Soft Bodies featuring Chowder

For my final visual effects project I had to create a simulation with soft bodies. The project requirements were very open ended, and many great ideas came out of that. I decided to go with a Chowder theme because our professor warned us to pay attention to swimming textures in maya (3d textures that do not animate with your geometry) and fix them as they happen. This made me want to implement them into my project intentionally, and Chowder was the only show I knew of that used them extensively.

I never understood swimming textures as a child

Back to the soft bodies though. Soft bodies can be used for many different effects, but they are great for secondary action, being that my interests are rooted in animation, that seemed like a good fit. I started with a basic chowder model I found online, which was ripped from the game Cartoon Network Punch Time Explosion XL (great game by the way, very under rated.) And it goes without saying, credit to the original creator. The model I used was actually a combination of two, there was the shirtless Chowder and the hat came from a regular Chowder.

Link to the Chowder model

I rigged the model myself but it wasn't really anything special (don't tell anyone, but the rig didn't even have control curves.) But it got the job done for what I needed and baring time constraints. It's all about putting out the best quality by the deadline, and the rig is not something the audience sees. I may go back to it in the future and retouch it for some practice. Other than the joints there was also some skin binding and weight painting (but I'll cover those in a rigging specific update.)

So one way you get soft bodies to act the way you want is by setting goals of them. By making a copy of Chowder's geometry and making that a soft body, the original can be a goal, and the soft body will attract to that goal. The amount of attraction is determined by the goal weight and can be refined by painting goal weights all over the model to get varying degrees of motion. You can probably tell where the goal weight was high and where it was less. The less the attraction the more the freedom to move.

That's good and all but how about when chowder smacks his belly? Is there some type of collision in the arms? After all soft bodies are still particles and can react in many different ways. What I actually used was a radial field that was animated to push the particles the moment Chowder hits his belly. There was also a turbulence field active throughout the whole scene to give the belly some randomness. I also had a subtle gravity field on the hat to effect it's motion.

Once I had the simulation done, I added the other two models of Panini and Kimchi for a bit more personality.

Panini Model

Kimchi Model

Then it all fell apart...

From what I understand my particles and my material somehow got disconnected, so every time I would close my scene and reopen, Chowder's geometry would disappear. Reapplying the material only resulted in a lower resolution version of the original model not suitable for rendering. The fix for this was to just work without closing Maya which worked until render time came along. When I went to batch render the model would still not show up, despite it showing up just fine in the single frame render. What I concluded from some online searching was that particle caching or geo caching was the answer, I tried both with no success. You may see where this is going. I ended up single frame rendering each frame to get the desired look, this was 240 frames and it took around two hours, plus one for troubleshooting the batch render.

Batch Render Result

Single Frame Render Result

Despite all the issues, I did learn something new, while meeting the project requirements, and hitting that deadline. But I did need to drop a few features like the swimming texture and making Kimchi a particle cloud. I await your feedback, until next time.