Creating Stereoscopic 3d Images

Maya 3d

Recreating Cameras and Lights in Maya.

Original

Maya Version

Maya Side View

Extra Credit: Lighting a Scene in Maya

One-point Lighting

Two-point Lighting

Three-point Lighting

Building a Scene in Maya

Second Term Paper

No term paper is being submitted.

Outline for the Second Term Paper

        I.            Introduction

a.       A brief overview on the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum and how it works in the real world.

b.      Hypothesis – The Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum can be bent in entertaining media if it enhances a scene or does not detract from the scene significantly.

      II.            Body

a.       Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn (2012) – In part 2 of this mini-series cadet Lasky is suffering the effects of his allergy to a chemical used during the cryo-freezing process. This causes cadet Lasky to pass out during a capture the flag exercise. In the first shot of the scene you see cadet Lasky rotating forward as he has no control over his body. In the next shot it shows cadet Lasky falling straight down to the ground without any rotation. During this fall he loses all angular momentum.

b.      Dead Island (2011) – In this horror RPG video game the protagonist is one of a few survivors on a popular island resort that has been overrun by the undead. As the protagonist makes their way around the island they open a lot of doors. To open the door the protagonist can be seen placing their hand flat on the door frame and giving a slight push. The protagonist can push on the door near the doorknob, in the center of the door, or right next to the hinges. No matter where the door is pushed the force exerted by the protagonist is the same and the speed at which the door opens is the same. In order for the door to open at the same speed if pushed closer to the hinges it would require a larger amount of force. Angular momentum does not seem to be dependent on force in this game.

c.       Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) – When Steve Rogers returns from the secret Hydra factory he brings along a device powered by the energy of the Tesseract. Howard Stark then takes apart the device to study the power source in his laboratory. In this scene Howard Stark is standing on a small platform looking at the power source through a small window that stands about shoulder high. Howard Stark then applies an electric current to the power source which causes an explosion that sends a shock wave through the small window knocking Stark halfway across the room. Since the blast was directed through the small window the force applied to Stark would have been centered around his shoulders well above his center of gravity. This force should have caused Stark to flip backwards instead of flying straight back. Angular momentum was not conserved.

    III.            Conclusion

a.       In all three instances the law of conservation of angular momentum was broken for either dramatic effect in Captain America or to simplify the scene as in Dead Island and Forward Unto Dawn.

Character Animation

Watch on YouTube for higher resolutions

I created this stop motion animation by first using reference video of a run and jump I did. This allowed me to get the frame numbers I needed and my step and jump timing. Next I set up a green screen studio in my office. I used a pair of green poster board and a lot of lights. To hold the action figure i used my helping hands solder station. Using my Canon DSLR, stand, and remote I proceeded to pose each individual frame. Since I was limited in height movement of my solder station I didn't worry about the position or height of the figure in frames where the figure was in the air and focused on the poses. I imported everything into GIMP and proceed to remove the background. I found out it is important to use a non-reflective green material as I found my figure was bathed in a green glow. I had to be careful not to pull pixels out of my figure. I went over everything with a little negative green color saturation and got everything looking normal. Next I created a background image and proceeded to position each frame within the background using the previous frames to line up the next frame. I then saved all  84 individual frames as jpg images and converted them into a HD avi file using a free software called JPGVideo.

Green Screen Studio

Alexand showing he can pose!

Animation Snake

Reverse Video Reference of Walking.

Clip A

Clip B

Clip C

Clip D

The Laws of Physics in an Animation Universe.

Day Watch is a Russian live action fantasy movie that was released in 2006. The movie takes place in a modern day Moscow that is populated with Others from both Light and Dark factions. These factions are in a delicate truce that becomes threatened as the Dark faction seeks war while the Light faction fights to restore the balance of the truce. Day Watch uses CGI special effects to create new laws of physics in the movie’s universe, specifically relating to inertia, momentum, and gravity. These new laws of physics empower the characters to help the audience believe they are super human beings.

