Jedrik Eliasen - Personal Journal

Finals Week

Tuesday
I spent today tweaking the camera on the credit scene for Cara. I then finished off this journal and the documentation.

Monday
Spent about 4 hours finishing up my scene for the credits. I wasn't able to include the 2 explosion scene in the animation, it never came to fruition, but I was determined to get the rag doll guy being flung out of the catapult working. The problem was that I was trying to keyframe the first 10 frames or so (the catapult arm being flung), and then have the rest of scene done procedurally using the SetUsUpTheBomb script to explode the guy once the catapult reached the end of its motion. But the procedural stuff was being activated at the first frame, though I thought I had keyframed it not to. What I wound up doing was creating one scene with the first 10 frames keyframed, and then playblasting another scene using the procedural elements. I then open a third blank scene and imported the two files and timed the motion of the 2 scenes so that the first blends nicely into the 2nd.

Week 10

Sunday
Tim and I got together to work on the sound. Luckily we had already done a lot of research on the sound effects for the animatics, so we didn't need to go hunting for them. All in all it was a painless, fun effort. Tim know Premier very well, so he handled the splicing and putting everything together. I think the team effort really paid off well.

Thursday
Spent another hour or so at ACCAD trying to get those scenes to work. She wants everything by tomorrow so I have to get it done.

Wednesday
Spent about 3 hours at ACCAD trying to get a scene working with 2 explosions. Unfortunately it has not come about very successfully. I just hope I am able to get the scenes done in time for Cara to incorporate them into the animation. I have also started on a scene where a paper guy gets flung from a catapult.

Monday
After the group meeting, Mike showed Eric and I how to use the new SetUsUpTheBomb script that he had written to generate and explosive force on the rigid body guys. I spent the next hour or so fooling around with different scenes.

Week 9

Thursday
I spent the early part of the day finishing up some last minute keyframing that needed to be done. Later on, Mike and I spent about 10 hours at ACCAD getting the code that he had written for the rigid body dynamics to work in MEL. For some reason, Maya does not like the sphere_sphere_collision plug-in in the rag doll scene. It always says that it cannot find the plug-in. Maya also doesn't like to include more than 5 other plug-ins, luckily we only needed 5 of the 7 that I had made. At the end of the night were able to his code working and were able to render out two short animations that demostrate the rag doll physics for tomorrow's presentation.

Wednesday
Spent the early afternoon finishing up the keyframing for the last scene. At 6 or so I met with Eric and Mike to finish up the last
2 functions (the functions that actually calculates and updates the physics) that need to be transposed to Maya and to start testing
with models. We had to split up the functions into a function that updates the linear velocity and angular velocity. So far all of
the testing has been on spheres and planes. We were able to finish up the sphere-sphere collision physics and all the remains is to
tweak the plane-sphere collision physics and we should be good to finish up the scene. It shouldn't take to long because we merely need
to copy and paste and then update for planes.

Tuesday
I spent most of the day finishing up the collision class' plugin. We are now able to do sphere-plane in addition to sphere-sphere.
collision test.

Monday
Today I was to get the sphere-sphere collision test to work. When two spheres are approaching each other, Maya will now be able to tell
if the sphere are overlapping, touching, or if they are not in any relation to each other.

Week 8*

Sunday
I was able to get the sphere-sphere collision to report back to Maya if two spheres had interesected or not. If the spheres intersect, then a bool is set to true and returned. It's quite a pain that only one value can be returned per command, because lots of the functions pass parameters by reference. I'm going to have to talk with Mike and Eric and see if there is a way that we can split the functions up somehow.

* I tried to write my journal entries for this week on Monday of Week 9. I soon realized that I was so burned out from Week 8's work that I could not remember what I had done. That week has literally been lost from my memory, though I know that I worked everday that for several hours.

Week 7

Friday
Today the group had a presentation which went very well. Everything seems to be coming together quite nicely. I worked at ACCAD from after
class to about 3 AM. Most of this time was spent trying to integrate the phyiscs classes Eric had written with the API. At first I tried to use
follow the example that Brent had done online, but I didn't know how to create a .cpp file nor did I know how to call or even use the plugin within
Maya: Brent's power point presentation simply went over Visual Studio C++ project creation. Since I didn't know how to create the .cpp I tried
to use the Plug-In Wizard, but this didn't work because I kept getting an error that I could not fix every time I tried to compile the wizard-created
project. Eventually I created the project using Brent's example and then took the .cpp file created from the Wizard as my starting point. I then had
to turn to the book to figure out how to call the plugin from within MEL. I have made good progress so far and have been able to call functions
written in the API from within MEL and have them work. Now I am tyring to integrate the C++ classes that Eric wrote and MEL, but I keep
getting a linking error. I'll try more tomorrow.

Thursday
Several people from the group got together at ACCAD. Got the "Complete Maya Programming" by David Gould form Eric while I was there.
I read sections 4.2-4.4.

Wednesday
Got an email from Cara. She said that I could animate the last series of keyframed scenes (the last hero battle, Click here: Scene E). I would like to
have those worked on (at least some preliminary animation) by next weekend sometime.

Tuesday
Updates all of the content to the site and added a presentation link. Eric has sent me the information pertaining to the collision detection examples
from the code that we have written.

Monday
At the group meeting Tonight night I received the honor of figuring out the Maya API. Eric said that he has got it working, now it is up to me to
figure out exactly how to pass information to and from the C++ classes to Maya. If the API doesn't work, though, it's not the end of the world.
We can simply write all of the information that the C++ classes creates to a file and then parse the file contents into Maya.

Week 6

Friday
Cara showed me the file setup for the keyframed animations. We also reviewed the controls for keyframe animation.
After Cara left, I updated the rest of the site and organized and renamed files.

Week 5

Friday
Kevin and I completed the site and emailed it out to the rest of the group. It still has a lot of work in that we need to get content from everyone.
Everyone is responsible for their respective documentation. So if a group (ie, flocking, collision, etc.) does not have it then it falls upon them to
write it.

Thursday
Cara and I met in the morning and we spent a couple of hours redoing the animatic. I originally had done it in
Kevin and I started to overhaul the page. I looked around for some textures online that would fit our theme I think the simplicity of the design works
well. After I met with Kevin I went to the computer lab and met with Eric. We wrote out the rest of the code. Eric, since he is also in the rigid body
dynamics group, took the code and is going to now use it in his implementation of the rigid body classes.

Wednesday
Eric and I met and wrote up the headers to the classes.

Monday
We had our 2nd presentation today, and I learned a lot more Maria about animatics. I plan to meet with Cara later on this week to polish it up.
Eric and I met in the evening and we created the module for the collision detection classes. We discussed which algorithm would be the easiest to
implement yet still allow us the power that we needed in a collision detection system. We envision a system in which we check for cube/cube, sphere/cube,
and sphere/sphere intersection.

Week 4

Since we are required to do a 2D animatic for the next presentation, I volunteered to do it, since I one of my goals in this class is to be more involved
in other aspects of animation. I spent several hours on Sunday doing it, but for some reason After Effects in the art lab (in Hopkins) will not let me render
a movie into any other format than avi. I finished up the paper for class and have continued to do my reading on collision detection. Most of the research that I have done has come through looking at rigid body dynamics and how collision is done through them.