Faking Cloth with Soft Bodies

Hey there. For those of us having trouble with cloth, I found a cool tutorial that shows you how you can sort of fake it by using a soft body. The tutorial itself shows how to make a curtain blowing in the wind, but the best part is that there's not a panel or a garment in sight! The author doesn't seem to really have a grasp on how to write sensibly in the English language, but he compensates with lots of pictures. It's pretty easy to follow, and there's even a scene file you can download to start with. Overall the tutorial is pretty short, but it could save you a lot of time fretting over cloth. And of course, the technique can be reused to make things other than curtains.

Hope you enjoy it!

-Sarah

Let's Blow Stuff Up!

Hello Class,

Fun with shatter effects and particle effects can make for a cool explosion tutorial. It can be found here:

Explode Stuff

If that links doesn't work or it tells you that you must "login" then paste this in your browser and it should work

http://www.spafi.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=438&Itemid=99999999


What I particularly enjoyed about this tutorial is that it is quite easy to follow and it creates some neat effects that could be used in various different ways. Try for instance a missile hitting a wall that could blow a chunk out of the wall and then have the wall shatter with the explosion on it. Also this creates an almost two in one tutorial, because the second part where it shows you shaping the particles into words and then blowing them apart can be used for different movie style effects as well.
Enjoy!
Keshan

Game Developers Map

Hello All,

This is Trent. If you are or will be, looking for a job in animation of any sort, may I present to you, one of the coolest things to help search (ok, well it's pretty cool).

It is a game developers map. You click on one of the orange dots on the globe, and it brings up all of the companies in that state/country (though I think it just brings up the main ones, not sure). Just make sure you scroll down after clicking on a dot because that's where the info is. It has the website, city they are located in and what type of company they are.

You can sort by:

-Developer

-Publisher

-Developer & Publisher

-Organization (organizations that are connected with game design/animation)

-Mobile/Handheld

-Online Developer

I like it. Do you?

Peace,

Trent

Fun with Particles

Hi there, Sarah here. Since we're all having so much fun with particles, I did a little digging and found a tutorial that shows how you can use the speed of a particle to determine color (or another attribute of your choosing). It's a little bit of scripting, but mostly just the runtime expression that we saw in one of the homework tutorials. There are two scary looking examples in the beginning, but the real tutorial starts after that. Look for the sentence, "So we want to create an attribute called 'speed'." Everything before that is basically background info. The tutorial itself isn't too bad to follow. The only problem is that he tends to stop in the middle of what he's doing to give you an example, and it can be a little confusing. I suggest reading through it once before you actually try and do it. There's a short movie at the end where he uses a turbulence field to create sudden speed changes. Enjoy!

UV mapping in maya

Hi, it's Yu here.

We all know how long it takes to manipulate the UVs in the UV editor. I recently came across an interesting tutorial, which introduces another step to separate different parts of the model before UV mapping. The tool used is "edit polygons---extract". It seems to be able to save lots of time. Check it out!

Happy texturing!

Free Texture Library

Hi everyone,

It's Brad. My favorite thing about modeling/animation is texturing objects. I spent the most time in 308 just searching, uv mapping, and texturing appropriate textures for my landscape. I've come across a website with a lot of high res photos covering a wide range of subjects.

The only catch is that you can only download 20 per day (per IP address). Some of these images can be seamlessly tiled, and some cannot without photoshop. If you come across an image that you really want to use..say it's a really nice shot of some grass, just do a google search for "Seamless Tiling," and you should get the info you need. I have grabbed some really nice environment textures from here. I'm particularly fond of their selection of wood and grass.

happy hunting!

Brief description on dynamic rain...

Hey guys, James here. So in my never ending quest to love the particles more than I probably should, I came up with a "beta version" of a decent rain sequence. This is just from playing around a bit with particles and dynamics and what not and certainly isn't anywhere near perfect, but I figured I'd pass it along.
Anyone who wants a more in depth description of how to do this can ask me in class and I'd be happy to give you a brief one on one demo, but I think where I'm at now is pretty easy to figure out by playing around.

-So- begin in an empty scene by creating a poly plane of whatever size you want and raise it up somewhat in the Y direction. (for the purposes of rain however it would be best to have it a decent size...)

-Under the Dynamics tool set, with the plane selected, go up to the Particles menu and select Emit from Object. This makes a little handle of sorts appear in the middle of the plane and when you play the animation it seems like the particles are coming out of the verticies because they emit oddly. I played around in the attributes for the plane and found an option where you can select "emit from surface" and that makes it more uniform and less messy.

-You'll notice (unless my Maya is just acting up again...) that the particles go up instead of down. I think I kinda half-assed fixing it by just flipping the plane around 180 degrees (I'm sure there's a more technical way to make it work) and that fixed it. Then select the particles and add a gravity field onto them. I tweaked the strength of the gravity down to about .3, but they're still kinda floaty so you just tweak that up to wherever you want it for yourself.

-Now you will notice the particles don't really look like rain, but just like falling dust or something, so if you go to the particle attributes palette and select the particle shape tab you'll find an option to change the shape to streaks instead of points. This looks alot more like rain.

-The last thing I did was to create another poly plane underneath the first and make it a collision object so that the rain fell down and had something to crash into. It seemed to look fairly decent and if you tweak the friction settings on the collision plane the drops sort of spread a little.

Hope this helped you guys! Next week I'll post more if i've figured out how to make it sharper.
-James

Secure connection to UIC - should resolve licensing issues?

Some people need to use the new maya or other software off campus - you need internet connection but do you also need to be connected to the UIC server?

This free vpn client may help - be sure to read the warning if you are using SBC/ AT&T dsl.
This should also help people not able to connect via FTP.
Also, remember UIC will be switching to Secure FTP in mid-March, so unsecured ftps like WS-FTP will not work. See the class shared folder --> FTP software folder on the network.

The VPN Client creates a secure connection over the Internet that lets you access UIC as if you were an on-site user.

For general information on ACCC's Virtual Private Network (VPN) Gateway, visit:
http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/software/vpn/index.html

e-sales site: http://e-sales.accc.uic.edu/ search for VPN Client