FXWars! Catapult! (Trebuchet) : Derby-Q Salano

#61

Derby-Q you can add as many bell and wistles as you want, as long as you have a Trebuchet animation at its core.

-R

#62

Wow, Derby-Q Salano is on a roll again.
Extremely nice work, as usual!

Too bad your qualities don’t get the chances they diserve!
(I know, we live in the same country)

Maybe you could start a Pixar office overhere? :thumbsup:

#63

Great final anim posted ! There was a mention or 2 of “underwater wires” but as soon as I saw the anim , I thought “wow , monster Treb!” . To me it looks more like a rotoscoped video of a very large Treb ( A.K.A. … very very convincing) .

If I were you , I wouldn’t touch a thing … it’s really amazing . That freakin’ huge counterweight comes to , almost , a complete halt after letting the missle release . To me , that means it is so well designed that all energy is transfered to the projectile , and little is left for the counterbalance to slowly degrade .

The whole feel is tremendous and to me , flawless . I won’t comment on potential ranking etc , but I must say I am very very impressed with the way the mass of this device is conveyed so accurately . I think a person really get’s a good feel for what these incredible battle machines must have looked like , even from our technically advanced perspective . I can’t even imagine what people of those times must have thought when they first saw a very large Trebuchet fire a heavy stone .

Excellent job & Congrad’s on really nailing a very difficult challenge .
Studio

#64

i have a question about dynamic curves in maya. i work with maya 5 is it possible or do you have to have maya 6 for this type of thing?

#65

studio: thank a bunch

MrWyatt: Dynamic curves is a feature in Maya 6 only, but you can get the same result when you make cubes, connected to eachother with pin constraints as a chain.

#66

Time for some goodies, the Worker Generator works like a charm, using reference which is a nice feature, I must admit.

Here’s some action on a treb that’s loaded and being prepped for action, this one will be placed next to the one that’s dynamic… I hope my pc will be able to get through the data of a scene which will be 4 times as heavy as this one and this one is getting rather heavy… Och well…

#67

Whoa!

That looks awesome! This one is going to be the best by far!

Great job man.

#68

Your computer going to choke from calculation time or from geometry data? Your trebuchet doesn’t look all that heavy so I can’t imagine it could be that. Your little dudes are also low-poly and even if you have them smooth at rendertime, it still looks like it should be fine! I wouldn’t sweat it unless you’ve got only like 512megs of ram or less. You can always render in layers as well. If it’s calc time you’re worried about, just remember to cache everything as you go along.

I can’t view the file here at work but I’ll look forward to seeing this latest update when I get home.

#69

Neat , plus now we can see the actual size of this big Treb ! Funny , but it’s just about exactly the size I had pictured it , and I got that impression just by the way your ropes moved , and the speed at which the treb arm moved , so once again , way to go on getting it right !

Studio

#70

umm…
thats insane
mind letting me in on how you created those wires… do they maintain volume (i think envelope is what the feature is called? maybe not…) or do they just deform with whatever they are attached to? I know of a method (using spring/hinge constraints on rigid body’s constrainted to clusters of UV’s on a curve that wire deforms a cylinder) but I’m curious about yours…

thanks, keep up the sweet work!

#71

Thanks guys,

Rabbit: the dynamic data is very light, I play the animation at about 12 fps, which is not bad for a simulation this size. Polygonal data is pretty low indeed, although, you could check out one of my early wire shots and find that the rear part of the treb is pretty dense… anyway, textures is what makes it so heavy in the first place, I think one treb has about 9 textures of 1k1k and 2k2k, the workers too have pretty high texture resolutions, not THAT big though, but also about 9 1k textures. Still it works pretty good, by card can still work that. Then we got deformations, I got skins and 15 blendshapes on every single character, which makes a character 16 times as dense, because of the shape data of a blendshape… it takes about 21 seconds to load the scene… The scene where I’m gonna put everything in, has this HUGE ground texture, we’re talking about a throw distance of 750 meters, so I need a plane at least that large. First I drew a ground texture for the entire ground on a 4k by 4k texture… but… when I render this out from the point of view of a human near the treb, I’m standing on one pixel the size of ping pong table. Then I used layered shaders to add a more detailed texture on just a portion of the ground plane of 4k*4k. The result was better, but still tere’s huge pixels underneath my feet… I added another 4k by 4k texture right where I am rendering, and that works just fine… In the end, about 30 characters, 3 giant trebs, maybe some birds, some painteffects and a hell of a lot of geometry like rocks and branches… I was even planning on using fur for grass, but with finalGather that would be suicide…

Gremlin: Read through the posts in this thread, I posted that before, I used cube to cube pin chains for the wires that need to be the base for other dynamics, such as the pulley and the rock. I used dynamic curves for the other wires. (Great avatar btw)

#72

Even More Goodies.

