OUAN504 - Animating, Poster Scene

This scene started as still shot in order to bring the audience further into the environment of the barn. Originally I tried to create a dramatic upward shot of the poster stuck to the wall of the barn. However, after looking at the shot I felt it lacked the element of movement. I had the idea to make it move as if there was a strong wind coming through the visible gaps between the planks that make up the wall of the barn. I thought about what I knew about Maya up to this point and if there was anything I'd learnt that could be applied in order to make the poster move in the natural way that a thin sheet of paper or a thicker piece of material would move. In the end I looked online for methods and tools in Maya that would help me achieve the look I wanted for the poster and came across the nCloth function. nCloth is a dynamic tool that uses a 'system of linked particles to simulate a wide variety of dynamic polygon surfaces'. I looked at the presets for the material that can be simulated and there was a huge range of things from honey, lava, heavy denim, leather and silk. This showed me straight away the diversity of the tool in that it can create slow flowing liquids like honey, and thin materials like silk. The first step in creating a dynamic free flowing poster for this scene was to recreate it. The reason I had to recreate it is that it needed to have a lot of subdivisions in order to be able to move and be flexible in the way I wanted. I create a polygon plane in the rough dimensions of the previous poster and made it so it had 40 subdivisions Axis, and 40 subdivisions height. This produced a lot of geometry on the surface of the place in order to manipulate it later on. The final step was putting the poster image back on using the lambert shader before importing back into the main barn environment scene.

Once the poster was placed onto the face of the barn wall in it's original arrangement I selected the object and selected the nDynamics menu before going to nMesh > Create nCloth. At this point nothing changes in terms of appearance, but in the outliner you can see that an object titled 'nCloth1' is created along with 'nucleus1'. The nucleus object contains all of the editable attributes associated with the nCloth that has been attached to the object, in this case the poster. There is a huge range of editable attributes including, gravity and wind, air density, wind speed, direction of the wind and noise. These can all be changed to give the desired effect on an object. I chose to have Earth's gravity which is 9.8 m/s² which is also the unit for the 'gravity' option in Maya. From here it was a case of constantly testing the scene and adjusting it until it looked and flowed how I wanted it to. In terms of scene length this scene was relatively short, lasting only around 2 to 3 seconds. Compared to other scenes this one took a fraction of time to render (around a day) because of the scenes content and also the short number of frames. It was nice to be able to have a scene completed so quickly.

Below are screenshots showing the process of taking a plane and allowing it to move using the nCloth function. When you first allocate the nCloth function and play the clip the object falls down vertically by default. To counter this, change from object mode to the mode where you can select the vertices and then select the vertices you want to stay still, creating the illusion that in this case, it's pinned to something. The method used to achieve this is derived using the nConstraint > Transform function, which gives the object points to move around. Once this was done I selected an appropriate preset to start with, that could reasonably act as if it was a thin piece of paper. I experimented with several different presets before settling on the heavy denim preset, and selected 'blend 10%' to alter the way the material moved. Another way I chose to make the object look heavier and less 'light weight' was to increase the air density. Increasing the air density makes it appear as if the object is moving or flowing in a thicker medium. The effect this has however, is make the object look heavier which I thought looked better. For this opening scene I wanted to make it appear as if the wind affecting the poster in the environment was quick and possessed a high 'wind speed'. So for the purpose of this scene, I bumped the wind speed up to around 15. In addition to this I discovered that the direction of the wind had a good affect on the way the wind interacted with the object, in this case either pinning it to the wall or pushing it away from the barn wall as if the wind was coming through the gaps - which is what I wanted to make it look like originally. I changed the direction to 10 in the y axis and 4 in the z axis to help make this look more effective. This came as a result of some experimentation with wind direction and attempting to understand how the direction of the wind interacted with the poster object in this specific environment. For the final scene, I had some problems making it look like it was night time outside in combination with the rendering and mental ray. The problem occurring showed in the script editor as 'render completed' despite not having rendered anything. Wing also had this problem at some points trying to render scenes and I believe the problem lies within mental ray, but I never discovered the source of the problem and was only able to fix it by playing around with different settings. For this scene I made it so the 'physical sun and sky' was an ambient white light, giving the illusion of moonlight outside, so I hope this is communicated well to the audience in combination with the other scenes around it set at night time. Overall I was happy with the way this scene turned out, and found it to be quite effective despite its simplicity, if I could have improved on it however, I could have liked to make the grass outside the barn, which is visible through the gap in the planks move as well as the poster. Adding a sense of dynamic and simultaneous movement across different objects in view during the scene. I was happy with what I had achieved however, and didn't want to spend too much time on it due to the fact it was such a short scene in comparison to others and time was pressing on towards the deadline.