Environment and Animatic Progress

This has been a productive week for my project. In my previous post, I noted that I'd fixed the jittering issue and created a method of adequately shaping the gummy bear FLIP fluid. Since then I've fleshed out the environment and refined the RBD motion.



In addition to refining the RBD simulation, I also rigged and animated a simple gummy bear. The animated bear was imported into the RBD simulation as a static object, to help the incoming gummy bears react appropriately to the animated bear. One of the other interns, Ethan, showed me how to create custom ODEs that the bullet solver can use as proxy geometry for RBD point objects. This enables me to simulate 120 gummy bears at real-time speed.



At render time, the high-resolution gummy bear mesh will be instanced onto the RBD points, which saves a lot of memory since Houdini's Fast Point Instancing only loads one copy of instanced geometry into memory; it transforms the one copy in memory to match the point position, scale, orientation, velocity, etc.

The next step to to cut together an animatic by Tuesday, the only part I'm missing for that is the final shot, where the giant gummy bear forms and looks out the window and the shot preceding the above shot, wherein the lead animated gummy bear falls out of the bag and onto the table.

I also might include the following shot:

I like the low-angle, close-up view of the bears