Since I had never worked with either Bullet dynamics or nParticles, I decided to explore them a bit the first days to familiarize myself with them. My timetable for the week was planned like this:
Monday 14-16: Come up with an idea for the assignment and play around with Bullet and nParticles.
Tuesday 14-16: Play around some more with Bullet and nParticles.
Wednesday 14-19: Start working on my scene.
Thursday 14-20: Work more on my scene, fix physics and particles.Friday 09-16: Polish and tweak, batch render and put the video together.
Drawing
This week we drew stick-figures, and focused on movement in pictures, preparing us for animation in the coming weeks.
Idea development
My initial idea this week was to create a Rube Goldberg device, so I started by looking at a lot of videos and images I found online.
My idea consisted of having a ball travel through a contraption, swapping places with a different ball and then have it turn on a lamp light that lit up my name in the end.
My main problem with this idea was the limited time we had. Since the video was to be a maximum of 15 seconds long, the whole sequence from start to finish, it meant having 360 frames if the video was to play at 24 frames pr. second. This wasn't really a problem, it only meant the Rube Goldberg sequence had to be pretty short, but it could still be fun and interesting!
After I had done some tests and played around with the physics of Bullet in Maya, I had a fair idea of what I could and couldn't do with it. My only issue was that Bullet often didn't work the way it should, and I wasted a lot of time getting simple parts of it to work, which by Thursday evening got me really worried that I wouldn't be able to finish the assignment. I did some more tests at home, which were working very well and got me excited to keep working on it! I went back to school that night at around 9 PM to get some more work done, and seeing as I had gotten my ideas to work at home very easily, I was extremely motivated.
My motivation was sadly very short lived, because when I tried doing it again at school, it wouldn't work at all. After fumbling around with what should be very simple for almost an hour, I decided it was more important for me to do something I knew would work, but not as impressive or fun to look at, rather than something half-finished because I couldn't get the software to work. This meant however, that I had less than 18 hours to make it.
I then decided to do a simple, but stylish scene, focusing on the modeling and having some simple physics. My idea was to make a toaster with a piece of bread going into it, and then after a few seconds pop up with my name scorched into it from being toasted. This idea was fairly simple, and I was confident I could do it, so I at least had something okay to submit a few hours later.
Getting the physics to work, even on such a simple idea was still a challenge because Bullet didn't work like intended 90% of the time I used it, even though I was 100% sure I had done it correctly, so I had to redo it until it worked, even if it meant doing the exact same thing 10 times. It only has to work once!
To get the bread to change textures from a regular bread texture to a burned one with my name I used a ramp with the textured, and keyed the position to the timeline. For some reason it messed up so the transition disappeared when I baked the animations.
I also wanted to add particle smoke coming out of the toaster when the bread is being toasted, but I decided against it for now due to the time pressure I had.
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