Day 68 -- 19/8/2011 Friday

I played with the keyframing and the graph editor to smooth out the camera movement in shot3. It took me quite long to test out as I need to play the sequence with the cube stream on to visualize the movement to the camera angle. Overall the angle is there. Also, Steven told me to fix a few thing in this shot, e.g the cubes are intercepting the floor and I also find the speed of the stream was quite fast. I got to tweak the velocity parameter and the scale of force of the velocity path and re-sim each time so it took awhile to get what I want.

After that, I work on the suggestion/advice by Steven on some part of the shots. For shot 1, the last part of the camera movement somewhat coincidentally move along with the cube movement making it kind of awkward to look at. Fix that as soon as I was done with shot 3. Next was shot 2. The part where the cubes start to roll towards the camera, I need to make it such that some of the cubes gets to pick up the wind force then gradually the rest of the cubes gets the wind force. By doing that, I use an expression on the wind force.

(rand($OBJID) < clamp((($F/ -350)/20, 0, 1) * the value set by the user of wind force

What the expression does was picking random cubes to apply the force on from the "rand($OBJID)". Then the current frame - 350; 350 is the frame the simulation start, the value was then divided by 20 and thus setting a kind of threshold of the wind force to kick in. A clamp function is use to prevent the value from going outside the range which in this case set by me, 0 to 1.

Like before, I did some test renders while waiting for simulation to cook and stuff. I still couldn't decide on the color scheme. I played with black, teal, red, blue and white. I also did some motion blur test but the result was weird. I was then told that tweaking the xform time sample will lessen the motion blur.