"Sweet Tooth" - Visual Effects 1 (VEF1) - February 2015 (1502)
Here is my second and final project of VEF1; it is an exploration of soft bodies coupled with the desired simulation of how they move. I was actually hungry when this project was introduced to us during lecture, and after seeing a couple of examples on jiggly movement I decided that jello cubes were the way to go. I figured I could put some fun colors on the jello cubes and set up a tasty scene. I decided to go with the scene I used in the previous visual effects projects - just at a different camera angle and position to accentuate the back area of the scene.
I had no trouble creating basic cubes and applying fun textures to utilize as soft bodies for this project. I actually created two versions of this scene in Maya - one using the geometry as soft bodies and the other using lattices as the soft bodies. I ended up going with the scene utilizing the lattices after consulting with my instructor.
Despite this being a fairly simple project, I ran into quite a few issues with getting my scene to work properly. The first issue essentially dealt with my cubes exploding on impact after colliding with the hidden plane sitting just above the counter. It turns out I had too many all-springs per jello cube (over 43k). My lattices were too dense so I brought them down to about half the density of the cubes, and that brought my springs count to just over 16k per cube.
I still had an issue with the geometry of the cubes exploding upon impact, but this was because I was animating the conserve on the particles decreasing upon impact. I ended up having to delete the keys on the Conserve; instead I keyed the dynamic functionality off after the simulation settled enough (this stopped all movement of the simulation). In order to get the cubes to settle up into their relative original shape, I keyed the Stiffness node at from 0 during the fall to 15 after impact. It worked out just fine after that.
I enjoyed this project. By the time it came along in the last week of the class I had a decent enough understanding of dynamics and rendering to know not take on anything too task-heavy. I enjoyed setting up a tummy-tempting and visually appealing scene. I struggled with which key light to use for this scene, but I ended up using the spotlight across from the counter (coming from the window above the sink) to achieve a naturalistic afternoon lighting. Perfect for that after-school snack time setting. I feel like the music just brought it all together. I hope you enjoy it.
