Modelling process:
-Create the glass tubes with the connector hoops
-To make the bent ones, use the bend deformer and subdivide the initial shape
Initially I intended to simulate the ball rolling through the pipe, so I turned the pipe into one mesh, selected static mesh to ensure that the mesh would be hollow, and add in a rigid body ball.
I rotated it so that gravity would be on my side and tried to simulate it. Even though it doesn’t look like it, somehow the ball was colliding with the pipe and getting stuck. I often have this issue with collision physics, and I couldn’t find a way to simulate it properly so I decided to use the align to spline tool and create my own spline through the centre of the pipe. This worked really well once I changed the spline mode to uniform rather than adaptive, to make sure the points were evenly spaced, if they aren’t, then the motion is not smooth.
I then grouped the piece, and duplicated it to fill the scene. Then I used the animate menu to loop the before and after so that each piece would loop forever. Once this was done I was able to stagger them without causing any looping issues. Finally, I changed the pacing and experimented with the lighting until I got what I liked, and sent it for export. It looks really nice with global illumination on however it makes each frame take around 2 minutes even with a low sample size, so at the moment it isn’t really an option.
I think the speed that they move is still a bit faster than I would prefer, but I like how this has turned out. Of course, for the final render I will up the samples significantly, but I really like the composition, colours and concept. Upping the samples will take significantly longer in the render, but I am planning on setting one of the Uni computers up to render overnight, so speed doesn’t really matter.
Initially for this I wanted to use a soft body number 7 and have it inflate however I was having issues with it holding its shape, and when I added a subdivision surface, it modified the shape of the number. Eventually I found that I actually like the more subdividied shape and I stayed with this. My computer was struggling to render the softbody simulation so I tried rigid body and I think it looks quite cool.
Again I have rendered it with low samples to get a good preview. I’m not 100% happy with this final output, I think I would like to increase the air density of the project to give more resistance, and give a more dream-like effect. There are also a few issues with the meshes that I need to iron out.
Jennie Hawkes 