We are starting a new 4 week project for our Maya classes. This project is going to be about we make an oddly satisfying animated video. You can find all these kind of videos online on youtube for example. These videos that are very pleasing to the eye show an animation loop that will have a perfect fit through different objects. In the video just below there are many examples of these oddly satisfying videos.
Nick showed us an example he created himself, this draft was made with the effect of MASH. MASH Utilities are a set of helpful tools that either function on or are aided by MASH networks. don in this utility space you have many different effects you can use on a simple object. Nick gave us the example by using the replicator and the curve. You first start by changing the distribute in a way you like (by making a grid or a radial, kind of like the duplicate special). When you get something you like you can give it different types of effects.
Using the replicator it will [as it says] replicate the MASH that you created using the distribute editor. this will create more versions of your created MASH. Look at the ‘replicator and distribute’ image to get an understanding of what this looks like.
The other example Nick gave us was with the MASH curve where you can also use a simple 3D object and make the MASH follow a spline, this could be random or linear. look at the image below ‘Follow the spline’.
So these two images below are my try of using the MASH tool to see if I want to include this in my satisfying machine. I created the 2 types of MASH with a simple cube to start with and see what I could come up with. Using this tool was quite easy to understand, you get a nice menu where you can choose different effects to apply on your MASH. The fun thing about the MASH is that you are able to animate every little part in your MASH. For the circle I tried to randomize the rotation of the cubes and give them a trail. I am still a bit uncertain on how to use the trail in the MASH but I think it adds a nice bit of flow in the animation. I also made some swirly ‘tornado’ using the distribute and the replicator to replicate my first MASH. This was a good class to get to know the tool and play around with it so for testing out the effect I quite understood what a few of the different assets did.
Thinking about the oddly satisfying project I tried to figure out what I wanted to do for my satisfying animation. I searched around on Youtube / Pinterest to get different inspirations on what people had done for their own satisfying animation. one of the inspirations being the video that is at the top of this block. I had a bit of a difficult start to finding something that I wanted to create, there are many different ways on how to create a satisfying machine which was a little bit overwhelming for me. In the end I came up with the idea to create a wave loop animation in where there is a small boat that will stay still in the center of the wave simulation and will goo up and down according to when the waves will appear. The two images below give a reference of what I am trying to create, click on the pinterest links on the images to go to the animation/video.
Starting off with my idea I tried to recreate the wave animation shown in the left inspiration image. This wave is also created with what Nick learned us in class, MASH. The first test I did was with a cube and added a MASH to this, from here I assigned the MASH to show as a grid and made it were it is x 24 by z 24. Then I started to follow a tutorial on how to create a wave motion. It is the tutorial shown above this text. To create this wave the tutorial shows that you need to use the OFFSET, in the MASH menu this creates a controllable tool that you can modify and move to create the waves I want for my scene.
I also recreated the wave I made and adjusted the grid size and the shape, the shape in this version is formed as a cylinder with a low polygon count, you can see this version in the video above. For the results of the shape I prefer the cylinder shape since in my eyes this looks a little bit more organic and a wave is a very flow motion ‘shape’. As for the gird I think there are too many and it is a little bit too long, this makes for a few problems where I am having trouble to get a correct loop going. So I decided to make a new version with the cylinder shapes but a smaller grid size, This version is shown below. I still have to change a lot of things in the wave motion since the shape of how the wave goes is not entirely correct/ how I would like it to be, It has to broad of a flat surface and the wave is too cylinder. The tutorial shows that you also can create your own shape. This will be my next step for this satisfying video.