Particles. Continued.

The behavior of my fish has been a bit of a journey; but now I am convinced I have found a way of animating the fish without them looking wooden and with each one keeping a degree of individualism. Using the Dynamics/forces within Maya and the particle system you can balance out the negative/positive attraction and whether the force is attracting the whole of the particles to a particular place or repelling the other particles away from its particular 'personal space'. This result is some resarch into how to get the herding behaviour i was after with the imported script I tried at an earlier stage. The problem I was having is that the 'fish' were reacting to world space; and this was a tough one to crack seeing i lost my td. With this method it is possible to animate the attract force along a path and in theory the fish should follow.
The scene (5) will be dressed only after the particles have been cached. This should speed up the process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=royagdXNh24

Particles.

Been looking into particles and ways of steering them. Tried using a lattice; but this was too unpredictable; so now am using a curve to direct the particles. The fish have been animated on a cycle of about 200 frames to give a swimming action and then this is being instanced to the particles.
This is an experiment using the lattice. Must admit it just turned out more for the sake of 'looking pretty' rather than the particle effectivness at guideing objects.

A note on form....

I was just watching the tv on a Sunday arvo; like you do, and one advert really jumped out at me through its lack of convention. Yes it was trying to sell, but the way the shots were strung together harked back to the times before the shackles of disney and aspects of realism that they brought. It is almost as if the building stuff of the animation itself is being reused and morphed into other objects like the older animations. This could come along with the way digital animation has altered content in some ways (Pixar and Disney) and free up the way we now can make animation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnwsAr8eBQA

Very pretty bit of animation; don't you think?

New phaze.

Production is going to be stoaked up this week; and the final timeline edit is going to be struck. The fact I have my production crew 'back' is a bonus; and I am hoping that they take this week as seriously as I am going to. The first thing is to get the water scene rendering; I am giving that to Ryan; and emphisising the time management aspect of this scenes production.
Been doing a few experiments at home with different programs and have had some success; namely Flash, where the pen tool is a lot faster to work with rather than the beam tool in After Effects for instance. Also been doing some tilt-shift cheat type renders on the projection animations to see the effect on the mapped architecture.
I am also loking for either someone to gather my foley for me or some time to do it myself! Ha only joking; but it has to be done soonish :)

Hi Ya.

Getting some advice about the sound was cool today. We ran through a few ways of editing the sound and even looked at ways of negating the lack of a mix track.
Been experimenting with some vector based programs and looking at their possible uses for mapping. I mapped the roof outside my flat and the chimney stack; and then projected the animation back onto the surface. It looked cool; but the camera i have to record the imagery is not all that so tonight i am going to be recording the results with a P2. Get in there. Omni projections could be an answer to my showreel issues atm; and that kind of thing only happens at night. Gorrilla stylee...

As Promised a test shot.

Keep having ideas. Good or bad?

Was thinking about the uses of projection and trying to go away from the linear method of projecting onto a flat surface; and I have started to work with right angles; mainly the corners of rooms. Using the method which i told you about a couple of weeks ago i feel it would be possible to make a fairly convincing installation. Simple but effective. Tests to follow.