Recreating Cameras and Lights in Maya

Actual image.

My attempt.

And at an angle.

I had so much trouble with this, but this is what I ended up with.

Creating Stereoscopic 3D Images

An attempt was made. 

Extra Credit: Lighting a Scene in Maya

Note: I actually wasn't sure if the objects still had to be on the floor for this one, though the shadows seem to be.  I liked these compositions better than the busy floor'd letters, so I'm taking a chance posting these instead.  The letters are on the floor in the previous lightless entry though!

Building a Scene in Maya

Special Effects in Animation and Live-Action

My first two term paper scores were 99 and 100; I will not be writing a third term paper.

Outline for the Third Term Paper

Visual Effect = Snow / small flurry / ice

Intro: Speak of distinctions of reality, entertainment based on belief, visual effects and techniques, narrow down to show + game and particular effect.

Show
* Live Action
* Name: Once Upon a Time
* Effects by Zoic Studios [link for reference]
* Snow and Ice effects
- only semi-believable
- computer generated (ZEUS program, compositing, etc)
- doesn't look entirely convincing, but follows general conventions for effects within the show.
- doesn't behave entirely true to how one might expect the effects to behave; though some instances are better than others
- often more the 'idea' or 'feel' of snow and ice than completely realistic and believable snow and ice


Video / Computer Game
* 'Animated'
* Name: Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
* Square Enix
* Snow and Ice effects
- somewhat more believable
- computer generated / animated
- I'd say overall more convincing than the live-action show because the time you see the effects isoften brief, but they are up to the same par as the rest of the visuals; thus it looks like it belongs in the world, instead of having a sort of physics of its own. (which often causes the disconnect with CG graphics; they don't fit seamlessly with live action footage)
- Realistic lighting in most cases
- Not 'taken out of the world' when the effects arise
- Contrasts to the slight disbelief that occurs when viewing these effects in Once Upon a Time

Conclusion: Re-summarize, close with statement about belief, subjective reality, and imagination.

Stop-Motion Character Animation

For this short stop-motion clip, I went about it the same way I did the previous one; using stuffed animals on the backdrop of my desk, and placing various small objects underneath them to help them stay in position.  Then I took a number of pictures of the still poses.  Remembering how much editing I had to do last time, I minimized the amount of times my hand would be in any shot as much as possible.  And finally, I combined all of them in Quicktime, adjusting for the timing I wanted.

I had figured out the scene before hand, and actually had a lot more I had wanted to do; I'd made some props I intended to use in addition to what's seen here and was planning to continue the 'story' from the previous stop motion, using the same characters and later introduce a third.  However, partway through the shooting, a medical issue I have resurfaced, and I had to stop and rest so I wouldn't lose consciousness.  After that, it was difficult to continue the duration I'd need to do all I'd planned out, so instead, I shot just a few more to finish the first scene, and used what I had gotten before I needed to stop. At the very least, left like this, it makes for an amusing loop.

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction.

Humans are known as a species for causing nature to change for them, instead of being defined by their surroundings.  Instead of using caves for shelter, we build homes.  Instead of letting the weather determine our temperatures, we simulate cool air with air conditioners when the outside swelters, or warm ourselves with heaters and flame while the outdoors are covered with frost.  At nearly every turn to defy, if there is a way, they seem to seek to attempt it sooner or later.  And if it isn’t physically possible, not something we can feel and create for all our senses, then we will simulate it for just a few with a different method.  Thus, so follows much of our entertainment, stretching and bending the rules of physics for a more dramatic, ‘beyond reality’ sort of feel.  Intentional or not, it seems to be incredibly pervasive in today’s entertainment media, be it in movies, the shows we watch on tv, or the games we play on various screens.  And though few rules have been left untouched as a whole by our defiance, one most often exploited is the Action-Reaction Principle, as well as laws of acceleration in relation to a force and the objects it affects.  Taking a couple television shows, the popular show Supernatural, the more tame Once Upon a Time, and the movie X-Men, a few isolated scenes can show these mentioned stretches of reality for the sake of entertainment.

