Project 4: Rube Goldeberg
Robert West - 4/7/22
Robert West - 4/7/22
There's no better way to start off a physics demonstration than with a Newton's Cradle so there must be no better way to start off a Rube Goldberg machine right?
My animation showcases a Rube Goldberg Machine that includes a Newton's Cradle, a free moving ball, rails, spinning platforms, static platforms, dominos, and a coffee mug.
A playblasted version of the animation from my original presentation.
At some point (well many points), Maya randomly changed how it was simulating my animation. This was the best result I got out of that.
Spinning Platform
Static Platforms
Rails
Coffee Cup
Also includes the description of my initial plan.
The only real deviation from that is that I didn't include the scatter effect because every time I attempted it, Maya crashed. Additionally, I couldn't figure out how to make it shatter on the second impact.
Some of the challenges I faced during this project:
I could not figure out how to make the coffee cup shatter upon ground impact (since it was the second impact on the coffee cup), which eliminated my grand finale.
Maya crashed three times during substantial animation sequences (the worst was before my initial save when I had just finished the Newton's Cradle).
Maya would randomly decide to alter the path of the free ball (at one point, it just randomly started veering left so substantially I thought the ball was going through a passive rigid body and that really confused me for a good hour or so).
I could not get Arnold renders to not appear as black screens (even with five light sources) and then when I finally did do a Maya Software render, the final render sequence came out way darker than all of my individual test renders even though it used exactly the same settings.