Digital Art Zone

My niece is going for her Phd in Palaeontology, so I was hoping to do an animation featuring a T. Rex for her.

The basic idea is from a Bob Dylan song ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. See video: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/sy-187835137/bob_dylan_subterranean_homesick_blues_official_music_video/

Except the TRex would be center screen holding the papers with both hands below it’s head (not to the side). One hand would let go of the front paper as the other hand drops it. I want each paper to flutter to the ground, hopefully with the text from the paper sometimes partially visible as it falls.

I’m thinking at the end good ole’ M4 comes by with a broom and pushes the papers off ‘screen’ at which point the TRex eyes him as a tasty morsel.
I’m not sure what text I want just yet.

I have no idea how to do anything that includes the papers!! Help!!!

-Eileen

unfortunately I cannot think of an easy way to do this in studio
all I can think of is how I would do it in Carrara or even Poser!
the latter I would use a plane primitive clothified in front of another static one and dropped doing multiple sims with differend wind, gravity etc then edit all the videos together.
maybe the Optitex dynamic tablecloth might work but you would need the dynamic clothing plugin to alter stiffness etc for paper
you could not do one continuous animation, rather edit in takes.

I actually _do_ have Carrara, but not Poser. I also have Bryce and Hexagon.
How would you do it in Carrara? Unfortunately, it’s one program I don’t have a lot of experience with…

-Eileen

well in Carrara you could use a number of options.
firstly a plane in front of the other as I already suggested, not touching but sitting cradled in the figure’s hands
using bullet physics you can either simply leave it a stiff board or even add a bit of softbody but that gets complicated
pose your figure so it is pulling one supporting hand away in the animation so the card can drop via gravity, parent the other one to the other hand in the scene tree by dragging the object there.
then under motion parameters for the dropping card, chose physics
when you click the wand icon in the top right with the little sparks coming out it will run a physics sim and the card will drop according to gravity doing nothing it will prob bounce and fall out the figure’s hand but you can add a keyframed motion to the hand to throw it.
after running the sim you can convert it to keyframes for a saved motion for that card then duplicate the card and put it in front with another behind, add physics motion to that card and repeat.
once the first card falls away the other one can follow, keep doing this until you have a stack of keyframed cards
then you can stagger the movements by lassoing all the key frames for each and dragging them along the timeline.

please post in the Carrara forum too!
we have the wonderful Andy username 3dage who is a Carrara guru and newb’s gardian angel, he may have other ideas

When I read the title I immediately thought of Wendy the cat lady who has done all those funny animation gifs… and here she is helping.

You can start by using a plane primitive in D|S - you’ll need to create a new texture for each card or just create a generic card and add the text in post (can be added in After Effects by tracking the plane primitive - depends on what tools you have available to you.

Key frame the animation of the T-Rex picking up the card and save animation to AniMate2 aniBlock - reuse andr vary the camera moves.

Not a simple task, but defintely do-able.  Best of luck with this project!  Please post when done.

-AniMajik

FatCatAlley

ebauer01 - 03 June 2012 08:36 PM

My niece is going for her Phd in Palaeontology, so I was hoping to do an animation featuring a T. Rex for her.

The basic idea is from a Bob Dylan song ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. See video: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/sy-187835137/bob_dylan_subterranean_homesick_blues_official_music_video/

Except the TRex would be center screen holding the papers with both hands below it’s head (not to the side). One hand would let go of the front paper as the other hand drops it. I want each paper to flutter to the ground, hopefully with the text from the paper sometimes partially visible as it falls.

I’m thinking at the end good ole’ M4 comes by with a broom and pushes the papers off ‘screen’ at which point the TRex eyes him as a tasty morsel.
I’m not sure what text I want just yet.

I have no idea how to do anything that includes the papers!! Help!!!

-Eileen