Fantastic Voyage; Natalux Hop and Shatter Test

Hop/Shatter Test

[Environment style is still temporary!]

I had this finished on Friday, but half way through the render, Maya somehow crashed in a way which corrupted my SSD and rendered my entire computer un-usable. Thanks Maya. A day of repairs and a new solid-drive later, I finished it up.

I toned down the line-shimmy effect on this one; it is there, but it's subtle. Honestly, I think I preferred it in the first test, so I might exaggerate it again next time.

Playblast

I added some squash/stretch to the hop. I didn't want my creatures to become jelly-like, but even solid objects can have a little bit of s/s to make the animation smoother.

The physics simulation was a pain, and it still looks a bit awkward, but it's a world above trying to animate a shatter effect manually.

Animated texture;

I made the transparencies much larger on this model so that I could extend lines and animations much further out from the surface. This allowed me to add some lines around the model to add some more expressive line animations, like the tapping of the base, and the 'shock' animation as it looks off the cliff;

[Frame from test]

This was a nice effect, but again, I need to make it less subtle because you can't really see it in this test. It was also a pain to make sure all the transparencies were aligned properly, so I'd probably only do this for focal characters.