Bonus Points: Lighting a Scene in Maya

Building a Scene in Maya

Side Quest: San José Tech Museum

A couple weeks ago Michael and I took a walk down to the San José Technology Museum! At first he accidentally lead us to the art museum and we bummed around, but after realizing there isn't much tech there, we went across the street to the real museum. I saved the whole adventure as a snapchat story which converted into a video clip for some reason... so here I've pieces together the adventure without the videos.

Here's us entering the museum. We were fairly impressed at how large and artistic the building was structured. We started our journey by going to the top floor.

Without knowing anything about the museum, we were pleasantly surprised to see that it's main audience is children... meaning there was a lot of hands-on equipment... meaning we were really excited to touch all the displays.

Here's a simple machine where you can learn binary. By connecting the circuit, the input changes from 0 to 1. I spelled Michael's name out for him. It was pretty cool.

In between the two areas up top were some robots! Here is a sorting bot, lovingly named Alphabot who spells whatever he is told using the little wooden blocks. The children were having a time by just punching in random letters. Michael and I felt our hearts go out to Alphabot.

Also there's Buster. He's cool we asked him for some selfies. He talks and gave Michael a fist bump.

On the other side of the top floor was just more activities, mainly involving sound/music and genetics. There's another part I forgot to mention, but it's these small devices where you scan your ticket and take quizzes.

Then we took a venture to the underground level. Here they had displays for robots and body-tracking technology.

This is a furby display that Michael and I were extremely charmed by if not also very frightened of. We watched a little boy with his mother play with the controls. We never touched the thing.

Here's the body tracker, and Michael playing it. Then a picture of the earthquake room.

Before the simulator goes off, we're allowed to build some foam buildings. Michael's is the large building, he thought a good foundation might make it last. I just made a lot of small stacks. it was fun to watch them fall.

Right next to the earthquake section was an area dedicated to space travel and mars. There was a cool jetpack chair thing, but the line was too long.

Another area taught us how to pick locks and be bandits! :)

We finished the day by getting sick pennies of course. It was a good time that smelled heavily of popcorn and filled with the sound of laughter. See you next time, SJTech!

Special Effects in Animation and Live-Action

My first two term paper scores were both above 80; I will not be writing a third term paper.

Outline of the Third Term Paper

Special Effects in Animation and Live-Action

Introduction:

·         -Modern technology has yielded us efficient modes of transportation such as cars, airplanes, and trains. But in entertainment, whenever we imagine a new vehicle or weapon, it’s often in the form of a human. And not just a human-sized robot, but a giant robot.

·         -Thesis: The different portrayals of giant robots in different media.

Body:

1.       -Pacific Rim (2013)

o   Full CG modeled and animated Mechs

o   No use of scale models

o   The realism of the environments makes the audience believe the depth of the situation. That the most powerful weapon at our disposal are these giant robots with random powers.

o   288 ft. tall

o   American

2.       -Super Sentai/Power Rangers Series

o   Using Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger, the 37^th Super Sentai team (2013)

o   Guys in costumes

o   Scale models of cityscapes used

o   Not filmed in slow-motion, but the actors move slowly to create a feeling of weight. We can tell that the film is at 1x speed because of the overlap and drag with some of the monsters’ costumes.

o   Uses the same type of explosions for the mech that they use for the human-sized actors

§  The particles are the same, but the explosions should be larger because of the amount of particles involved at that scale.

o   Is built on a proud tradition of using practical effects since 1975.

o   They probably have the budget to create full CG fight scenes being one of the most successful franchises in Japan.

o   There are a few scenes that do use CG, but it’s only in the transformation scenes that are stock footage used in every episode.

o   ~42m = ~138ft

o   Japanese

Conclusion:

·         -Comparison/contrast

o   The ability to control the effects of the city (as well as wind, rain, and lighting) are accomplished at an astronomically higher level in Pacific Rim than in any iteration of Super Sentai.

o   However, the two styles of giant mech fit the tone of each story. Pacific Rim is a more realistic world, and thrives on creating reality, believability, and therefore suspense. Super Sentai is geared towards smaller children, and is a campy show overall.

Reference:

http://www.zimbio.com/Beyond+the+Box+Office/articles/TzjPYG8JMuA/Pacific+Rim+How+Engineer+Sees+Jaeger

https://www.grnrngr.com/zords/zyuranger

Stop-Motion Character Animation

Hey, we're back with another stop-motion animation! This time it's supposed to be character. Hopefully it's understandable if not a bit messy:

Both the crane and the fish in my animation are folded paper. I used 26-gauge wire in the wings of the crane, as well as the body of the fish to keep them in place during certain movements. I also twisted the wire to create sturdier legs and toes for the crane that were easier to see. The toes are movable, but I wasn't able to utilize them fully.

The "water" is just plastic wrap over some blue paper, and the backdrop is a white cloth. I did have to edit out some of my hand as some shots had the characters jumping/flying.

I used Windows Movie Maker for the compositing again.

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction?

