Thursday, October 23, 2014

STE-Software Technology- Research Project

The Marble Machine

For our research project we were allowed to work in teams. Our goal was to make a simulation in Houdini without any key frames on the marble. Each of the team members had to model at least two props for the marble machine. I partnered up with Hannah. For my models I made the ramp and the shovel that would guide the marble into the funnel, they were both made in Maya. Originally, the marble was supposed to reach the edge of the ramp, fall into the shovel and then slowly be dropped into the funnel. What actually ended up happening was a sort of edited version.

Reference:

Modeled:


At first we had trouble getting the merge node to work because of a little caution, I found out that it was the funnel causing the error. Hannah believed it was because it had inside faces so she deleted the outer ring of the funnel which seemed to fix the problem.

We made the marble into an "Active" rigid body, which in Houdini is called "RBD object" and made everything else a static object. The ball kept falling through the ramp and stop at the ground plane. We both researched the possible causes of it, but after awhile Hannah figured out by not merging them but keeping them separate would it register as static objects. The marble kept floating off to the sides and then get stuck on a turn for the funnel. We couldn't get the shovel to get the hinge constraint so it would swing down when the ball hit it, so it was made into a static object. It was originally supposed to be one piece, but it was changed to be two pieces where the marble would fall into the ramp.

What we didn't manage to fix was when the fall dropped down the funnel and reached the ramp it would forcibly try to make its way through the geometry. So we couldn't get it to move anywhere after it reached the ramp.
This is how it looked in the end.





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