?” BUT JUST A BIT - we don’t want it to look like lassie.

AT 1.00, when we are over her shoulder, and above her head, the camera feels very rushed. Take the time before we concentrate on the frame, and cut the time on the frame.

When the hand reaches out of the dark - make her more jumpy - her head turns quicker. Shoulder reaction is just right.

When she walks out the door, give her more hip motion, and some moments of hesitation, and have her look up the hall as she comes out (just a glance as if to say “what’s up there” , then at the doll “wow this doll is amazing” then us..have her look for much longer (and have her shoulders turn a little more toward us.

Before her attack - don’t move the camera around to it - make the camera catch her up after she has walked out of frame, and then when she has her first second of attack, then CUT TO the next shot. The camera move looks bad.

After that, it’s ALL GOOD.
In fact, I think you got on a roll. It’s very moving.

Finishhedddddd the last 10 seconds of character animation today. 10 seconds in a day. Not bad I say. Behind schedule though!! NEXT UP: dust

Sticking with what I know, I used blendshapes for the drips.

Even though I haven’t finished animating, I figured I should start rendering what I can.
I have broken down the scenes into the frame number, so that I can render out non-moving backgrounds. My table is a little complex… but rendering is underway at least.

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.