Latest Kubo Trailer

The latest trailer for Kubo and the Two Strings! Check it out...

Flesh Simulation Continued...

Continuing to refine the flesh/fatty tissue simulation using a new body type. This setup is now completely reusable, I only need to provide an animated interior and exterior mesh (boundary edges need to be coincident). There are only a couple of parameters that need to be tweaked to adjust the volume behavior. I'm getting closer to a result I like, particularly for the upper legs. This technique has the added advantage of fixing bad skinning...notice the hips and crotch area.

Next step is to try and bundle this up as digital asset and get in running inside Maya using Houdini Engine.

Houdini FEM Flesh Simulation pt2 from Grant Laker on Vimeo.

Flesh Simulation - aka Look at that Blubber Fly!

Playing around with the finite element solver in Houdini to simulate fatty tissue. Original animation is the red mesh, simulated result is in blue and a scaled difference visualization (xyz/rgb) in the middle. The second half of the video shows the internal thickness of the flesh volume.

It's a bit too isolated and springy right now. Next steps will be to refine the flesh thickness and overall solver damping.

Houdini FEM Flesh Simulation from Grant Laker on Vimeo.

Its always best to work from good reference...

Herd Rig Test

Herd Rig Test
Software: Maya 2009

A basic range of motion and deformation test for a creature rig from an in-house short I worked on at LAIKA in 2009. The main creature mesh is deformed using surfaceSkin, a Maya deformer plugin I was developing at the time.

Creeper Rig Test

Here is a little example of the surfaceSkin deformer at work. SurfaceSkin is a multi-influence, nurbs surface (and optionally transform) driven deformer I developed few years back at LAIKA.
The skin slide and jiggle is achieved by converting the underlying influence surfaces to softbodies, and then generating a wireframe of springs between the particles. A runtime particle expression is applied to restrict the movement of the particles to the original goal surface. Basically, at each frame the velocity vector for each particle is projected back onto the normal plane of the closest surface point.
I've been working on converting this to a stand alone deformer which will work with all surface types.