I had planned on heading in to work Saturday and Sunday after I got back from Puerto Rico, but was told to enjoy the last two days of my vacation before coming in for two more hard weeks. Score.
I did get some sleep in. A friend of TJ’s whom I met Friday night reminded me of keeping the room dark, so I’ve been playing with a sleep mask which seems to have somewhat of an effect.
As far as my film goes, I spent most of Saturday in Lightwave 9. I’d had a lot of crashing issues before when using dynamics in the beginning; under 9.31 the cereal tutorial on the official videos site was impossible. However, all’s well now.
There were two things that I wanted to use dynamics on: one is a sugar cube for this site. I tried a bunch of different ways to make sugar cubes using only textures / displacement with simple geometry, but nothing looked right. Then I had the idea of using hard-body dynamics on a bunch of tiny cubes and letting them settle into the shape I wanted.
Interestingly, bounding-sphere collisions between the few hundred or so tiny cubes ended up creating a nicer-looking sugar cube than using bounding-box collisions. The boxes also took a magnitude longer to calculate. Anyway, I won’t bother posting the interim images since it’ll become the header of this blog once get it finished.
The other thing I wanted to test in LW was whether or not I could use it for the effects shot in my movie, the bridge collapse. I’m almost 100% sure I can do what I need with ClothFX and a hard-body FX link, and it’ll be easier to accomplish in LW than in anything else I have. People told me when I bought it that I was crazy for doing so, and still tell me that, but I keep finding new reasons that warrant my purchase.
On the Cinema 4D front I made some scripting progress. The supplied language, COFFEE, lacks a lot of what I consider necessary utility functions, things like easily applying constraints or even something as simple as being able to tell which object was selected first in a list. Yesterday I got through making a function for applying IK constraints. It’s really simple, taking the starting object, the ending object, the goal object, and the pole vector object as parameters. I went through a few versions of the function (again, it’s really simple — only five or six lines long) until I was happy with how it worked in the scheme of the whole script.
The next thing is aim constraints. They’re a little harder because of how C4D handles them, but I think I sorted out one of the issues I was having late last night, so all that’s left is to test out my idea.