Masi's 3D Computer Animation Blog

Due to nCloth simulation being too unpredictable and lack of time the decision was made to remove the dress altogether after consulting with our teacher. Overall the project turned out satisfying.

This project was made to celebrate a very specific dance but also to focus purely on animation. The purpose of the whirling Sufi dance is to establish a connection with the divine and the universe through dance. Some scholars have pointed out that the whirling element of the dance mimics the rotation of the planets and the stars in their orbits thus adding an ethereal element to the dance. I wanted to visually reference this hence the inclusion of the shot below.

Furthermore the water color sequence at the end further eludes to this ethereal element of the dance with the distorted ai generated 2D visuals.

The toonshader technique from characters was extended to backgrounds and props, aiming for a seamless 2D aesthetic consistent across characters and the world they inhabit. A key decision was removing textures from assets to maintain visual consistency throughout the project.

Recognizing the need for a uniform visual language, similar toonshader settings were applied to characters, backgrounds and props this ensured a cohesive blend between characters and props.

I wanted to seamlessly infuse the aesthetics and charm of 2D animation to the project while keeping it a 3D animated film. This was achieved using aiToonshader in Maya.

The intention behind this was to keep the spirit of the project artistic and break away from realistic rendering, applying the aiToonshader was relatively easy but the challenge lay in keeping the visuals and width of the lines consistent in between each shot. Toonshader determines the width of each line depending on the distance of the camera to the subject and the distance of the camera is different in each shot and adding camera movement further complicates this resulting on varying line width in each shot. Some thicker and some shots with thinner lines.

To make it look consistent the toonshader settings were tailored to each shot individually and were rendered multiple times, some shots that had camera movement were rendered multiple time with different settings and edited together to keep the line width consistent.

The process and technique used is as following:

1. Select an object assign new material, arnold toonshader
2. Adjust the settings add color and ai ramprgb tonemap where appropriate
3. Repeat the process for each part of the character

The video below demonstrates nCloth improvements since last post. The dress is no longer collapsing in on itself and is legs are not poking through the dress anymore however there is a severe drag and delay to the back part of the dress.

1: Expand timeline let simulation run for 500 frames

2: Add transparent lambert to the parts of the upper legs that are poking through the dress

3: Select vertexes of the top part of the dress and the waist of the character and nconstraint them together using component to component constraint

I managed to get the dress to stay on the character and not fall off to the ground by using nconstraint component to component, furthermore the geo of the character was made into a passive collider.

nCloth simulation is very unpredictible and there are many issues, nCloth simulation is needed for 15 unique shots and have to be redone each time. Since the movement of the character is different in every shot the simulation is unpredictably in every shot since the same settings will not work on different shots. This makes nCloth not reliable for this project

Process for nCloth simulation.

1. Create a cylinder and shape it around the character roughly forming the shape of the dress
2. Add lattice deformers
3. Manipulate lattice points to form the dress
4. Manipulate edges so the geo of the character mesh does poke through the dress
5. Delete history on the dress
6. Smooth the dress add divisions
7. nCloth simulation works better with more divisions but too many will make the simulation more hardware heavy and take longer time
8. Add nCloth simulation adjust the settings until the object starts to resemble a dress

I want to focus on the animation and keep background assets minimal, only essential assets were modelled.

The sking of the rig was unbinded, mesh duplicated and separated into torso for shirt, legs for trousers and feet for shoes. The mesh was then extruded, sculpted and modelled appropriately into the different clothe pieces. The dress has not been made yet as it will be simulated using a nCloth.

Clothes for the two male characters were made using the same workflow.