OUAN504 - Animating, Grabbing the Poster

This was one of the most challenging scenes to create because it seemed like a difficult idea to execute at first. The idea was to have a similar shot to the one earlier in the sequence where the poster is blowing in the wind on the barn wall, but have a character come in shot and grab it to start executing their plan (which is located on the back). The first step was to animate the first second of the character coming into the shot and reaching out to grab the poster, so I spent some time doing this and lining up the characters hand with the edge of the poster just before they grab it to pull it off the wall. I tried to make it look as natural as I could, focusing on the movement of the arm and head as they were the main features of the character in the shot.

I thought carefully using what I had learnt in Maya to try and join up the poster to the hand of the character and have them move together. Most of my efforts were focused on the constrain option as that was (from my understanding) the option to control certain points of an object that has been modified with nCloth. The first thing I did was try to constraint the vertices of the poster to the vertices of the characters hand, and that didn't work. Secondly, I attempted to constrain it to the controller, which didn't work either. I spent some time looking only and tried some of the methods shown there, however I couldn't find any tutorials specific to what I wanted and found it difficult to make and progress. My understanding was that the vertices of the poster object had to be constrained to another object, so it was difficult to troubleshoot what was missing from my attempts. Eventually I decided to ask Mat for help and after attempting a couple of his own methods including a script called Rivet. Rivet is a script to 'constraint buttons and other objects to polygonal or NURBS surfaces fast and interactive'. So it seemed to fit the idea of what I was hoping to do. Unfortunately this didn't work either, so we had to rethink. We ended up doing it a more manual way, which was fine as long as it did the job! Mat took a polygon cube and embedded it within the hand of the character, and then parented it to the hand controller of the character, meaning there was now a polygon linked to the hand of the character. Some of the poster objects' vertices were highlighted using the brush tool and constrained to the hand controller - which worked quite well! After this some minor adjustments were made to the settings of the objects including the strength of the constraint which I increased to 70 from 20 and it seemed to be a high enough value to make the pull off the wall look natural and authentic. Something interesting about this was the way it was key framed, and it involved turning on and off the Enable option, this when on, activates the dynamic constraints and is on by default. Enable is on by default and is used to activate and deactivate the dynamic constraint as necessary, without the constrained cloth, (or in this case poster object) snapping back to the start position if it is animated, so it's really useful and perfect for this.



The final part of the scene simply involved the character doing a swift turn around as he exits the shot to show the fast pace and urgency in their movement. This worked quite well because of the short number of frames it was animated over, and all in all I consider this quite a successful scene and a nice addition to the final animation without taking up too much time in terms of on screen scenes.