Hats

Tuesday, 28th April 2009

My latest project is a short animation of some spinning hats. I’ve been working with dynamics, ncloth and hair in Maya to process the spinning motion of the fez and mortarboard, both of which have tassles that need to react to inertia and gravity. It’s been quite a learning curve, and the steepest part of that is remembering the order in which to select and assign attributes to objects. It seems impossible, for instance, to assign hair to a polygonal mesh and then make that mesh an ncloth. You have to do it the other way round. Making objects spin has also been more difficult than you’d expect. I had anticipated that if I animated each hat spinning on it’s own pivot point that I’d run into trouble after just a couple of rotations - Maya doesn’t like animating this method and seems to get a bit wound up, as do the objects. So I’ve constrained each hat to a locator using an aim constraint, and each locator is orbiting a nurbs circle motion path. A few more hats to model and then I’ll start texturing. Such fun!