The Dreamhive Studio Blog

This was a great talk by the folks at Pixar on both a high level and low level. The following are my notes from this course. Feel free to post comments if you’d like clarification on some point.

Modeling & Dressing

• Kitchen Space organized based on the concept of Mus-En-Place (everything in it’s place). Practically this meant organizing set dressing into meaningful groups to provide a visual rhythm/staccato and also to help frame the characters.
• Focused areas of detail
• The kitchen was organized special based on tasks
• Varying groups and density can alter the scenes mood
• Goals for Food models
  • translate visual design of fine quisine
  • found in nature look
  • aviod plastic feel
• Used Soft Body simulation to help fill crates and bins with food
  • Scripted setup
  • Initially resulted in flat sorting (not mounded veggies)
  • Solution was to place sculpted collision surface in base of crate to achieve art dirrectable mounding
  • Also used invisible wedges and collision shapes to add more interesting gaps and break-up
  • Yields organic results without hand-placement
  • All veggies low-res cage of sub-d surfaces
  • Key to simulation control was layering
• To create static mounded food on plate. Soft-body sim each layer separately then freeze.
  • Use low gravity to achieve better control
  • For cavier modeled shape then filled with simmed soft body “eggs”
• For compost heap sculpted top surface mounding then flipped up side down and dropped rigid body simmed garabage into the volume to mold the shape of the mound. Then freezed and flipped back over.

Okay I’ve still got pages of notes to go as well as notes from Sunday afternoon and Monday and I have no doubt we’ll have pictures from the exhibition floor tomorrow. Stay tuned