Exhaustion (3)

"Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of the hard work you already did."

- Newt Gingrich

It's been quite the week, guys. On top of the generic school and homework deal, it was the week before districts!

Which reminds me: along with all of that school work, we had final preparations before our first FRC competition of the season (shoutout to Hatboro-Horsham and the 35 other teams who showed up to compete). This is some tiring stuff, I'll tell you that. It's only been one day of competition so far, and it's already been exhilarating enough to keep the team on the edge of their seats...literally. I mean we were screaming our faces off, with chants and cheers, as well as a little more...emphasized shouting, I should say (*cough* *cough* telling the players on the field what they were missing).

Any who, somehow along the way, I was actually able to fit in a little bit of animation this week. I focused on Soft body Dynamics, meaning I created some entities and had them interact with each other. You can see in this video that they sort of molded to fit around one another, hence the "Soft" in Soft Body Dynamics.

They look like bubbly plastic balloons, don't they?

To create this animation, I worked with a few other aspects of C4D. For instance, to get these bubbly blobs to move around in the center, I essentially turned down gravity in the animation and turned up turbulence, allowing them to stay afloat while moving around as if there was a wind-like force pushing them.

I also worked with some other feature of C4D that I've never touched before. To keep these inflated balls contained, I created a box around them, and spent a lot of time generating different sized balls and constraining them inside the box. Then, after setting up my camera angle, I was able to have the balls contained in the frame. This also helped create more interactions, for I made the balls soft-bodies (i.e. able to be manipulated) and I made the box a rigid body (i.e. a non-transforming wall).

As of right now, it is 10:30 at night. I have another full day of competition tomorrow, so I'm going to cut it off right there. Enjoy your weekend everyone, and don't forget to root for Miss Daisy 341!

Please mention in the comments any questions you might have, random comments that come to mind, or simply ideas of what you would like to see on this blog.