M A D E L I N E P I T T M A N
A N I M A T I O N
P E T A L S
PROGRESS:
In total, my miscellaneous animations are the swaying of the flower, the cherries unfolding after the petals, the caramel dripping, and the sprinkles. Since the petals drive a lot of the other animations, I focused on that first before I fully animated anything else. I started by animating one object at a time, and making my mistakes with the single object by itself, before utilizing the same workflow on the rest of the copied elements, like the cherries and petals. The caramel was my first forray into flip fluids in Houdini, and after a short tutorial from Eric Anderson and several hours of reading online and playing with parameters, I was able to get it working the way I wanted it to.
When I began working with the particles for shot 10, I had some problems with the metaballs simply because I've never used them before. I knew it was a level of detail issue, and got some help with the workflow which fixed the issues I had. Also, the particles were exactly the same at first, only copied across from each other. Developing the swirl motion and differentiating the two separate simulations was a long process where I tried several different methods of directing the particles, and, though it could still use some improvement, I finally settled on a motion that I was happy with. I originally wanted the particles to change into the color of the cone to tie in to the closeup of the ice cream flower, but the color change ended up just looking confusing. With the help of the class and Professor Stallworth, we decided that showing the vague form of the full flower and partially fading in a version of the textured flower would do a better job at providing a transition between shots.
PROGRESS:
I initially created the petal animation by pulling points to make keyframes, which turned out to be a more precise solution, but also more time consuming. I tried out lattice next, which helped maintain the petal shape much better, but was ultimately ineffective for the amout of detail required for such a close-up animation. The next step for me was to combine the two methods together. That way, I could maintain both the petal shape and the ability to edit the finer details. Doing so improved the petal movement significantly, making it more fluid and adhering better to my video references.