ANP100 - ASSESSMENT 3 - FRAZER CARPENTER - SIMULATION ANIMATION

The inspiration for this animation pretty obvious if you ask me; dnd. I started playing this year and have been really enjoying it to the point where I’m looking to buy my fist dice set. Because of this, I started thinking about what I could animate while taking notes

After solidifying the idea in my head, I modelled a D20 and a dice tray in Maya.

I then took these into Substance Painter to give them textures.

Finally brought the geometry into Houdini and applied the models. The dice tray was too glossy when I first brought it in so I used the material node to increase the brightness.

I set the die to be a hero rigid body, placed it on one end and added an initial velocity.

I then set the tray to be a surface collider but it would cause the die to collide above the tray, at the height of the wall. After playing around with different options nothing seemed to work so I created a series of grids and placed them individually inside the tray and made each one a surface collider. This solved the issue as the die would now bounce off the floor and walls.

Now that the die and tray work properly I made small tweaks to the friction, bounce and initial velocity of the walls and die until I got a roll that looked good. I added lights around and animated the camera to follow.

Placing a fireball was easy enough and felt good considering the spell fireball was one of the first to come to mind for this animation. However, it took a considerable amount of time and googling to figure out how to delay the start of the animation until I found a setting in the pyro burst source.

I then duplicated the die and, using a different setting, delayed it till after the fireball, launching it onto the tray.

Similarly animating the camera to follow the new die, as it stops a particle emitter initializes and I animated the emitter to rise through the tray until it sat inside the D20. This gave a really cool look of water sticking to the die closely.

Finally, I used the same setup taught in week 9 for the group of dice where a sphere is used for its points, coping geometry to them and dropping them as rigid bodies. I had a lot of trouble getting them to drop individually instead of sticking to an invisible sphere but I finally realised I had one box unchecked and after checking it, it worked. The materials also didn’t show up in the viewport but fortunately, when I tested the output render they did which saved me a lot of trouble.

I would once again like to thank my friend Geoffrey who gave me permission to use his music for this assignment. In future, I’d like to spend more time thinking of more unique spells than fireball and control water and try to play with vellum, grains and viscous fluids. I would like to try spells like web or faerie fire maybe over the break.