Sofia's Skirt and Hair Dynamics

I knew one of the most difficult aspects would be creating believable dynamics for Sofia's Skirt and Hair. So what better way to overcome this than by creating the dynamics and attaching her hair and skirt to the most difficult shot dynamics wise?

So I position the Skirt to where I need it to attach from, I turn this into an Ncloth and use either a TRANSFORM or POINT TO SURFACE Constraint (Dependent on situation, here we use a TRANSFORM Constraint because she is not moving.) 

Then the difficult part begins:

I turned her body into a Passive Collider.

I created a small Plane as the Skirt would be hitting the ground and so would need to react to it, turning the ENTIRE Farm Surface into an nRigid would be ridiculous as Sofia only occupies a small space in the scene, so I created a Plane used the 'Transfer Attributes' function to it so that the new Plane Conforms to the shape of the farm plane, I adjusted this then deleted its history so my Plane is clean once again.

I turned this New Plane into a Passive Collider also. This worked, all I had to do now was adjust my settings for the Skirt nCloth and that was it.

Likewise with the Hair because my colliders were already set up it was a simple case of positioning it...

Applying my Transform constraint:

And then adjusting the nCloth settings such that it is fairly rigid and resists bending and moving too much in this particular shot.

Shot 45 Dynamics

Using a tutorial from Digital Tutors:

http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1459-Creating-a-Wind-Blown-Leaves-Simulation-using-nCloth-in-Maya#play-38666

I was able to adjust what this tutorial taught to create a simulation of Bagboy's Heart Kite being run over, a pivotal point in the story. I knew that this shot would have to be brutal yet dark humoured so there was no excuse to not go all the way and totally rip his kite to shreds!


Test No. 1:

Test No. 2:

Beginning to achieve the desired effect:

Complete:

Shot 38, 39 Dynamics

Shot 38 and 39 are Bagboy's 'Hero' Shots, the moment where he confidently proposes his love to Sofia with a heart shaped kite, with an abundance of swagger to boot!

Shot Layout:

I toyed with two similar yet different methods to achieve the effect of his tie waving and blowing in the wind. (This way the shot will not feel so bland)

So after the Tie is modelled and in position I applied the nCloth option to it as usual.

I then used the TRANSFORM nConstraint to Constrain the Tie around his Neck. This was very important.

Then I used Component to Component constraints on the separate parts of the Tie (The Tie is actually split into 3 separate meshes, the collar, the Triangular Knot, and the actual waving section.) This gives me total control over it.

So far:

The below video shows my progress, this is serviceable but it's still not really there, I need to get in there and tweak it a LOT.

I realised that the Tie was going all over the place, but I also realised the first 12 or so frames the wave looked pretty seamless, so I attempted to follow a tutorial for seamless nCloth simulation (this proved fruitless, but it was interesting)

In the below screenshots, I have used the Trax Editor to put out the first few frames of the nCloth simulation and attempted to just have those frames on repeat, in theory this saves render time and also gives you a lovely seamless loop

This method didn't quite work out for me, the movement of my Tie became automised almost and before I dwelled too long on this idea I had another. I decided to use a Force Field in Maya (Turbulence), to PUSH my nCloth in the direction of the wind, this would mean it would only flow in one direction.

After I set up my scene and applied the Force Field and also set that up I had to tweak my settings for a while, to achieve just the right effect and voila:

Learning new Animation Tools

To speed up my Animation Workflow I've been using three new tools that majorly speed up my workflow, the first of these is a plug in called 'bhGhost'

bhGhost Video HERE

This is an INCREDIBLE assistant to my animation workflow, because to put it simply Maya's 'Ghosting' Tool is completely broken! It's very temperamental and so I am unable to view previous/progressive frames in my viewport. However, with bhGhost, I can choose exactly which frames I want to see an outline of which can really help when posing and blocking.

bhGhost in practice, here I was trying to create a nice arc for the hand, and was successfully able to do so quickly using bhGhost.

The SECOND tool is Maya's Camera Sequencer. With the number of Cameras I have to manage in the film the Camera Sequencer makes it easier to view and play through all my shots.

So I took the liberty of learning how to use the Camera Sequencer. A lot like the Maya TRAX Editor, the Camera Sequencer uses the same sort of timeline feature to put clips together.

BUT... The camera sequencer is best used with the UberCam.

Which is the THIRD tool I have learnt to use in my workflow. The UberCam is a godsend. It's a fairly new feature that was bought into Maya.

I noticed that with my directorial and editing style there were many cutting points for some animation shots. It would've gotten very cumbersome then to have play blasted each camera out separately then to go into my editing suite and then edit the two clips together just to see what they will play like when put together.

So bring in the UberCam...

My UberCam Workflow, it looks a little complicated but it's really simple. The Top Left Window is my UberCam window. The Top right is my Active Camera. The Bottom Left is my Camera Sequencer and the Bottom Right is my Outliner.

With the UberCam and the Camera Sequencer working together I can convert my Active Camera's Time Range into Clips, add these to the UberCam and Trim and Edit them straight in Maya and finally put out a Playblast, greatly speeding up my workflow!