Newton’s first law of motion states that unless acted on by an unbalanced force an object with either stay at rest or stay in constant motion. When the protagonist Anton is trying to find his son Yegor he is attacked by a group of Dark Others in an SUV. Anton avoids being smashed between the SUV and a brick wall by jumping on the hood and leaping off the back of the SUV. At this point Anton has a constant velocity away from the SUV but has no velocity to his left or right. The limo is moving about 15 inches per frame so it is estimated to be traveling at 20 mph when Anton lands on the hood. Under normal physics Anton would not instantaneously move in the direction of the limo but would instead tumble as he remained mostly stationary and the limo moved underneath him. Anton however gains instant velocity in the direction of the limo which allows him to stay on the hood of the vehicle and make his escape. 

The ability to ignore inertia is not limited to the heroes of the film as the Dark Others utilize this property to launch a motorcycle attack on Olga and Simeon. The motorcycles are hiding in the back of a semi which is traveling about 12 inches per frame or 16 mph. This means that when the motorcycles leave the back of the semi they need to be traveling at least 16 mph in the opposite direction in order to not skid upon hitting the snow-covered ground. There are ten frames from when the first motorcycle begins to accelerate and when it leaves the back of the semi, allowing for 0.42 seconds of acceleration. In order to reach 16 mph in this amount of time the motorcycle would need to accelerate at a rate of 17m/s², however, an average sports bike can only accelerate at about 11.6 m/s². At an acceleration of 11.6 m/s² the motorcycle would have only been going 11mph out of the semi or 5 mph backwards relative to the ground meaning the motorcycle would have skidded on the snow. Instead of skidding the motorcycles are able to land safely because they were not affected by inertia and are able to lose their forward velocity from the semi.

Shortly afterwards the motorcyclists devise a plan to ramp into the back of Simeon’s truck. A Dark Other, riding in a sidecar, leans over and drops a metal ramp onto the ground. Assuming the motorcycle is traveling the same speed as the rest of the vehicles in this low-speed chase, the ramp should be traveling at around 16 mph at the moment it was dropped. However, the ramp can be seen falling straight down and stopping on the ground without skidding. These events would not be possible if Newton’s first law of motion were in effect.

The movie does however break its own rules in a comedic scene involving the same vehicle chase. A motorcycle breaks through a bridge barrier and lands on top of the truck. Hearing the thud of the landing, Simeon slams on the truck’s brakes which cause the bike to be thrown forward off of the truck. This scene is consistent with our normal universe’s rules of inertia.

The law of conservation of momentum states that momentum cannot be created nor destroyed and therefore no change in the total momentum can occur. The momentum of two objects must sum to the same amount before and after a collision. When Zavulon attempts to apprehend Anton for the murder of a vampire, Svetlana fights back by summoning a speeding bus in the path of Zavulon. Zavulon outstretches his hands and yells at the bus as it collides with him, but is barely moved by the bus as he brings it to a complete stop crushed around him. An average transit bus has a mass of 10,886 kg and right before impact the bus moves about 15 inches per frame or about 20 mph. The total momentum before the collision is then 97,331 kg m/s. If momentum was conserved in the Day Watch universe and the bus came to a full stop after the collision then Zavulon, whose mass is approximately 70kg, would have a velocity of 1390 m/s or 3,109 mph. Under normal circumstances accelerations to this speed would be enough to kill a human. Zavulon walks away with only a few cuts and scrapes.

When Simeon races towards the Hotel Cosmos he decides to play chicken with the black semi that had been hindering him. Both vehicles start from a dead stop and accelerate towards each other. With neither driver willing to swerve, the two vehicles collide and Simeon’s truck ends up running through the entire length of the semi. Before the collision the truck is traveling at 26 inches per frame or 35 mph while the semi is traveling at 24 inches per frame or 33 mph. We know from the earlier scene with the motorcycles that the trailer is now empty and the average mass of a semi like this one is 13,608 kg. Assuming we do not know what the mass of the truck and seeing that both vehicles are moving 1 frame per inch or 1.4 mph to the right after the collision, we find the mass of the truck needs to be 13,971 kg for this to happen in a normal universe. The average mass of a utility truck with a maximum cargo load is around 8,283 kg meaning that Simeon’s truck would have needed to be fully loaded and traveling at 58mph in order for this scene to work.

