Tea Time Redeux

It has been some time since I visited my tea room. I decided to come back to it to make some improvements.  Now, it should be known, since I'm going to be using this piece in my generalist reel that when I modeled the assets in this piece, they were intended to be more cinematic.  This means that they have way more geometry then they should. There is no way that I would want these assets to be used in a game.  And that is my only regret.  Had I extra time to do a major overhaul of this piece, I would remodel the assets so they only have as much geometry as needed.

That said, I did add some dynamics to the scene.  I have a reputation of wanting to throw dynamics into everything, which is the reason for most of my head-bashing later on.  In this particular instance, I added steam to the teapot and water pouring out to make the matcha.  Again, because of time restraints, they aren't as polished as I would like, but they serve their purpose.

The best part of finishing this scene (worst, really) was when I rendered the beauty with all of its dynamics.  I spend quite some time getting the water to pour out of the pot in a believable way, and I think my attention to detail for the pour itself took away from what happened AFTER the pour. Because, when the teapot tilts back to stop the flow, this happened:

Haha, yeah. Water isn't supposed to splash upwards and defy gravity.  Unfortunately, I discovered this like....they DAY BEFORE I needed the final product.  Like I said, big time constraint.  What's a girl to do?

Playing with the dynamics and re-rendering the entire segment again was out of the question.  I needed a quick and dirty solution that would be believable.  The problem area was only in the last 100-ish frames, so I decided to only re-render THOSE FRAMES...but without any dynamics. It wouldn't take long to do because, well, no dynamics.  In post I put the two layers on top of each other.  Then I got my rotoscope on in After Effects and masked out the crazy-gravity-defying-water so all you can see is the clean, dynamics-free layer.  Phew!  Not the best way to solve the problem, but it was the best I was going to get in the time I needed it.

So enjoy my traditional Japanese style tea house, complete with self propelled matcha set!

Alive at the Smithsonian: Elephant Becoming Alive

The idea from this wasn't actually from the movie "Night at the Smithsonian". No. Growing up in D.C. one of my favorite places to go to this day is the Smithsonian (its for that reason that I'm shocked and outraged at having to actually pay for museums). I loved to imagine what it would be like to see all those creature in the Natural History alive.

Hence the inspiration for this piece. I've been animating this piece for about a month. I used my 'Henry' rig, which you can see him in progress in some of my older posts. I hope to have a video about his rig posted soon. I'll admit I'm not proud of the little girl's rig. I did it very quickly, and wanted to try my hand at hair and nCloth-I originally had the girl's shirt entirely made of nCloth. While I love nCloth and its versatility, I couldn't get it to perform the way I wanted, no matter the settings. It would get to stretchy and looked more like chewed up gum and would constantly go through the girl's geometry, making it look like there was a giant whole in her shirt. Even making her geo a passive rigid body to the nCloth and adjusting the collision settings wouldn't fix it. In the end, due to time constraints, I painted the shirt onto her geometry like I did her jeans. Her hair was also a nightmare, but it serves its purpose. It is made of fur which are controlled by hair follicles. For whatever reason, the fur will pass through her geo, most noticeably through the top of her head, making her some kind of crazy long-haired-Captain Picard-ginger-freak. Again, due to time constraints, I could not find a permanent solution.

Enjoy!




You can also find a link to it here.