Like water off a cat’s back
April 18th, 2006
Hey everyone. Here’s the next fur/effects test for our section of “Six Monsters”.
When dry, soft, wispy fur gets wet, a few different things are happening that change it’s appearance:
·Water gets into the spaces between the fur and makes the color look a bit darker.
·The fur clumps together, making the fur look a bit spikey.
·The fur tends to cling to the surface it is growing from.
·The softness of the ends of the fur disappears, leaving hard looking ends.
Check it out and let us know what you think. The clip is playing slower than normal so that we can see the transition from dry fur to wet fur better. When Buck gets water on him in our boards, it happens much faster than this, and the transition goes by in the blink of an eye.
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On April 18th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I have a question… When doing fur on animations, do you have to create each differnt piece of hair? I’ve alwsays wondered that. -Steve
On April 18th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Well, yes and no. The computer generates the hairs based on maps you create. If you want longer hairs in one area, and shorter hairs in another, you paint a greyscale map where black is short hair and white is long hair. The computer will then generate accordingly.
When it comes to animation, you control guide hairs, which in turn control a larger number of render hairs. The computer interpolates the hairs between these guide hairs.
For example, if one guide hair looks like this “_” and another one looks like this “|”, then the hair between the two that the computer creates will look like this “”. You will end up with this result in the render “_|”. Ascii art doesn’t really do it justice
On April 18th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Looks cool! I’m looking for ward to seeing some animation!
On April 18th, 2006 at 12:00 am
We’re doing the character turn arounds and boards right now as well. I’ll try to post some of that stuff in the near future.
On April 18th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Floyd, What program are you using for Six Monsters? -Steve
On April 18th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Not to get all techie, but we’re using Maya 7 for the animation, probably rendering with Mental Ray. I used Real Flow for the fluid simulation. The fur is Maya fur.
We’re also using pencil and paper for all the boards, turn arounds, and such.
On April 20th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Those are great programs from what I’ve heard… Now when you’re animating like in a street or something, do you have to have the ENTIRE neighbor hood env thats HUGE when animating the characters in that area? Let me make it more clear. Lets say I want to animate my character ontop of a building, and there are buildings in the bkg. Is it like a HUGE playset and you put ur character on one of the roofs? Im really interested in 3d but it seems SOOOOOOO complicated. -Steve
On April 24th, 2006 at 12:00 am
It is as complicated as you make it. For our short segemnt, we’ll just be modeling a small set for the characters to act in. We could model the entire school, with desks, chairs, etc, but that would be overkill unless we need to see all of that. What we often do is to render out the background seperate from the characters, and then comp them in. This allows us to render the background only once, and then composite the characters over top… a la 2D cels over a painted background.
On April 20th, 2006 at 12:00 am
that wet fur looks amazing! can the software calculate when the water collides and then “bend” the fur in the direction it was hit– so it could kinda push down when it’s hit with water…
not going to lie, i just played the water movie like 10 times.
On April 24th, 2006 at 12:00 am
It is possible, but we probably won’t need to do that in the short, as Buck will get splashed pretty quickly. We’re using Real Flow for the fluid simulation, and Maya fur for the hair solution. One way to do it would be to kick the Real Flow simulation out as particles rather than a finished mesh. You then bring that info into Maya, and use Maya Hair dynamics to drive the fur. Make the particles interact with the hair, which will then bend the fur. For this specific test, I wanted to see if I could make water that looked like water, and I wanted to see if I could make soft, fluffy fur look wet. I wasn’t too concerned with the dynamics of the fur.