In the final showdown between Svetlana and Yegor, Yegor hits Svetlana with his yo-yo ball which in turn sends Svetlana flying back through the air, crashing into a pillar. It’s hard to gauge the speed at which the yo-yo is thrown but under the assumption the mass of the yo-yo is around 0.25 lbs or 0.11 kg the initial speed can be determined using the conservation of momentum formula. After the collision the yo-yo can be seen moving about 1 inch per frame or 1.4 mph back towards Yegor, while Svetlana is traveling 12 inches per frame or 16 mph backwards. Assuming that Svetlana is the average weight for a Russian female at 59 kg this means Yegor needed to throw the yo-yo at 8,637 mph. If momentum were conserved these scenes would have been a lot less dramatic and lethal for a few characters.

Newton’s law of universal gravitation says that all point masses attract each other with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them squared. While this affect can easily be seen by the acceleration the Earth causes on falling objects, it is negligible between objects on Earth. In an early scene, Alisa drives to meet Zavulon at the Hotel Cosmos. Not wanting to use the front door Alisa ramps her car off an on-ramp, rotating it parallel to the hotel, in order to drive across the side of the hotel. Alisa then pulls the emergency brake slowing the car to a stop so that it can crash through a hallway window. The only possible way for Alisa to be able to stop like this is if the upward friction force caused by the tires on the building equaled the downward pull of the Earth. This means there has to be a normal force exerted by the building on the car and an equal and opposite force from the car on the building. Using Newton’s formula for gravity we can calculate that in a normal universe the force between the roughly 100 million kg building and the 2,300 kg car separated by 100 ft between their centers of mass, would be 0.017 N. Using the formula for friction and using the coefficient of static friction between a tire and glass of 0.87 the car would need a normal force of 25,908 N to stay still on the window. It is easy to comprehend that the hotel window would break if subjected to this amount of force.

In the motorcycle attack scene mentioned earlier one of the motorcyclists drops a ramp onto the road to allow a second motorcycle to ramp into the back of Simeon’s truck. After the ramp is in position Simeon’s truck is seen traveling over the ramp at a rate of 24 inches per frame or 33 mph. At the moment the motorcycle leaves the ramp it is moving around 12 inches per frame or 16 mph. In the next few frames you can see the motorcycle passing a third motorcycle at a rate of about 12 inches per frame or 16 mph relative to the third motorcycle. Assuming this third motorcycle was traveling at the same 16 mph speed, the airborne motorcycle would be traveling at 32 mph relative to the ground. Since Simeon’s truck was originally going 33 mph this would still not be enough speed to hit the truck and it is assumed that the motorcycle accelerates even further leading up the collision. Since the motorcycle is in the air during this time, no other forces are acting upon it meaning the horizontal velocity would be constant and the acceleration would be 0. There has to be another force present to account for the acceleration seen.

While trying to escape the Dark Others, Anton, in the body of Olga, breaks free of his captor and delivers a kick to the head sending the Other flying through the air and into the side of a SUV. This scene was difficult to analyze as this was a night scene in the snow with an Other in a black jacket hitting a black SUV. It is possible to see with the naked eye the Other undergoing acceleration as he approaches the SUV. An alternate hypothesis to what is occurring in these scenes is that force can be delayed by the person creating the force. However, in this example, the most important thing is the velocity at which the Dark Other hits the SUV. Since there would be no difference in final velocity whether Anton kicked with full force from the start or whether he kicked with a smaller force and applied the rest mid-flight, the end velocity would be the same. There is also the problem that the Dark Other creates a reactionary force on Anton which could have been delayed and applied at a later point. There were no instances of delayed reaction forces ever seen throughout the movie so this hypothesis is unlikely. The only way these examples could occur without a means of propulsion, like jet packs which were not witnessed in these scenes, would be if there were greater than normal gravitational forces acting between masses.

