Dakota Williams Capstone Blog

Cell Fracture Wall Simulation I made a rigid body simulation where I had to assign each broken fragment to a rigid body object and specify its characteristics, including mass, friction, and bounciness. I added a mesh plane ground to react and then configured it to be a rigid, passive body. This ground will interact with the broken fragments to mimic the gravitational pull. I then baked the simulation to compute the physics before rendering the animation. The fragmented pieces will react realistically. This also gave me keyframes so I could play the simulation later on in the final render. 

Houdini FX RBD Fracture Simulation The process of RBD (Rigid Body Dynamics) fracture in Houdini is an intriguing and visually impressive technique often used to simulate the destruction of objects. However, users of Houdini Apprentice, the free version of Houdini, may encounter limitations when it comes to rendering such simulations. I followed my lectures Hossein's previous tutorial that he recorded on teams which I found to be very insightful. 

City Scene Creation - Blender Asset Pack It was fun to start building a Blender city scene with low-poly objects. Throughout this procedure, a carefully constructed cityscape with a range of structures that each add to the urban environment's overall feel was developed. I started by carefully choosing and downloading low-poly elements that fit the style I had in mind for my city in order to create the scene. City scenes benefit greatly from the use of low-poly objects since they render quickly and effectively. The intricate arrangement of these resources allowed for the creation of a captivating and realistic city feel. I carefully considered where to put each building to make sure there was a variety of sizes, styles, and purposes for each one.

Guide Paths & Road Creation This week, I explored Blender's Guide Paths feature in the RBC addon, a fascinating tool that expands Blender's potential for automotive animation. The RBC addon is a great tool that simplifies and adds a great deal of convenience to the vehicle animation process. But as I was experimenting, I ran into a particular problem. I had trouble getting my model object to follow the intended guidance path smoothly. This challenge brought to light the subtleties and complexities involved in using Guide Paths and emphasized how crucial it is to grasp this area of the RBC addon. Even after the first failure, I knew that Guide Paths could improve my animations, and I was determined to get past this barrier with more research and practice. I also started to texture the road for the city scene. I got the textures from Poly Haven. 

Turntable & Exegesis Document This week I created a turntable to show the final version of the Tesla model. I also added a plane mesh backdrop with a subdivision modifier. My main focus for this week was to start creating my exegesis document for this project.

RBC Blender Addon, Animation Test, Manual Rig This is the manual rig I began to do where I applied the armature car deformation rig I then generated it which lead to implications seen within the images The rigging tutorial process I followed did not want to comply and I decided to change my rig. I then decided to use the RBC addon plugin which comes with inbuilt pre rigs. The plugin allows me to have full control over the scene and animate  The addon includes tuning, suspension and full access to expriement with physics of the rig. The newest feature offers the option to have your deisred object to collide physics.  There is an option called RBC animation which I personally expriemented with in this project. It allows you to 'recored cache' and reply recorded animations and mess around with keyframes. I found this plugin extremly helpful in terms of creative freedom allowing my vision for this project to come to life as it made work flow very user friendly.