Maya animation update 9 (Animation)

I’m back at testing the cloth physics for the character as well as the physics for the mattress. It has been a couple of long days with physics baking and animation correction.

I got eye movement, eyelids and tail animated, where the tail needed a bunch of corrections to the animation.

The mattress also uses cloth physics, and needed a bunch of tweaks to make it act like a mattress. The first iteration of it acted really strange, but I found out, that for some reason it hadn’t subdivided the bottom part. After the correction, it worked well, especially when having geometry that kind of mimic the amount of pocket springs there is in a mattress.

A function that Blender cloth sim offers is something called ‘Shrink’, it’s controlled by a slider going from -1.000 (expand) to 1.000 (shrink). I haven’t really touched the function, but it’s something I have seen being used for furniture to make creases and pillowy areas wrinkle. This ‘Shrink’ function can be controlled by a weight map, which can define what areas shrink or expand.

I was wondering if I could add a bit more wobbliness to the fat shapes. So, I began to paint the weight map, marking the back folds, the upper arms, belly, sides and around on the legs, all those places that could have more sagging. When I ran the first simulation it looked neat. I continued painting till it looked just right, setting the slider slightly in minus makes the mesh expand just enough to better mark the folds on the body.

This function was something I haven’t planned, so I had to go through the animation again and tweak the hand movements where it was needed.

I think this is the last test physics bake before I focus on the long head hair and finally get to put the scene together.

This preview was made while I was working on correcting the hand movement: Link here.