Gathering the images. And a brief review of my file management system.

As we have been going along we have been using ong computer mainly for the main back-up. This in turn has been backed up by a portable hard drive, and also if anyone got allocated a scene then they were responsable to go to the main computer and paste there work in the appropriate folder; accompanied by their name.
So in theory all I have to do is go to the file that is relevant to the scene and grab the most recent render. This is working ok so far; as long as i keep the aspect ratio the same as the reference image everything should be ok.Must get on with stuff. Will let you know the outcome; but the deadline is looming....

Chrysallids.

They are out there. If you look. And have some faith. Had a breakthrough on the 'having somewhere to show it' side of things and maybe the funding side also. I am not going to say anything else atm but they are out there. I have made contact.

The sound.

I have been out recording a few sounds with a hand held recorder. I have been in the house and got a few recordings in there which speak of the environment whernce they were taken. I have a recording of some people talking in another room and the resulting reverb. I also have some great recordings of the sea and the ambience of the beach. These noises have been stripped down into sound bytes and put into some kind of order to form bars in the same timeframe that my abstract animation section is in. The result is something quite obscure. Good.

Event co-ordination.

Seems the best we can hope for atm is a silent show; and also we do not have any cash for the projector. But we do have a fundraiser in the pipeline which should enable us to get some sort of projector. This offers an oppertunity to sync the sound after the thing has been shown, which seems a bit crazy. Looking back I tried to get the events management course on-board, but not even a reply to my emails. If you are reading this-thanks a bunch. Now is the time you guys would have really come into your own; and took a lot of pressure off me. as for the production, its going ok and today ironically i am working on the sound. Sorry to moan.

Innovations.

Hi there sorry about the lack of posts. Tell the truth the only reason you are getting this post is the fact i am scanning my other hard drive and seemed a perfect time for a blog, so here goes. As the title suggests I am going to give you an overview on my innovations project.

Well, one of the scenes I have been working on led me to look at how fish team together; but still have a degree of autonomy, and how I could replicate this within Maya. Firstly I started looking at animated instanced fish plotted along a motion path-too wooden. Then I tried a flow path; again with the fish animated. Again this was too regimented and the way the fish turned alng the curve still looked although they were turning as one (the inside fish moved a lot less than the outer ones). Even with the help of a wave lattice deformer to give the fish a bit more 'swim this did not work).This has led me to look at particle systems and per particle behaviors.
I found a lesson online which looked at the way butterflies flapped their wings and how to animate a group of them. I ended up taking the animation snapshot part of this lesson and taking that back to the animating an object along a curve to get some direction. This also staggers the animation of the fish and makes them look more natural.

Here we can see an animation snapshot; over two hundred frames.

This is the frames spread along a cv curve.

This is the frames relpacing the particles with the toll on the normal settings;

and this is the particles drawn in the rough shape of a 'bait ball'. The direction of the particles is preserved as per velocity (as long as the onigonal geometry was aligned with the x axis. the depth of the bait ball can be altered with the particles /transform. More to come; but must dash atm, got some sound files to find....

Flocking continued....

With the research I have done into the onboard tools I have at my disposal within the Maya program, I have found that it has influenced the way I have been tackling other problems in other scenes.I have been forced to take some compromises in the form of sacrificing the plant growth in scene 2; which to tell the truth I was not too impressed with anyway; and after being let down for a second time on the animation of the trumpets in the same scene a fresh approach was called for. I opted to keep the trumpets, albeit only 4 of them and embelish on the musical notes with a particle system. I have used per particle events just to get some practical use out of the research I have conducted; and as you can see in the still I have overcooked the amount of particles and collision event particles in the scene. I should have time to refine this and use the 'less is more' theory.

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.