Day 14

It's nearly been 3 weeks since we started, time is moving really fast.

Like yesterday, spent the morning in the Motion Capture studio. I did learn a little more, on what to do to but it's still quite unfamiliar. Mr Chee Leong will be there during the first mocap shoot next week, so there'll be some supervision at least. We did some test ROMs today and a walking motion and exported them as FBX files. We gave Mr Douglas the FBX files so he could test them out in Houdini. The captures were not perfect though, I still haven't learnt how to clean them up in Vicon Blade. We will be starting the first mocap shoot next Tuesday.

I briefly showed Mr Douglas my progress. I asked him where I should start for the interactions and behaviors of the particles. He told me to learn about and play with the particle groups, such as utilising them to change the colors and such.

So i did play around and created a simple scene to test what I know. I made particles birth from a line. I added a group node at the start and enabled it with a rule " $AGE >= 5 ". I then added a color node with pink as the color and a force node pushing the particles down after the group node. I used the name of the group in both the color and force node. So soon after they birth, the particles do a sudden drop and change colours to pink at the same time. I then added a collision node to make the particles bounce on collision, followed by a split node. I made a birth group on the split node and then added a color node after that. I used the new birth group as the source group in the second colour node and changed that colour to blue. So in the end, the particles birth white, do a sudden drop and change to pink, then as they bounce they will split into other particles which turn blue.

I visualised the flying angels and demons to be fighting by zipping by each other like in Dragonball Z. I did a simple setup to test that out with 2 sources and a soft limit to keep them in the vicinity. I used the interact node after that, and the outcome was pretty nice. Kind of looks like a whole bunch of flies actually.