                But first, let’s examine the Action-Reaction Principle itself.  The Principle states first, that for every action force there is an equal reaction force in the opposite direction.  So someone pushing on a wall will, of course, be pushing on the wall, but the wall will also be exerting a force back onto the person.  Furthermore, action and reaction forces always occur in pairs, and are always simultaneous (as with the wall and the person, the forces acting on each other were, together, a pair; and they also happened at the same time.)  Another important factor in this is the acceleration of the objects involved.  The magnitudes of the action and reaction forces are equal, but the resulting accelerations are usually not equal.  And by the Law of Acceleration, when objects or characters push apart, the heavier one will accelerate less than the lighter one.  This is to say that while acceleration isn’t the same as speed, it is the change in speed, or more specifically, the change in velocity towards the direction of an unbalanced force.  The net force, or the combined value of forces acting on an object, result in the acceleration, and is what is important in finding the acceleration of an object.  So with these few things in mind, that forces affect all objects involved, and that heavier objects accelerate more slowly but would need more force to move them, let’s look at these examples.

                The first instance we can look at with a number of unrealistic depictions of the Action-Reaction principle is the popular show Supernatural.  As its title suggests, it centers around supernatural phenomena that two brothers track down and attempt to stop from causing harm to humanity.  There is a particular number of fight scenes in which people get thrown across rooms or large spans with little effort on the part of the ‘thrower’, and once such case occurs in Season 9, Episode 23 of the show called ‘Do You Believe in Miracles’ at about 31 minutes and 7 seconds in.  One of the brothers, Dean, is attempting to stab one going by the name of Metatron who’s attempting to take over heaven and earth.  However, what looked like a simply block from what may have been a side swipe to the neck became a tossing of Dean through the air of what looked like more than 10 feet away and up high into the air.  Metatron, who did the tossing, didn’t seem to have much recoil from the block, nor follow-through afterward, standing simply, nevermind the amount of force it would take to toss someone after only catching their arm along that far and high.  It is physically impossible, especially with no visible force appearing to affect Metatron.  In this case, the title of the show speaks well for these actions, however, such a thing between two people would never be able to occur in the world as we know it now.

                The next show, Once Upon a Time is similarly of an otherworldly scenario, along with otherworldly physics.  The show itself is less violent, but not without its conflicts, and centers around fairy tales that have come to life in a place called Storybrooke, with the troubles and connections of the characters there trying to live together.  This particular scene, though, starts with some unfamiliar side characters.  There is an old sorcerer’s apprentice guarding some sort of box from someone called The Dark One.  The Dark One manages to get around the apprentice by pushing him back with magic (the apprentice flew through the air, though didn’t seem to accelerate fast enough for his mostly straight trajectory; that, or the arcs were wrong for the velocity), and gets to the box.  However, there seems to be a magical ward on the box that exerts an outward radiating force when the Dark One gets near.  Based on the Action Reaction Principle, even a very strong force would send the Dark One flying back perpendicular to where he attempted to get close to the box.  However, in this scene, not only does he fly up in the air at a rather slow acceleration, but flips backwards through the air 3 times in an incorrect arc spanning only about 14 feet.  There didn’t appear to be any additional force keeping him rotating through all that, other than the outward radiating force of the box, which only would have acted on him once when he was in proximity.  The box itself didn’t move at all, and the flying Dark One flipped far too much too slowly for the force acted on him.  This scene can be viewed at about 2 minutes in during episode 4, season 4 of the show.

