3D Research and Development - Kite Rig

I knew that one of the most important things in this film would be the Kites. And of course these Kites would need some sort of fluid movement, so I considered an array of options.

The first option I considered was to use 2D Animation for the Kites. However me and the team instantly shot this down as it would require someone on the team confident enough to crank out a large number of these 2D animated kites very quickly as well as make any changes if necessary. Now whilst I am more than able to create 2D Animation myself, my team will be taken up by the 3D Animation side of things once we're well into production, plus a solid compositor would be needed to ensure the Kites don't look out of place once they are animated into the scene.

The second option for the Kites was one that was far more plausible; creating a Rig for the Kites.

Having rigging knowledge meant I was able to come up with a 3D solution fairly quickly with plenty of variables open to consideration once I had rigged the Kite.

In my 2nd year I rigged a ball and a chain using a clever rigging process where a Maya nHair could be used to drive a joint chain. See the video below (0:52 seconds)

This rig worked quite well for this sort of thing and I believe that it would also work for a Kite system.

So before I open up Maya I had a look at a few videos on Youtube looking at Kite movement for reference and assessing how I would go about doing this technically.

From these videos I realised two things;

1) When a Kite is being flown in a stationary position, quite still, it simply soars and floats through the air quite gracefully.

2) However, when the Kite string has some sort of Kinetic force applied to it (eg. pulling), then the Kite begins to flail about drastically because of the disturbance in it's movement.

Without further ado, I opened up Maya.

Created simple model of Kite and it's string.

Create a Nurbs plane, and assign it a singular nHair Curve.

Nurbs plane with nHair Curve

Interactive playback mode, you can see how the nHair dynamically moves, because it's using a low level of dynamics it is very fast at rendering at real time.

Create joints for my Kite.

So that it goes from the bottom to the top.

Use the IK Spline Handle Tool by selecting my first joint, last joint and nHair Curve to have the joint chain be driven by my nHair and then simple Bind my Rig to the Kite Model. In interactive playback I am able to move the base nurbs plane (created in the first step) around and the Kite will dynamically move.

And the best part is, is that since I am using a Hair System for this rig, it allows me to instantly adjust my dynamic settings just like I would on any other hair system (for example, I can add less or more gravity, wind etc.) which is perfect for something like a Kite!

Test Video below:

Kite Test 01:

Kite Test 02 with wind less gravity

Kite Test 03 Little Movement