     Every day our knowledge, curiosity, and theory about objects beyond our planet grows. To reach these new heights we develop technology to sustain being jettisoned out of the atmosphere and on to space. During the 20^th century space race, Werner von Braun once said, "Our two greatest problems are gravity and paper work. We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming." In animation we deal with quite a bit of both. Gravity being an unseen force that every mass in existence displays towards one another, it’s no wonder artists love to play with the effect of something that is felt rather than explained. Re-imagined across multiple forms of media, gravity can be used to create a fantastic, satirical, and otherwise fun universe.

     Just being big enough is just what it means to gravitate items towards an object… right? Well that’s the idea in the Katamari Series. In this game you get a ball that is described as “sticky”, but acts more like a magnetic or gravitational object. As your character rolls the ball along, it picks-up items to add to its mass so long as they are small enough in mass relative to the current size of the Katamari. I say mass because long, thin objects can be picked-up just as easily as small, stumpy ones. Objects can also be released from the Katamari if they are on the surface-level of the ball as the ball hits or is hit by a much-too-big object. Another evidence of gravity-based Katamari physics is when using a power-up in Katamari Forever called “Robo-King’s Heart”, all items nearby that can be rolled-up are automatically gravitated toward the singularity that is the player’s ball.

     This is an impossible case of gravitational pull since the Katamari, though relatively larger than another object, is still too small in mass to attract other objects to it. The item in question this time is clearly fiction-based, so it is more possible that it is a super-dense ball, but only as possible as we allow ourselves to believe it. We assume that the character rolling the ball does not become stuck as he is the Prince of All Cosmos and probably has some fantastic power to defy the ball’s gravity (he is about 3 inches tall at all times). A caveat here, there is a particular level where the Prince is asked to roll-up the cosmos including planets, galaxies, and eventually the biggest star at the center of the universe. In this case the objects should be attracted to the Katamari even from far-away due to its incredible mass.

     Although often frowned upon, and perhaps even politically incorrect these days, the show Family Guy by Seth McFarlane often makes jabs at how obese Peter seems to be. This joke is taken especially far during season 4, episode 17 “The Fat Guy Strangler”. During the episode, Brian tries to convince Peter that he is fat so that he can avoid a serial killer targeting “fat guys”. Peter is offended and challenges Brian to prove his point. Brian then proceeds to gently toss an apple next to Peter. The apple bounces a couple of times—taking into consideration the Earth’s own gravity—without touching the ground and proceeds in orbit around Peter’s largest diameter. Brian proceeds to throw in a book, a glass full of ice-water, and an entire television (approximately 24” standard definition, optional viewing of Example 1 below).

     It is true that we, as humans with mass, have our own gravitational pull, but our escape velocity is ridiculously low—just like with the Katamari. Peter would have to be a super-dense clump of mass to display a gravitational field similar to that of a planet. Pluto, can support a moon that is almost 20% its own mass (similar to Peter and the Television), but that is due to the total gravity of the two objects on each other. This invisible tether is only possible because of their actual mass, and not relative mass.

     A point that has been mentioned, but not elaborated upon is the term “escape velocity”. We have stated that the previous examples are just far too small in mass to contain enough gravity to hold either orbit or gravitational-pull on the surface. That is to say, their escape velocity would be based on the gravity of Earth’s natural gravity pulling them away from the other object as well as other objects on Earth passively pulling on those masses as well. Let us then travel to space, and find an object that is large enough to be considered some kind of planetoid.

     The video game series Ratchet and Clank, when travelling through space, you can land on smaller planets, some not much bigger than your own ship, yet they display all the same gravitational properties as bigger planets. Planets so small that Ratchet can jog the circumference in under a minute. A planet of that size would have a notable gravitational pull, but its escape velocity would be so low there’s no way that Ratchet would be able to even walk without launching himself out into space. Some of the small planets are metal constructs that utilizes magnet boots Ratchet wears, which is a good idea, but his jumping and running animations remain unchanged. He jumps the exact same height on a planetoid than he does on a full planet (ranging from the size of Pluto to Jupiter) regardless of magnetic footwear.

Ratchet is jumping from pad-to-pad here, but as you can see the planet's curvature would make its gravity fairly weak. There are even smaller planets than the one above (and not all of them are molten on the surface).

     The physics in animation is often broken, and what better way to break it than with an invisible force of the known world? Games and movies may not always be accurate, but sometimes they are true to how we feel. When we jump it's usually not that high—average adult height is about 16 inches—but sometimes we feel as if we're flying 16 feet in the air. Just like how sometimes we really can feel so large that objects begin to gravitate towards us. In a fictional universe, it doesn't matter if the physics are real as long as we believe the story, because without an audience, media has no purpose. So we push that reality, we push that fantasy, we push that feeling to make the audience laugh, keep them immersed, and keep them entertained.

Example 1. Peter's Gravitational Pull

Example 2. Katamari (This playthrough is a bit lengthy, just skip to the middle if you want to see a bit of the gameplay.)

Sources: 

http://www.askamathematician.com/2010/04/q-how-big-does-an-object-have-to-be-to-gravitationally-attract-a-human-or-have-a-molten-core/

http://historicspacecraft.com/quotes.html

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/gravity-and-density.361570/