                And the last example of strange physics mentioned here is from the movie X-Men (2000). Following the trend of the extraordinary, the film is about a new evolution in the human race, people who call themselves ‘mutants’ and seem to have a particular power of their own.  Though it appears that some of these powers allow them to defy physics, even when their powers aren’t at play, there are flawed mechanics around the Action-Reaction Principle.  Leading up to this scene, however, there seems to be one that is somewhat more believable; Logan has taken Rogue into his trailer, and they’re driving on the snowy road.  Just as Rogue mentions Logan should wear his seatbelt, and he brushes the comment off, a large tree falls in front of the car, causing it to crash while throwing Logan out the front window from the impact and his continued forward motion.  However, having the power of essential immortality and rapid regeneration, he quickly comes to despite his injuries to find the whole thing was an ambush from another mutant called Sabertooth.  From here, the physics get sketchy.  Sabertooth leaps from some ambiguous part of the forest, as though he would have landed on Logan.  However, the next scene shows him standing and seemingly hurling Logan about 20 feet away and 15 feet into the air, with little to no recoil or effort seen on his part.  This scene is about 19 minutes and 30 seconds into the movie.  For it to at least be a bit more believable, Sabertooth would have had to throw his weight into the toss more, he wouldn’t be standing straight and stiff with feet shoulder-width apart, and most likely instead would have used his feet and the ground to give him additional force for the maneuver.  Even then, the way Logan flies hardly fits what the toss would’ve had to be.  Overall, powers or no, the entire scene is very contrived.

                In conclusion, it seems very clear that people often find ways to bend physics in their entertainment if they couldn’t otherwise do it themselves, as is proven at least once in the shows Supernatural and Once Upon a Time, as well as the movie X-Men.  Though, really, it doesn’t stop there, but it would seem that to emphasize just how strong, powerful, or otherwise ‘unnatural’ something is, one often resorts to using these inaccurate means.  Certainly, it could be done better and more accurately; and despite attempts to defy nature at every turn, it seems that not all methods have been mastered yet. 

Outline for the Second Term Paper

* Action-Reaction Principle and laws of acceleration Violated (particularly in fight scenes, where people go flying)

* Once Upon a Time
- scene where the previous Dark One flips through the air like three times and then lands
- not true to action-reaction principle at all
- arcs wrong
- acceleration wrong.

* Supernatural
- Fight scene with Dean vs. man who wants revenge on him, where single punches from Dean send the man flying.
- Also not true to action-reaction principle.
- acceleration is wrong.
- recoil is near non-existent.

* X Men movie
- Sabertooth's both attacks that send wolverine flying, and his 'leaps' are entirely exagerated.
- not true to the action-reaction principle.
- arcs are wrong
- acceleration is also wrong.
- minimal 'recoil' as well.

Reverse Video Reference

Ref A

Ref B

Ref C

Ref D

Stop Motion Animation of Falling.

When creating this little short, I briefly planned out the idea before actually getting to it.  I used a tripod to shoot a number of photos, and had the stuffed animals laying down on a desk.  The sphere actually has a hidden stand underneath it, since just setting it on the desk would have it rolling all over the place.  From there, I edited out my hand (which often held the Mew (aka the pink animal) in position ) with a photoshop equivalent program called SAI, and touched up the few shots where the 'sphere stand' was showing.  Then I resized all the images to some much more manageable dimensions, and put them all together in Quicktime, where I shifted around frames and framerate to make the timing a bit better.  The more believable motion is at the beginning, whereas the ending toss was just mostly meant to be silly.

The Laws of Physics in an Animation Universe.

                           Imagine you are tasked with creating an entire world.  How would you even begin?  Well, those of some ‘sharp wit’ might simply say ‘the beginning’; what’s there, what’s real.  There are many ideas we hold that bind our notions of ‘solid reality’ together which we often forget to notice.  Over time as we grow, what we see everywhere, every day, simply becomes the way ‘it is’, and we hardly question the reasons behind why it is.  Incidentally, physics and the dynamics of how things move through the space we inhabit are some of those things – and very important ones at that.  They are certainly components that, while not necessarily considered first and foremost, once they’ve become realized factors, would be pivotal necessities in creating a world of your own devising.  How else would anyone move themselves, move anything, what would happen if those moved things collided?  What is possible in such a world and what would break its natural laws?  As you ponder your own world creation, these questions are also exactly the sort of thoughts that creators in gaming must grapple with, as they create worlds of their own for either one, or many people to experience.   Suffice to say that looking at such a game might, not only prove how much physics plays a role in these worlds, but just how very different a world can be from what we take as ‘real’ when physical rules are stretched. 

