Collapsing ‘Indiana Jones Style’ Rope Bridge
This Month’s Intermediate Tutorial has Attitude
For all you Indiana Jones fans out there, we’ve got a very exciting free tutorial in store. This month Mark Spevick, resident VFX tutor and Head of 3D here at Escape, has created a great example of how to construct a perilous rope bridge, with all its elasticity and delicacy. This one is specifically in honour of the recent enhancements made to Maya 2013, released this year. In earlier versions of Maya it was very difficult to create anything like this – a suspended rope bridge drooping above an immense canyon. But now with the introduction of some new features in nDynamics, creating this effect in CG is now possible.
What to Expect in this Free Tutorial… Drama!
Well not quite, but Mark does get to fulfil some of his teenage ambition by creating a tutorial synonymous with old-school action heroes. Covering everything from creation of the initial model, learning to understand the importance of curve spans for constraining and accurate deformation, to adjusting the physical properties of the hair to refine the simulation and ensure the rope behaves like rope. As well as this, Mark offers an overview on the optimisation of settings to speed up the simulation process. Injecting a little action into this tutorial, Mark also introduces additional nCloth objects into the scene to further effect and collapse our rope bridge.
This tutorial is not for the faint-hearted, requiring a little knowledge of the hair system in Maya before you begin. But for those with courage, the rope bridge beckons...
Breakdown
- See Maya's nucleus system in action
- Introducing nHair in Maya 2013
- Manipulating curve spans for constraining and accurate deformation
- nCloth and nHair interacting effectively in the nucleus system
Total video time - 37:28
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