Project 4 – Rube Goldberg machine

April 18, 2022 (sorry)

This project consisted of animating a Rube Goldberg machine. The purpose of the project was to use Maya dynamics to operate the machine from start to finish.

storyboard

I called this scene "Kitchen Catastrophe" because for me this project was a catastrophe. The objects I included were: 1) apple, 2) frying pan, 3) rolling pin, and 4) plate from Sketchfab. The other moving element in the scene is 5) the shelves.

maya dynamics

Hinge Constraint

To make the shelves break when the apple collides with them, I used hinge constraints. The hinge is on the left side of the shelves to make the right side collapse on impact. I wanted to simulate the apple crashing through and creating a domino-effect of broken shelves.

Nail Constraint

I used nail constraints on the frying pans to make them swing from a rack. When the apple falls from the shelf and hits the first pan, it knocks into the rest of the pans and sets them all swinging. I had a lot of challenges with rigid body collisions with the pans; if they hit in even the slightest wrong way, they would intersect and cause Maya to crash entirely. This made it a very very difficult and slow process as it would sometimes tank my entire computer and erase my progress.

Solid Shatter

I used some videos to help me figure out how to implement a Shatter effect on the plate. It was very difficult to get the plate to shatter on impact instead of just shattering immediately. It also slowed my computer down majorly and was hard to get just right. I do like how it looks though.

Lighting

I used a point light, directional light, and ambient light to create shadows on the wall behind the shelves as shown in Chapter 10 of the textbook. Unfortunately, my shadows were jagged and in trying to fix it my scene crashed again, so I decided not to push my luck.

The problems

This project was very very challenging for me. Essentially throughout the process, Maya would crash and take several minutes to reboot whenever I tried to playback anything involving dynamics. Everything was very choppy and unresponsive and made it basically impossible to accomplish anything. The final result is after several weeks of trying and redoing everything over and over again. I will be doing the rest of the projects on the lab machines because this was an absolute nightmare and made my computer essentially useless. I had ideas and knew how to carry them out but my Maya problems were too much to overcome. I had a whole different scene involving small spheres for cereal that I started with but my computer could NOT handle that many polygons; no matter what I did, even after removing the cereal, the scene was broken beyond repair, so I had to start over. In the future, I will start very simple and see if it can actually play through before adding more elements.

final animation

I had a lot of trouble even playblasting it because of all of the problems but after hours and hours and many attempts I got it to produce a video. I tried everything I could with the render settings and playblast settings but still could not get it to upload to Youtube as an HD video. I was lucky enough to get it to output anything at all and if I continue to mess with it I think my computer will break again. None of it is what I wanted and it broke me but at least it's finally done.

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