                A particular game we can analyze would be one by the name of Guild Wars 2, a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) which is played on a PC, and created by the company Arenanet.  The world itself, named Tyria, is certainly not the same as the Earth we know; and beyond all the strange races of beings, flora, and magic one might encounter, the physics are quite notably stretched beyond comparison to our known reality.  

                One example of such reality-stretching is found in the dynamics of jumping within the game itself.  Consider a moment, just how much you jump places in your own life.  Unless you are quite into parkour or prolific at dunking in basketball, it might seem like almost a laughable thought.  However, in Tyria, this is certainly not the case; for in many scenarios, incredibly long leaps across cliffs, platforms, or terrain is an absolute must, it seems, breaking laws of Earth-known physics in the process.  Some structures are even built with these gravity defying leaps in mind; imagine having to jump up every stair to get to work instead of walking when the stairs are hovering in the air, approximately 3 feet apart, and 4 feet elevated above the previous one.  It’s ridiculous when compared to what we know!  But it doesn’t stop there. 

                The game introduces something called ‘Jumping Puzzles’, in which it takes complete knowledge of the absolutely ridiculous physics of the game (atop player’s wishes to climb and jump up every strange thing they can find due to that desire) and makes the ordeal into a challenge, stretching perception even further.  These Jumping Puzzles literally have characters climbing up odd buildings, mountains, trees, volcanoes, and jumping between floating boulders, geyser lifted stones, vanishing force fields, tree branches, tiny ledges they can barely fit on, and just about anything else to reach a particular destination for a prize.  You don’t know how to do it or how to get there, you simply try to push the physics of the game until you succeed.  And despite it being possible, it’s quite easy to miss the mark.

                Which then brings us to falling dynamics.  Or more eloquently put, the effects of gravity on the world or other characters.  Even though everything still seems fairly rooted to the ground, forces themselves, (especially those considered when falling) seem to have been skewed.  Characters will take ‘falling damage’ in distinguished percentages; no matter your stature, armor, or anything else, the damage you take from a fall is calculated by how high up you’ve fallen from, and the same for all across the board, - the only way you take no damage at all is if you fall into water.  However, damage to your person is simply knocked off from your ‘health’, and recoverable in mere seconds (as long as it doesn’t kill you), which certainly isn’t comparable to the broken bones and who knows what else you might be left with should you jump off a castle roof in Earth’s reality.  By these things one might think that, perhaps the gravity in Tyria is much less of a force than it is on Earth, though there are other inconsistencies that conflict with this thought.

                Beyond mere jumping and falling, should gravity be lessened, how much force it takes to move certain objects should also be affected.  Though actually being able to interact with and apply force to objects in the game is very hit or miss.  On the one hand, certain heavy things like boulders and various other items can be picked up and thrown great distances, which would follow along with the ‘lessened gravity’ thought.  And yet, pulling out a chair (or even moving one at all) seems to be impossible.  Objects you think would be able to be pushed cannot be moved in the least, and in many cases they can only be destroyed.  But from there, it only gets stranger, as certain forces in Tyria seem to be able to accomplish feats they never could on Earth.  Such as felling stone-keep walls in minutes by, quite literally, hitting them enough times with a sword.  Or that one is capable of exploding entire homes by sending trained animals to bite at the foundations. 

                There have been some attempts to preserve physics as we know it, though they all fall a bit short.  At the very least some sense of gravity is in place, even if it is hard to believe in some cases.  Some objects seem to be affected by inertia and exhibit ‘follow through’ and ‘drag’ like moving hair, or clothing, however it is selective and not as universal as a natural law might have you think it should be.   And though there are attempts to create water resistance and allow for swimming complete with deep sea struggles, the moving speed of someone swimming verses running is actually faster in water than on land.  In Tyria, you’d make it somewhere quicker swimming upstream than you would dashing on foot.

