Theme
Play and Self
Context:
My animation is a depiction of what is going on inside my head right in this moment. There has been a video in TikTok that is very viral right now and the video is basically a russian song with a llama dancing in the background. I realised that that is exactly what I am feeling right now due to the fact that we are dealing with a lot of stress from uni as well as this quarantine.
I was inspired by Major Lazer's music video called Light it up. It features various dance moves with 3D particle effects and it made me wanted to experiment with Hair particle effects on blender.
Method:
For this project, I majorly used Blender hair simulator. I found a free rights 3D model of a mannequin and its dance move on Adobe's Mixamo. I uploaded the .dbx file to Blender and it automatically reads the animation since I wanted to experiment in hair simulation instead of animation. The idea was to simulate the hair using the mannequin mesh. I simulated around 30000 hair strands in total.
The first time around, I tried simulating only 5000 strands but it doesn't look like what I wanted. I was aiming to look as if the hair is covering the whole body. After hours of trials and a lot of techincal errors due to the fact that my computer isn't strong enough, I found that 30000 strands of hair are suitable enough. After simulating the hair strands, I bake the simulation to ease playback.
For the camera movement, I wanted to simulate a handheld camera movement. I used noise modifier on the graph editor for the X,Y and ,Z axis of the camera.
Response:
Basically the character and the song is depicting what is happening in my mind right now.
Reflection:
This is my first time using the hair simulator in Blender and honestly it's not as hard as I thought it would be. The fact that Blender is an free open source 3d program with such a powerful tool could really enhance the creative industry. The down side of this experiment was the fact that you need a better CPU to process everything and a better GPU to help render particle effects on blender. But overall, I feel like the experiment is a success though it could definitely be refined.
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