Software Technology Research Project

This project was based on a chain reaction machine with a ball following the track projected. Done in Houdini with the purpose of conducting a research about RBD Objects and their different types of solvers; and how to set up the scene and node chain for the simulation to work smoothly.

The projected path is the ball falling down the platform and rolling down the helix to fall onto the ground.

 First thing to do was import the assets into the scene, make them static and RBD Objects respectively and go on the AutoDopNetwork to adjust the solver type to Bullet with Concave Collision. Because of the complex shape of the helix, I had to go into the sphere's physical attributes and adjust them to make it stay on track without using any constraints.

Voila! Running the simulation in real time finally gave me the results I wanted and that seemed like a natural reaction in real life.

Character Animation II

This month in Character Animation has been very informative and eye opening in regards to constructing a scene optimized for animation and creating your own little story to have your character act out. I consider my work to suffice based on the experience I have with animation, though I wish it was better. I had a lot of fun with my key poses, especially making my character express emotion with their facial features which I think translated well in the end result. However, I recognize that my anticipations, breakdowns and timing need quite some work. I made the mistake of not roughly timing when I had my key poses and main moving holds already keyed and had to do so when I was almost at the end of the pipeline for the video. Overall I like the direction my animation was heading, but need to put more work into it. 

Some PrePro work done for it: