This assignment was an open ended final animation project.  After much discussion, profanity, and general argument the three animators finally settled upon the idea of demonstarting the skills they had acquired over the course of the semester.  Hence, it was agreed that the animation should demonstrate both video compositing with CG elements and morphing.   In order to accomplish this,  extensive use of both Maya and Composer would be required. This would turn out to include Maya's modeling, animation, curve editor, and particle systems features, as well as Composer's image stabilization, morphing,  and compositing.

    The final sequence of events that was decided upon, as can be seen in the storyboard , began with an opening, setup shot of a pipe protruding from a wall. Shortly,  an evil-looking viscous green fluid begins to pour from the pipe and pool on the ground below.  After emptying from the pipe, the fluid rises up in a column while morphing into Brian, who promtly walks away.  Below are some images that cover the main shots in the film.
 

The starting scene.

The fluid entering the pipe.

The fluid spouting uwards.

Brian, after the morph.

    The fluid was modeled in Maya using the "flow"  particle systems feature. This was largely a matter of creating a  spline for the particles to flow along, and then setting the attributes of the particles so that they appear to be liquid in nature. The major difficulty that we ran into during this portion of the assignment (besides site liscense trouble) was our inability to get shadows that appeared correct, despite the fact that we went to great length to mimic the lighting conditions under which the scene was filmed. The procedure for doing this should have been to simply create and position a plane with the shader "useBackground" assigned to it to catch any shadows the fluid might create. Unfortunately, Maya seems to have some sort of bug that involves shadows casted by particle systems ; most of the  shadows that we did get looked not remotely realistic, and the shadow plane obscured many of our particles. Eventually, we decided to try to eliminate the discrepency created by our lack of shadows with our lighting and particle color.  The other-worldly nature of the fluid seemed to be especially forgiving to this decision. Below we have illustrated the bug. The image on the left was rendered with the shadow plane in place.  Here, it is quite obvious that our shadows are not rendering correctly. The image on the right was rendered with the plane in exactly the same position, but this time a phong shader has been applied to it. In this image, the shadows appear correct.
 

    The only other problem that we ran across was the actions of the particles at the end of the animation.  Instead of following that spline to its end and then disappearing one by one, the particles would simply all disappear at once from the spline when their lifetime was up.  This forced us to render three different particle animations. The first had particles  streaming from the pipe to the ground. The second had the particles stream moving from the ground into the pipe, and the final one showed the column of fluid rising into the air. The first render was obviously used as the opening part of the fluid scene, while the second reneder was reversed (using Adobe Premier) to show the fluid finally leaving the pipe. The final render was then cut in after the fluid had pooled on the ground. Composer was then used to blend these three portions together.
 

Spline with no particles on it. Prior to rendering.

Spline with particles on it. Prior to rendering.

    After dropping all of video frames, by using Woody's Perception Video Recorder we moved to Composer and began to put everything together. We noticed a slight jitter in our camera, and decided to use Composer's image stabiliztion tool to correct for this. Unfortunately,  the interpolation introduced a different, but actually worse jitter, so we chose to go with our original footage.
    The next special effect to add to the sequence was the morph from the fluid into Brian. This was done with Composer's morph feature. Because our morph was going from one moving image to another, numerous keyframe morph meshes had to be set in order to get a good effect.
 

    So, here's the final animation, for the final animation project.  Enjoy.
 

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