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.
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About
This is Joyce's development blog for KIB212. It chronicles the start to finish of her final project: LEIF ERIKSON.
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