Impact!

Here is a screenshot from my first impact. I am pleased with how it looks especially when in motion. Getting the deformation to match the surface it is impacting is difficult but with enough playing around with the squash deformer the desired result can be achieved. I tried using multiple soft deformers but they did not give me the flat impact result I needed.

Environment Reevaluated

The city idea was looking too blocky and linear so I have decided to go for a more natural environment. I have created a cliff face like shape that will give me the surfaces to bounce my bullet off and also give me a nicer background for my animation to play through.

I have also found and edited a texture that I will use for this environment. I went for a cracked dirt like surface as it matches the cliff like shape.

Bullet Material Change

Decided to change the material of the bullet as it wasn't looking very nice and the transparency did not lend itself well to showing impact deformations well. I have gone with the much more conventional looking brass bullet instead. I think the shine on it looks very nice and much more pleasing. Plus the metal texture still fits with the semi-liquid impact.

Environment

I need to create an environment that my bullet will ricochet off of. I don't want to just put random planes in so I was thinking of having something resembling the scene in Inception where the city bends over on itself.

This is the stage I am at in building my city.

You can also see the motion path that I will be using to track the motion of my bullet. I found a tutorial online that explained how to use these well and I believe I understand them pretty well now.

More texture practice

I have been practising my textures a bit more and have tried adding transparency to my glass bullet. This still doesn't look that great so I am going to look up some tutorials online. Here is what it looks like anyway.

Texture Attempt

After seeing the different texture layers in class and how to use the Hypershade window I tried out texturing a glass sphere. I wanted to try to make it look cracked even though I wouldn't do that for my animation as I wanted to try out the bump map and specular mapping. I used the following images, the second I changed to black and white in photoshop for mapping.

Basic Form

After playing around with some of the modelling functions in Maya I have decided that I won't make my original form very complicated. The feedback from my concept was that just having a glass sphere would be too boring even though it would change from that throughout the animation. I am thinking a bullet shape would be ideal as with lots of ricochets and fast motion it fits perfectly. It is also easy to create a basic bullet shape based on a picture as shown below. Seeing a glass bullet would be cool too.

Idea Selected

So I am going to go with my 3rd concept idea of exploring the semi-liquid form of glass in an exaggerated way. This idea will have a lot of motion involved in it so I am hoping that I can fit enough animation in to 30seconds as things will need to move quickly to look good.

MDDN241 Concept Sketches

My first idea was to explore the materiality of water and question the way it reacts with its environment by making it react in different and surprising ways having it end as ice which is a natural occurrence but in a much less natural way.

My second concept was to explore a molten rock form and how it reacts to different actions such as an icy breeze or being dropped from a great height.

And the last concept was to think about glass in an exaggerated way. Glass being a liquid on the verge of a solid, I want to reverse the process of sand becoming glass but show this exaggerated liquid form in doing so.