I really don't know where i'm going with this animation now. Practiclay every scene in my animation requires the use of dynamics in one way or another. Not because I want to use dynamics but because it needs it as hand animating it right would be impossible. Creating a sucsessfull dynamic simulation is fine, but intergrating simulations into a full animation is proving very difficult when all knowledge on dynamics has come from only books and internet. I've almost done the last scene, where the slime molds produce fruiting bodies, but the last part of it, shows one of them releasing their spores. I've depicted this as if it were exploding, as in my storyboard. I can't animate 100 idividual spores by themselves, so I thought. "I need to use dynamics". And now, after hours of tweaking, it just suddenly stopped simulating. I didn't even get a chance to cache it. I would rather not be doing all this complex stuff at the moment as my knowledge on this subject is only basic, but I can't see any other way around it. I only wish I could at least show the error message that came up the first time it stopped working, but I can't even get that to come back again.
I could go on listing all the wierd and not so wounderfull things, maya has be doing, although I wont, but one thing I just have to mention. In one of my scenes, whenever I created a camera, (that's just the plain and simple camera) it always came with an invisible aim controller. Yet the controller didnt apear in the outliner. Can anyone explain this? Restarting maya did fixe this, but I'm just curious to know.
I think I seriously need to re think how I create this animation. I hope the next post I have something positive to say.
Actualy I do have one positive thing to say.
I can render the shadows for the desk. By disabling the shadows on the book, the render time was reduced dramaticlay. The ambient oclusion pass takes care of the book.
Maya has been stressing me out a bit today as well. I've been trying to do a similar thing with the Dynamics for a flood of water, it really hasn't been worth it. lol.
ReplyDeleteThanks for making this post, as I completely forgot about the Cache and I was just generating the particles everytime. Keep battling with it and hopefully with a stroke of luck it will work.
Glad that its been of some help. I just can't understand why its not simulating. Theres no slow down. Its almost as if maya is denying the existance of the dynamics in the scene.
ReplyDeleteJust advise, if you can get away with after effects to create particles just do, because it saves a lot of time.
ReplyDeleteAnyway Phil and Alan are not expecting us to know such advanced stuff as dynamics.
Ruben is right, if you can "fake" it in after effects you will save loads of time and hassle, knowing what you can achieve with your software and planning how to create your shots are skills in themselves.
ReplyDeleteI only wish it were as simple as some dust like particles that could be overlayed. I have experimented with after effects particles, and are great for some things, but I don't think are necceserialy suitable for everything. For example: I need these small nuceuses swimming around inside my bloby mesh (slime mold). I think Im going to have to hope that Maya will start behaving itself.
ReplyDeleterefering back to the problem in the post, I was able to fix the problem by introducing some new particles into the scene, playing the scene, and then deleting new particles, leaving the original simulation back to how it was. For some reason it Kick started the dynamics again. Know idea why, but it worked, and thats the main thing.
Maya seems to be such an amazing but horrible piece of software, I mean it works brilliantly and can creating amazing things but the interface is overwhelming and some days it just never goes right and Maya can destroy any confidence :S
ReplyDelete