                Though despite all that, it was all part of what the creators of the world seemed to intend.  At least by way of the Jumping Puzzles, the developers knew the limits of the physics in the world, and utilized them, to make the world they were creating interesting.  It is in challenging the dynamics they’ve created and the rules they’ve made that characters in the world can get a prize.  And knowing those limits has quite an impact on how someone might play this game.  While the physics of Tyria is little like the physics of Earth in many ways, or potentially little like other worlds that may be devised, they still have certainly been considered important.  

               

                

Analysis of Physics in Guild Wars 2 - Term Paper Outline

Introduction

A. Guild Wars 2, MMORPG (online multiplayer video game)
B. Thesis:  In Guild Wars 2, physics as we know it is bent beyond what occurs naturally in our world.

Body Paragraphs

1.  Jump Dynamics in the game are skewed.
   - 'Jumping Puzzles' exist in which characters leap up unreasonable heights and scale unreal distances.
   - 'Fall damage' is greatly reduced from what would occur in our reality to allow more game-play freedom.
   - Falling Loops and unreal paths of action are present, in which a character falls into an abyss like hole, only to find themselves appear on a ledge at or near where they fell from it.
   
2.  Unstable Forces do not behave predictably.
   - Characters are mostly unable to push or pull objects in space.
   - However, in order to accomplish some feats (such as getting into a building through a wall side) applying a normally ineffective sort of force allows for unreal results (such as hitting a stone-castle wall enough times with a sword being enough to topple the entire wall within minutes.)
   
3.  There are some attempts at more 'realistic' physics (instances of gravity and inertia / follow-through ) however, they are ultimately sporadic.
   - Gravity in place, but not across the board.
   - Follow- through on some items, hair, and armor, but not all objects in all cases.
   - Attempt at believable underwater resistance, however, underwater travel (just swimming alone) appears to be much quicker than running with no explanation.

Conclusion

- Physics in Guild Wars 2 is bent to make what normally wouldn't be plausible in our world, common-place in the non-earth setting.
- It is done to create a more fun and interesting game, set out of our world, where tasks not normally possible are now something that can be achieved for fun, accomplishment, and entertainment.

Shooting Video Reference

Mini-Portfolio

Greetings~  My name is Dasair Glaspie, I am currently a student at San Jose State University, and my majors, Philosophy and Animation / Illustration, exemplify a selection of my interests.  I most enjoy character design and exploring the dynamics of world-building in my work, both written and drawn, with the digital side of things being my preferred medium.  While I have a greater inclination for illustration, movement and energy have always been interests of mine, especially in figuring out just how to capture it in a drawing.  

 This is some personal work of mine, a character of my own devising named Xsaiav'lairnn Mystrif.  His name is completely ridiculous, though it suits him, being a fanatic for puzzles and riddles; he quite enjoys seeing people lost or confused, and won't pass up a chance to get them there.

This is a digital still-life painting of a book, a desk, and a sphere.  It helped me focus on edges, shadows, and graphic composition of real objects.   

This was actually a spread for a zine done in ANI 116 called The Void.  The theme of the book was 'The Call of the Void', which is the phrase for these strange, intrusive thoughts one might get suddenly, yet are typically ignored.  An example of such a thought might be standing up on something quite high, and wondering what it would be like to jump, yet never quite taking that leap.  My image was based on the concept of unknown consequences and untaken risks that continue to hold on to people to asking 'what if?'

A Raiju character created for the ANI 117B class in concept art.  The Raiju is a creature in japanese mythology that is supposed to be made of or connected to lightning, that jumps around trees and buildings, excited by a storm.

This is my final 115 animation, called Your Number is Up.  In it, an older fellow is getting ready for a night out to a Bingo game, but instead gets an unexpected visitor. . .

The First Post

So this is it, this is the post.  The first among many, in which things will likely happen and knowledge will be gained.

Let it be hoped that the sheer bleakness of its sparse words are enough to appease the few or many knowledge gods, and their lesser homework familiars.