The form (morphology) of walker has changed slightly. He has longer, thinner legs, feet have been added, and the body/sphere is smaller. The ground is pink checkers rather than green, and the parameters of the simulation itself have been altered. The most significant change is that gravity has been lowered by half. The new settings mean walker’s movements are more varied, and he gets up off the ground more often. Here’s an early run with the new settings.
In order to have both more control and more options for simulating expressive creature movements, I’ve been considering a couple of alternatives. One is a more sophisticated version of the Breve creature simulator developed by Lee Spector called SuperDuperWalker. The code includes a window of sliders for adjusting parameters, which is both convenient and helpful for tracking changes. Number of legs, segments, length, etc. can be adjusted as well as the rate and kinds of mutation.
At present, the stages of the process are:
- design a character
- design a base mesh (cubes, spheres, cylindars) version that can be duplicated in Breve
- run the simulation using the basement
- import simulation results (the position coordinates for each of the base mesh parts) back into Maya to animate the base mesh
- rig the base mesh so that it drives the original design to animate it
- texture, light, and animate the original design
With SuperDuperWalker, the process could change to:
- run the Breve simulation
- design a Maya base mesh to match the body form evolved by the simulator
- derive a new character model that will fit the base mesh closely enough to be animated (this is the most significant part of the change–the character’s form is derived from evolved data rather than from my imagination)
- rig the base mesh so that it drives the new character model and animates it
- texture, light, and animate the new character model
Meeting with Stephen (code master) this week to set up importing the new walker settings into Maya and to see how much work would be involved in making the changes needed to get SuperDuperWalker data imported into Maya.