In practically every single action scene of Day Watch the normal laws of physics as we know them are broken. The characters operate under a different physics universe in the movie to accentuate their super human abilities such as strength and skill. The lack of inertia allows for the characters to seem more skilled at the actions they take. Without the conservation of momentum the characters can unleash devastating impacts and withstand great force. The stronger gravitational pull between objects allowed for both Alisa to look like a skilled driver on the side of the hotel and Anton to appear to be stronger in a fight. These scenes help reinforce the viewers belief that the Light and Dark Others are great and powerful beings by manipulating the viewer’s relative perception of physics.

Term Paper #1 - Outline

        I.            Introduction

a.       Day Watch (2006) – Film introduction

b.      Hypothesis – The characters of Day Watch are able to use the unique properties of their universe’s physics to empower the characters as seen through a normal universe perspective.

      II.            Objects have a strong gravitational pull towards each other

a.       The car ramps and continues driving on the side of the building without being pulled down by gravity. When the car finally stop,s the pull from the building on the car causes the car to break through the window instead of the car falling to the ground.

b.      The soccer ball bounces off of the goalie and then accelerates towards Alicia.

c.       Anton kicks a dark other who flies back a few feet and then accelerates into a parked SUV.

    III.            Objects are not affected by Inertia

a.       Anton jumps on top of a moving limo and instantaneously gains horizontal velocity so that he doesn’t get knocked down.

b.      Motorcycles ride out the back of a semi in the opposite direction the semi is moving and do not skid upon hitting the snowy ground but instead continue traveling the direction they are facing.

c.       A ramp is placed on the ground by a motorcyclist in motion; the ramp does not skid on the ground but instantly stops once dropped on the ground.

d.      Contradiction - A motorcycle lands and stops on top of the truck, but when the truck slams on the brakes the motorcycle flies off the front of the truck.

    IV.            No Conservation of Momentum

a.       A moving bus runs into Zavulon, crushes around him, and stops without moving Zavulon at all.

b.      The truck and semi collide and the smaller truck plows completely through the semi, driving out the back end and stopping the semi immediately.

c.       Yegor hit Svetlana with the yo-yo ball which sent her flying in the air about 10-15 feet and smashed her into a pillar.

      V.            Conclusion

a.       Laws of physics are broken in almost every single action scene.

b.      The laws of physics in Day Watch allow for a sense of powerful characters that are able to accomplish super human feats.

Stop Motion Animation of Falling

The first thing I did for this project was to create a chart based on the (Distance in inches) = (Number of Frames)^2 * (1/3 inch) formula for 24fps video. Once I had the frame to distance mapped out I rigged measuring tape to a pole next to my scene. I skewered my apple and placed a piece of tape on the skewer to help with alignment. After taking all of my shots at the varying distances I imported everything into GIMP and took myself out of the images. leaving just the background and the apple. I used SAM Animation to compile the images into the video clip. Just to double check i loaded the video into tracker to make sure my y axis was a parabolic arc.

Video analysis of path of action

Tracker video analysis of falling

Video Reference

(This video was recorded at 1080p so feel free to increase the resolution.)

Mini-Portfolio

Alexand's First Bath

First show at Hard Rock Orlando

Flying my RC plane

Hi I'm Zane. I'm currently a Computer Science major at San José State University. This is the first Art class at a college level that i'm taking. I've taken a good deal of Science classes at SJSU such as; Intro to Java, Intro to Data Structures, Data Structures & Algorithms, Intro to Computer Systems, Computer Architecture, Operating Systems, and Object-Oriented Design. This semester I will be taking Windows Programming and Artificial Intelligence. When I finish school I would like to go into Game Design. I'm specifically leaning towards Graphics or Engine programmer.

The First Post

This is the first blog posting for my Fall 2012 Phys 123 class.