Week 03: Prepare for Simulation
February 14, 2024
After collecting feedback from last week’s work, I re-adjusted the animation, did look -dev for the jet and the ground, and built a set up for the Fracture RBD Simulation.
I. Look-dev
A big appreciation goes out to BRENNAN BLACK, a talented environmental artist who is also my friend, for helping me with the process of UV-ing the jet and texturing it based on the reference. To further polish the look, I mapped out the glass surface of the jet specifically and gave it a realistic glass appearance using MaterialX in Solaris.
II. Animation Readjustment
According to the feedback on my animation last week, it needed to be re-adjusted since the movement of the jet was very funky. Therefore, I imported the model into Maya to re-create the crash on the right wing to match the first impact in the reference shot. Then, the transformation was adjusted in Houdini.
II. Contact Map
In order to mask the contact surface of the Quinjet and the ground to bring into the Fracture RBD process later on, I developed a tool which is based on the development of my supervisor and I from my last project, and I called it Contact Map tool.
At its core, the Contact Map tool offers a streamlined approach to visualizing the interaction between objects, in this case, the plane and the ground. The workflow with Contact Map begins by setting the start and end frames of the simulation, effectively narrowing down the scope of analysis to the crucial moments of impact and aftermath; thus minimizing simulation cooking time.
Under the hood, the contact surface is defined by a Solver, which accumulates the areas where the two surfaces intersect across the designated frames. This method ensures accuracy while avoiding unnecessary calculations beyond the specified simulation range. However, to further optimize performance, caching becomes essential. By caching the results, we prevent redundant simulations, enabling quicker access to the contact map data.
Looking ahead, there are always opportunities for refinement and enhancement. One avenue I'm particularly interested in exploring is leveraging the "Masking from Geometry" node to enhance user control over the contact surface without delving deep into the tool's internals. By integrating remapping functionalities, users can fine-tune the contact map directly from the node graph, streamlining the workflow and empowering users with more intuitive adjustments.
