FX Tests

So last year, when working on preproduction for the short I created a balloon simulation in Houdini. I modified some of the geometry with the hopes of using the Houdini Engine extension in Maya to work and modify the simulation in real time.

After a day though the information being passed stopped working and I did some trouble shooting to get the simulation to work in Maya again but nothing was working. The team decided to try working in nCloth instead.

At first the geometry was at a higher subdivision but, when the simulation would go the pieces where so tiny they'd fly off like confetti, despite how much I changed the glue strength of the sim, it still looked confetti like even with the bigger pieces.

Even with increased gravity and glue strength it didn't feel like an authentic balloon popping effect. So as far as this goes we decided to hand animate the effect. Which I'll be working on in the next few days.

On the bright side the blend shapes I created for the ground impact seems like it will work well for the shot we need.