LoopDeLoop Piggy 3 - Animating (Part 2)

Animating the pigs proved more complicated that I expected, not on a technical level, but for the creation of the loop. I had considered using a simulation technique to create a dynamic scene, however this would surrender the control of where the balloons landed and so I wouldn't be able to make everything loop as nicely, also it wouldn't really be animation.

So I worked one at a time, bouncing balloons of the walls and onto other walls. To start with I did a 2 balloon loop. This meant having balloon 1 end in the exact same place that balloon 2 started from, and balloon 2 would end where the 1st started. 

However as I went on, this became much more complex to comprehend. As I created looped involving many more balloons, which then bounced off of other in midair, I had to plan much more meticulously where the balloons were going. There is a loop of 4 balloons which go around in the middle in a very complex loop. If you follow 1 of these balloons around, it actually takes 4 loops of the whole clip for it to end in the place it started, however there is also always another balloon starting in that same place on the first frame of every loop. So there are kind of 4 versions of the life of one balloon loop happening at once. This was what was getting very confusing. I was taking many notes while going through this process, trying to keep it all straight in my head.

Eventually, when happy with the animation, I started on rendering. I started with a AIStandardSurface balloon preset, however it wasn't giving me the translucency and light glowing through that I wanted. After a lot of fiddling with more presets and tweaking the settings a lot, I came up with something I was really happy with. It is actually somewhere in between balloon and glass materials, but it gives me a light glow on the walls and floor that I am really happy with.


After 9 computers rendering simultaneously overnight... this was the final result. I am very happy with it, and excited to play with more lighting and materials in my final film project. 

https://vimeo.com/326158442

LoopDeLoop Piggy 2 - Animating (Part 1)

After finishing the pig head balloon model, I moved onto actually creating the animation. I recorded some footage of the hallway at university. Stepping side to side allowed the footage to be easily repeatable or reversed to create the perfect loop. However once I started tracking the footage and cutting takes into loops, I decided against this idea.

It was hard to make a version that was looping nicely as well as the HDRI hadn't come out successfully to create realistic lighting. I think this was due to it being a small space so the stitching process was struggling. This would have worked with a 360° camera and would have given me realistic lighting, however I didn't have access to this tool. 

I instead then decided to create a fully CG hallway within Maya. This made everything look cleaner and also felt more in line with the brief being an 'animation' challenge, it felt weird to have real life background plates. 

So then I finally got onto actually animating, and this was were the real challenge began.

LoopDeLoop Piggy 1 - Ideas and Starting Model

I decided to do the 'pig' prompt for this months LoopDeLoop. I am going to make a balloon style pig head in Maya and composite it into real life footage. I haven't decided what exactly this scene will be yet but some ideas I have so far are;

• someone bouncing the balloon, keeping it off the floor
• balloons bouncing/circling around a room.
• a bouquet of balloons bouncing around each other.

I will decide on this by the time I have finished the maya model. For the model itself, I am not worrying about it looking like a realistic balloon shape, I more want it to be cartoony and exaggerated. Here is what I have so far.