B A Weeks 2-4: The Big Reveal...

...well, most of it anyway.  There are a few words I can't mention, but here we go

The Brief

Produce short animations for a themed party VJ pack - the theme being Camp/Flamboyant

The Idea

Exploding Shoes!  Make sequinned shoes that explode into a cloud of sequins and then reform.

The Process

The first job was to model a shoe, attach particles using goals, and animate the goal strength to create the exploding effect

As a result of this test, I discovered that it's very hard to make particles explode; they always have a "slow in".  However, I found that by playing the sequence backwards, I could get the effect I wanted.

Next step was to turn the particles into sequins; this was done using a slightly modified version of Alan's "Pixie Dust" Tutorial

Now that I had a shoe, I tried a bunch of different ideas for the VJ pack

The idea that Pete liked most was the tapping shoe, so that was selected for development.  Pete suggested using a pink shoe and a blue shoe at different speeds

After final approval from Pete, I rendered out a series of TIFF sequences, including

• Just the blue shoe, static camera, one "Tap" at the beginning of the sequence and then the remainder of the 2 second length just sequins twinkling
• Just the pink shoes, static camera, one "Tap" at the beginning of the sequence

These were so the "Tap" could be manually triggered for VJing purposes

• A loop of the blue shoe, static camera
• A loop of the pink shoes, static camera
• A loop of all 3 shoes, spinning camera

Idea 2

After I finished the shoe sequences, Pete asked me to apply the same process to Sam Tremaine's bus.  The process was the same, but a little trickier due to the higher number of particles and vertices involved.

After feedback from Pete, I modified the animation so that the bus appeared to be driving along a road behind a camera car, and the explosion was less exagerated.