Software Technology: Marble Machine

For our research assignment we were told to team up and create a marble machine. This assignment brought quite a lot of trouble on. I split the modeling in half with my team mate, Luisa Reyes - so she modeled two of the props while I modeled three. We modeled in Maya and imported into Houdini in order to do the simulation.

Here are images of the props that I modeled.

The first big problem that we had was simply turning the models into Static objects. We could not figure out how to create the entire group of geometry static, so we ended up having to do it for each object individually. Our second major problem was making the shovel object tilt. In our original plan, we wanted the marble to roll down the ramp, land in the shovel, and the shovel move downwards due to the weight of the ball. We started off with the shovel being an active ridged body, and that seemed to at least make the object move, but we could not get our constraint to work. We tried using a hinge constraint because the model only needed to tilt on the z axis and not anywhere else. Still, no matter how we tried, we could not get the model to move properly on the hinge and eventually, the hinge just stopped creating all together. So our solution to the problem was to just convert the model into a static ridged body and raise the bounciness levels so that the marble could continue flowing into the next prop.

Our final problem ended up in a big headache. Originally, the plans were to have a funnel that had a connecting spiraling ramp so the ball could make it safely to the ground. We had turned this model static, but whenever the simulation was made, the ball would end up being stuck through the geometry of tube connecting the funnel and spiral. We thought that maybe it was a geometry issue, so we sliced up the tube and separated both pieces. That way the ball would surely not get stuck. After importing the new models, we made them static and simulated again. For some reason, the ball still gets stuck in the middle of the ramp geometry. We tried everything that we could think of, but we still could not figure out why this was happening and how to fix it. You can see in the video where the marble stops with the simulation. We plan to as our professor upon turn it for an explanation of why this is happening and how to avoid this issue in the future.

Here is our video of the simulation.

Software Technology: Lecture Activities

These are the activities that we completed during lecture.

The soccer ball that we modeled was to simply get started understanding Houdini. We learned where the proper nodes were to bevel, extract, et cetera. 

With the coil, we made a tab system so that someone who is not familiar in Houdini can easily adjust the object. We added sliders to adjust the radius, height, coil density, and other attributes that anyone could possible need. 

The rocks helped us learn how to randomize multiple objects. We create 100 simple rocks then imported them into the Houdini scene. Using an expression, we created a random occurrence of rocks along a curve, including position and size.

With the cheese, we continued using the random expressions to not only create different positions along the grid, but so that each cheese has it's own unique set of holes.

Software Technology: Dominoes

For class we did a simulation using falling dominoes. We modeled and simulated the dominoes in Houdini. Overall, the project was pretty simple and able to easily complete. It helped to learn how to simulate in a low resolution model and then bake the animation in order to switch to a high res version.

Included here is the simulation and the node editor.

Software Technology: Panther Couch

Here is a couch that I modeled in Houdini. To me, the couch does not look very comfortable, but I tried to follow the reference as closely as possible. It was the first real model that we did outside of lecture, but I'm fairly happy with the overall result.

Here are images of the couch with wireframe on and off.

Software Technology: Fence

For the fence, I started in Soft Image. I modeled each piece individually in Soft Image, and then brought the pieces into Houdini. I had not run into any real issues until I tired to merge everything together at the end. For some reason, when I merged the objects, it acted as if the normals were flipped. I believe that this has something to do with the models themselves, not the process in Houdini, but I'm not entirely sure how to fix it.

October Classes

So this month I have Software Technology. We are supposed to be learning about programs that we haven't been exposed to so far. We should be focusing on Soft Image and Houdini. I'm a little nervous about dealing with new programs, but I'm very excited to get started!