Day 65 -- 16/8/2011 Tuesday

Back to work on the "cubes rolling to camera" sequence. Yesterday, I was stuck at making all the cube to move despite having point velocity assign to all cubes. I thought of doing something like giving them a rule saying "if the speed is below a certain amount, give it the necessary amount of speed to move again", however, I know how the concept but didn't know how to apply, guess I need more Houdini lesson. I asked Charles for help, telling him the concept I had. He said this was a good way to solve my problem. He did a vopforce sop in dopnetwork.

Inside the vopforce, this was what he did;

> add a length sop to the velocity of the global to computes the length of the 3D vector.
> a compare sop to set rule like "less than", also give it a parameter, minspeed, for the user to input a value.
> a if sop with the compare sop connect to its condition, if the condition was true the value will be multiply by a constant and multiply with the mass and output it.

After getting the results I wanted, I play with the minspeed parameter to adjust the speed. I started out with a high, ridiculous value to see if the network does affect the cubes, then slowly decreasing the value by half to the right amount. Now, it does what I want.

Next, I work on the camera movement connecting that 2 shot together. I had this flipbook render of the this 2 shot and showed Steven. I am required to fix this little jerk in the middle.

shot2&3 from Tanner Caelum on Vimeo.

I asked Evan for his advice. He help me start tweaking the some parts in the graph editor. We spend some time tweaking that. Then he told me to combine both camera together to have a one shot movement. I combined both together by copying the keyframes on one camera to another. The overall movement was there but now there are a few bumps and hiccups. I spend nearly 2 hours tweaking on the graph editor. Finally, with Evan helping me to finalize the movement.