UPDATED: Final Cut (minus urchin shot), Added Breakdown Reel Below

Again, thanks to Max Bickley for the HDR’s, Sam Ortiz for the animation, and Patrick Warner for the rigging, and of course a big thanks to Scott Johnson and Jason Osterday for providing our beautiful plates, couldn’t of done it without y’all. The next cut with credits should be up in the next few days, had to slam this out for class.

Dave: Awesome quarter. We didn’t get to everything we had planned, but we got a considerable amount of it done. We knocked out just about everything we had planned, just not the optionals. We still have a few assets that we would like to incorporate (or make more visible), with a little more time at some point. From my end, I’m more or less done with the crab, there’s only a few things I would like to do to it, but I’m not dead set. I personally lost a little bit of speed towards the end because I wasn’t happy with how the crab looked on the tree, but I got a little more excited at the very last minute. Now, after I cut it to some music it’s a little more exciting for me again, and I would like to have this become a more polished piece.

On another note, I had an awesome time working together with Kurt and Jesse. They both had quick ingenious solutions to some of our hurdles. It was also wonderful working in a group who has as much passion and work ethic as they did. This cut was kind of a quick cut, so I didn’t get to typing up the appropriate credits or adding in the breakdowns yet, just a title card and music.

Kurt: Awaiting Entry to Grid…

Jesse: Waiting for Nodes…

Initially I thought that the eel system was going to be an easy port from the fish but, as it turned out, that was not the case. Because an eel’s body is not rigid like a fish there needed to be another dimension of motion. I first animated a point along a curve, then copied a line to the point. I then brought the line into DOPS as a wire opbject and used a pin constraint on the first point, I tweaked the physical properties of the wire and added a drag force to make it look like it was being drug through water. Then I brought the line back to SOP level and applied a modified version of the CHOPS-based animation I used on the fish to the line, this is what controls the IK solver for the rig. I used a separate chopnet to pull the transformation data for the first point on the line and exported that to the chain root so the bones travel with their controller.

This movie shows the progression from Curve on path to DOPS sim to final animation.