2 in the AM PM Story analysys

I have been directed to analyze a short story animation of my choosing. I chose to look at 2 in the AM PM, which is a short done in college by J.G. Quintel, who, if you didn't know, went to create the show Regular Show.  here is link. Warning, it may be NSFW for language. It was the only short I could think of that had a distinct storyline going for it, sorry I didn't choose a more appropriate short.

Also, here is my own plot diagram. we went through a process where we chose ten things we know to be tru, and making 2 of those things the base for our story. Of course, I was probably thinking too big for that part, and may have to resize my story to be a lot simpler. Here it is! 

Pirate flag done!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-CNs_wSPWo&feature=youtu.be


So i made a a pirate flag using nCloth Dynamics. It's pretty shabby, I had to redo it several times because a function that was supposed to work did not work.The Volume axis function crashed maya every time I so much as looked at it, so I rendered out the playblast without it. It was supposed to add a second layer of wind, but I think it looks the same without it honestly. Also i think i didn't add enough subdivisions, so i doesn't look as flappy as it should? I don't know. to atone for these mistakes, I put my flag on the moon, so that's cool. I think it turned out looking right though!

Shatter effect

https://youtu.be/tyf1NSPu4m4

I have created my shatter video! I have done this by making a plane and just randomly making divisions with the multi cut tool, then adding a cloth and setting the ball as a collider, making the plane shatter when it goes through.

Vortex cube Finished

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jLdLyfml6o&feature=youtu.be



Here's a finished product of the vortex dynamic thing that I made. It was pretty cool and I may use this effect in the future.

Vortex Dynamics

Starting to learn how to use a new dynamic, the vortex function! What supposed to happen is all the faces are supposed to sort of leave the cube and form a little tornado where the torus is, but unfortunately nothing is really working or making sense at the moment, but I'm sure as I go back through the tutorial and look at what is connected to what it will make sense.

The Rigging Crane is accomplished!

                                         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFSFPpXys5Y

I've finished my crane! it is now complete with three object compatibility! Here's a video of it!
Basically, the important part of this project was learning how to use constrains to our advantage, but at the beginning we learned some tools for rigging like using ik handles and creating joints!

Here's a close up of my crane btw:

Rigging day 4

So now I've completed getting my ball to land on my plate, by constraining it with a parent constraint to both the plate and the crane and keyframing when it will be contrained to either object. Now, I've contructed other shapes and am now in the process of figuring out how to get the crane to stack three shapes on top of each other, parenting the extra shapes to eachother instead of the plate.

Rigging, day 2

All right, so today i learned how to add joints to my crane, and how to set up my outliner to have different things parented to different things so that i know exactly what's moving what. For instance, the Ik Handle i added, which helps the crane to move all together as one entity, is a child to my locator, which i can use to control my whole crane by only selecting one thing. This stuff is fascinating but is always super buggy, and sometimes confusing. Can't wait to figure that out, but i'm sure it won't be anything too hard.

Rigging, day 1

I just started tutorials with rigging! although, i didn't really do anything rigging related, but i modeled this crane by following the video and am ready to put some sick joints in it

Soft Bodies

I'm now learning how to use soft bodies and it's very... interesting. Bascially, I learned how to brush on densities to certain areas, how to apply soft bodies, and how to apply springs. All of this can be found in either the fields/solutions tab or the nParticles tab.

Here's a playblasted video of what I have accomplished: (it's nothing pretty and it's kinda gross to look at but i think it's somewhat cool at least)
https://youtu.be/XTHVl7RBETU

Candy bowl dynamics

https://youtu.be/5KfV8EdTbVw
So I made a new animation using dynamics. It's pretty much the same as the last one, except now i've learned how to duplicate the items and apply the rigid bodies/gravity solvers to more than one object.

https://youtu.be/CYHJo9eQXmI
also, using the next lesson, I used what i learned and turned my candy bowl into a catapult, which is nice. I guess i learned how to use memory caches but I couldn't find that on the settings and this version of maya seems to have that function built in already. However, I learned to set the initial state of the dynamics to start out in a position where it has already fallen, and alter it by moving the bowl.

Dynamics

https://youtu.be/7pMjIruB99I

I have now begun to work with dynamics, which I think are a crazy feature. I'm actually surprised no one has told me about this until now, it's probably the most useful feature I've used thus far. Basically, you set one object as a passive rigid body, which lets it not collide with active rigid bodies, i.e the ground. You can also throw in gravity now, that's a thing, it forces objects to fall, on their own, without animating them. it's pretty gnarly.

Deformer video

https://youtu.be/jiWo_im3TSU

So heres the animation i did using deformers. The original shape is actually a torus that's been scaled up a bit. The deformers that are most prevalent are the flare and the twist, which give it a sort of tornado effect. theres also a squash in there that makes it look taller. As it moves along the deformer, the effect works on what ever shape is on it, which gives it its properties, and can make for some very interesting designs.

Deformer practice day 1

Im turning my shapes into an animation! Obviously, I chose the tornado looking one, because it would look the coolest in the end. It's pretty simple, so far I've just set movement key frames for the shape and it will move along the deformer.

Deformers

Here is a still of a couple shapes I've made using deformers. Deformers are a pretty nice tool, and can be used to make very simple shapes that would otherwise take a super long time to model. The instructions called for interesting shapes, so I used pretty much every deformer on 4 different shapes. Some turned out looking cooler than others. There once was a pyramid in there but the deformers did essentially nothing to it so i took it out