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ANIMALCOOKIES!!!!!! |
"Bringing
Animal Crackers to life, so you don't have to!"
| October
22, 07 |
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The cookies
I don't really have much
to update with this week. I spent a lot of time
debugging a few things, and fine tuning other aspects of my
project this weekend. However, I have a list of the
animal cookies I've made up, with their rigs, available here.
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| October
19, 07 |
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Young Talent
I'm so excited!
Today I filmed my clean plate with a different talent, her
name is Katie. I shot with the HVX200, in their
beautiful dinning room. Most of the shots came out
well. There's one or two shots I need to stabilize, but
overall, things are looking good.
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| October
10, 07 |
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As Promised
Here's the play blast from
the original zebra cookie's procedural animation. I've
only got it running in place right now, and I'm currently
working on a method to have it run on a predetermined
path. Until then, the link below leads to the
trot-cycle.
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| October
8, 07 |
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Talent update
Well, it's quite
unfortunate that I've misplaced the phone number to get in
contact with my actor. I'm in the process of getting a
backup actor in the event that I never find the phone number.
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| October
6, 07 |
Procedural walk cycle
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So I've successfully created a
procedural walk cycle for the zebra cookie. My method
for creating this movement was to rig the cookie with
ikHandles, and then animate them through brief sine and
cosine waves in the mel expression editors. The images
below show a close up on the three handles I created
and the expressions attached to them.
I will have a play blast for viewing by
Tuesday.
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| September
26, 07 |
Shader algorithms
completed
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I've decided to use Renderman for creating my cookie shader, as it
seems to be the method I can make the most adjustments to
easily. First off, I started by looking at one of the animal
crackers I bough as reference. The example you see is a
crocodile cookie from the Publix supermarket brand of animal
crackers. The elements I had planned on incorporating into
the shader was a cookie-like texture, a displacement based
on a texture map for each animal, extra baked edges, and the
unique texture that appears on the back of the cookie. |
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The first thing I approached was the general texture of the
cookies. I created a golden color, with a bit of a brown
speckle added through a noise function. The ameba shaped
blob protruding the surface was a displacement I was working on,
which was really two circles with a slightly different diameter,
but the same noise function on the circumference.
The next step I wanted to accomplish was adding in the function
for using a texture based displacement. Below you'll see an
example of what the shader looks like with the texture added as a
displacement. The image on the right is just a cruedly drawn
teapot I created in Photoshop to add on as the displacement shown
left.
Now it was about time for me to get crackin' on the back portion
of the cookie. There is a really unique circular pattern
texture to the back, probably a result from the surface the
cookies are baked on. My solution to this was to create a
sin wave, and offset it by a specific distance as shown in the
image below on the left. Then I set up a boundary, where if
the value of sin went beyond or below the limits I instaled, then
it would cut off and create the circular pattern.
Here
are a few results that failed, but managed to look interesting during
my exploration of the right equations to use. I like the one
to the third image because it makes me think of a very sharp
memory-foam pillow.
Finally just below are the images representing the communication
link between the surface shader and the displacement shader.
Its harder to see it in the first image, so I rendered a version
with a very plane contrast in colors. What's happening here
is that the surface shader is reading the height of the
displacement value, and based on it's height will serve the biased
for if the surface shader would use the more baked color or not.
I
intend to have these attached to the rigged cookies in a few
weeks, and by then I'll have the source code all worked out and
organized so it's easier to read.
In other news completely unrelated to the shader, I've finished a
functioning rig for the cookie models. Here is what the
zebra looks like rigged and distorted.
References and
tools used for the shader can be found at Malcolm Kessons website,
www.fundza.com
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| Site Launch, Spring
07 |
The idea for this project is to bring life to the animal cracker
image imbedded in everyone’s memory from childhood, however, I’m
having trouble deciding on what exactly they would do once alive.
I figured a nice ‘snack’ commercial would be a good
idea. The setting
would be a kid working on their homework late at night, with their
desk lamp on, probably looking very worn and tired.
Then the focus of the commercial would be on a plate of
animal cookies, being pushed by one lone elephant-cookie.
Then, for good advertising, the kid would eat the cookies,
and would be doing his work better, looking more confident, etc..
I could probably end this commercial with a box of the animal
cookies, and maybe animate one of the characters in the front by
hand (at least this way I could show off what I wasted most of my
electives on).
The other idea is a spin off of the first one, just a
little more action packed. Instead
of the kid being offered the plate of cookies as a
homework-helping-snack, he’s really being deceived by the
cookies, and they start jumping on him and attacking him.
This idea requires a little more work than the first.
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