Hair/Fur Simulation and Recommencement of Filming for Bones of Essimer!

In my advanced animation paper, we have been learning hair and fur simulation. We started by making some spheres and adding fur and hair systems to them. We then played around with the different attributes, such as the length, colour, hair width and stickiness. Here is a screen shot of my experiment with the spheres.

The far left sphere has punk fur on it, the middle sphere has a mixture of punk fur and a hair system on it and the right one has bear fur on it

The next experiment we did was to make grass using the grass attribute in the fur menu of Maya. We then made a sphere into a passive collider and made the grass react with the sphere accordingly. Here is a screen shot of my experiment with the grass attribute.

Grass Attribute with sphere as passive collider

We then attached a hair system to the head of a character. NURBS curves were drawn were drawn onto the head of the character to create a specific hairstyle. All the curves were selected and then "create a new hair system" from the nHair menu was selected. Once the new hair system was created, the paint effects brush was assigned to the hair system. From here the different parameters (attributes) could be adjusted to create the simulation and look that was required.

Screen shot of customised hairstyle

The final simulation required hair or fur to be modelled into a customised hairstyle

and attached to a modelled character. For this simulation a skull cap was created and

modelled into the shape of the required hairstyle. Once the modelling was completed,

it was smoothed off. NURBS curves were then drawn onto the modelled skull cap in

the orientation that was required for the hair creation. Then an experiment was done

by adding a hair system and playing the simulation to see if all the curves were all

going in the right direction allowing the hairs to be attached at the right point to the

geometry. This was done in the surfaces menu and “edit curves” was selected.

Skull cap with initial hair system attached

After all the curves were edited accordingly, the actual hair system was created using
the method mentioned before, by selecting the curves, creating a new hair system and
assigning the paint effects brush to the hair. The parameters were then adjusted to
make the hair react correctly.

The first parameter that was adjusted was the stretch resistance. First of all, it was
turned off altogether which resulted in the hair going crazy and growing out of

control. The stretch resistance was put up to 200 which was the maximum. The bend,
compression and twist resistance parameters were also adjusted as far as they could
go as the hairstyle chosen required the hair to stand straight up because the style was
in a Mohawk type style. The amount of hairs per clump was also adjusted up to 100.
All these parameters helped to give the hair the required simulation but there were
still some hairs that were swinging around in a manner that was not required. Editing
the curve attract and the attraction parameters helped to solve this problem.

Here's a video of the final simulation:

Final Hair Simulation

We have now started to learn fire simulation and so far it looks awesome. I will post about fire simulation when I have some cool stuff to show off.

As for this big collaborative film project fondly called Bones of Essimer, we are about to start filming again this weekend. After the weather issues we had, we have decided the best thing to do to get this project completed is to film on a sound stage, which is essentially just a huge warehouse that we can put our huge portable green screen up in. This means that there is going to be a lot more compositing done now, which is when the animation team will key out the green screen from each shot and add the backgrounds and some other set elements. All the backgrounds and set elements will be integrated into each shot seamlessly to make the audience believe that it is all real and not CG (computer generated).

To get prepared for filming, we have had to bring dirt into the warehouse, so that we can put in a ground layer, that looks like the ground of the real location that we wanted to originally use to film, as we do not want to try paint the ground in green screen paint and we also do not want to have to key out the floor because we will have all sorts of problems with green spill on our actors/actresses and also shadows. We spent two days shovelling dirt onto a trailer from the quarry we were going to use for filming in the first place. It took four loads of dirt to cover the area that we needed!

The crew stopping for a break from shovelling dirt

So, everything is going to be full on for me again as we begin to film again. There's cast for me to organise and keep in contact with and crew to organise. I have logistics to help work out and I just need to make sure that everything and everyone is organised and running smoothly! Also, I still need to keep our followers up to date on all our social media. It's all good, I'm still alive, so that's a good thing right? Seriously though, I am looking forward to filming this weekend and completing our awesome project!