I needed a treb that’s being build… I was thinking about how they would get the huge arm and weight 12m high, to secure it there… I build a frame around the construction site and made some more wire work… then I figured, lots of people were needed to lift a thing like that… so I created 4 wires, with 4 people on a wire… it took me about 2 hours to animate the variations in the pullers… left right… then I wrote some more scripts to automate the clip importing and in the end it took me another 20 minutes to make 16 workers who were allready pulling… The scene loads in 2’40"… well here’s another playblast:

The rope is a little too static I think, but hey

[[img]http://www.ronin3D.net/CGI_Files/Trebuchet/Build_Treb.avi[/img]](http://www.ronin3D.net/CGI_Files/Trebuchet/Build_Treb.avi)[[img]http://www.ronin3D.net/CGI_Files/Trebuchet/Build_Thumb.jpg[/img]](http://www.ronin3D.net/CGI_Files/Trebuchet/Build_Treb.avi)[](http://www.ronin3d.net/CGI_Files/Trebuchet/Build_Treb.avi)
#73

did you do the cables like this?
http://www.visualart.ro/tutorials/cablu/cablu.htm
thats the method I know how, but when you say dynamic curve… you mean converting it to a Maya 6 hair dynamic curve yes? how are you implementing both techniques… also, your ropes dont self collide or collide with anything else do they?

#74

Hey Derby, checked out the latest. You’re crazy man! Absolutely nuts. Your guys pulling the cable is all wrong though. They would all pull together, they would have some sort of task master yelling “HEAVE!..HEAVE!..HEAVE!” etc. I’d recommend animating one clip, then altering it slightly so there is some variation, maybe just 3 or 5 subtly different clips, then apply them to the characters so they’re heaving together. This would be much more realistic. Also, you can fix the staticness of your ropes super easily. Just make the ends of the ropes softbodies with collisions. Making the actual cylinder a softbody would look whack but if you’ve extruded a circle along a path, then you could make the end of the path a softbody and the rope would maintain volume.

Looking good! I’m going to try to catch up some more this weekend and post some real dynamic tests. I started playing a little bit with destroying the wall a couple days ago. I will be very interested to see how you implement it in yours.

#75

Cables made up with constraints, indeed somewhat like the tut you showed, en dynamic curves are solved seperatelly, so it’s prefectly possible to integrate the both. I know I should let the workers pull at the same time, I tried that, but it looks horrible, I think I would at least need 5 animations, which is 20 hours work instead of the 1.5 hours I spend on it now, in a few days the challenge is over and I don’t want it to drown in my extra detail… talking about extra detail, here’s my knight, 5000 polies, 2 textures, 1k and 2k…Don’t like the yellow on it too much, and the shinyness might be too shiny… but when a force, which is french I noticed from the marks on the armor, can afford to take over a stupid brick wall with 3 gigantic trebs, they surely can afford to shine their armor :)…

Wanted to do a cloak as well, but that’s gonna be overdone I think… Dunno, maybe it’s just this one knight… then it might be possible…

#76

Some VERY fine modeling and texturing again, friend Derby-Q Salano.

bows deeply

Keep it up!
Good luck finishing the challenge.

#77

Thanks man… an update in the morning, now onto setup and animation, I used a very light cloth for the cloak. I feel it solves that lack of contrast…

#78

Dude,

That’s some fast modeling! Keep up the great job!

#79

You, my friend, are insane. :eek: I mean that in a good way, though. Talk about going above and beyond! :applause:

#80

Beautifull work there Derby, utmost respect.
Im sure one day the school will get there as well. Youre good one your way to become one of the future well known names in the industry if you continue like this.
Although Belgium doesn`t have any professional 3d education, it sure has some very talented people :slight_smile:
Maybe one day we’ll work together as teachers or as artists :slight_smile: - or both

Ciao,
Peter

  • Although I really don`t have time for these challenges at the moment, I’m looking forward for the others involving dynamics.
  • this will also be excellent teaching material for the advanced class :wink: if you want to use it for that purpose that is.