Just a fun little image that happened when looking at a shot from the wrong camera angle. Polishing off an annoying shot (stacking dependencies of hands/paper/cockroach is not terribly fun, though the results can be)

Been making some extra crumpled paper for one of the trickier shots in the movie, and thought the method was amusing enough to post here.

• create a rectangular paper grid, and triangulate it.
• make a slightly bent shape and pin it.
• create a ground plane, with collisions turned on
• add a softbody modifier, rotate the grid, position it above the ground
• hit alt-a, let softbody do it’s magic
• apply the modifier as shape
• create new, successively folded shapes by repeating the previous 3 steps
• sculpt your softbody shapes to perfection
• uv unwrap
• split out each shape into a mesh of it’s own
• create edge creases, merge quads, etc.
• add subsurf/other modifiers as needed

I just polished up a longstanding todo item from animators: Make the controls easier to distinguish/select.

A bit of history: My old blender rigs used controls that spanned each finger, that scaled up or down to curl it, and rotated to rotate it. I used IK, which meant the tip of the control always aligned with the tip of the finger- but it had limited reverse-curl, and no tweaks. For Big Buck Bunny, Nathan Vegdahl took the idea, but changed the implementation to action-constraints, solving both problems but creating another ( controls no longer align with the fingers – hard to select). I’ve taken that same setup for Gilga, and animators instantly complained about the difficult selection.
My solution was to color each finger uniquely (duh!) and to make the controls themselves deform matching the fingers, that way, they stay completely aligned with them. Short Demo video below:

BREAKING NEWS! Chris Monson and teldredge posted working versions!( bdancer also, but the link didn’t work ) Thanks to all of you, send me your name as you would like it to appear in credits. Thanks to everyone else with help and suggestions.

Hey folks. a while back Josh Wedlake wrote a script for autowalking, which we would need to put together crowd scenes of cockroaches in the subway. The time has come where we’re actually doing the animation parts, but unfortunately, massive changes to the API have rendered the script non-functional. Josh is currently deep into his graduation animation project, and I’m swamped with many tasks, rendering the time for understanding and fixing the script out of my reach for the moment.
Tal came up with the idea of putting out a public call instead of a in-list internal one, since the script is pretty self-contained. Most of the incompatibilities stem from changes to mathutils. I’ve made a stab at fixing things, but there’s a lot left, and it’s possible I’ve done the wrong thing, since I don’t fully understand his code 😉 so script still doesn’t work. If you’re game download the .blend and give it a go! as a bonus, you’ll get a (mostly) walking (get it?) autowalker, and your name in the credits. Download here.