It can be difficult to improve your technical abilities when you’re lulled into the sleep of day-to-day production. This can include:
1. Not exploring creative solutions because of time constraints
2. Feeling like it’s too risky to try new methods
3. Restrained in the tools you can use on a daily basis
Advancing your skills requires stepping out of the day to day to get new perspectives.
Watch the first 2 minutes of the video below. Richard Feynman brings to light how our perception and understanding are tied together and in his view, adds to our experiences.
Write down 2 examples of a project/asset you worked on when you found the ‘inner structure’ or process illuminating. How did research and understanding the technical details contribute to your work and it's beauty?
Perception and understanding are critical in our work.
We all want to make faster setups, but becoming deft at placing nodes without inserting expressive qualities in your work will only get you so far. In order to marry agility, and skillfulness we must:
1) Understand how the materials behave that you want to simulate
2) Deconstruct our perception to understand how you want to art direct them
3) Have confidence that you can optimize and simplify your setups to achieve more faster
This week you have two assignments, one as a group and one as an individual:
Action # 1: Find 50 references of wood fracturing/destruction. As a group, discuss the elements that are unique to wood fracturing and worth highlighting in a simulation.
To introduce the second part of this week’s assignment is a story about a moment in time when the material quality of a brushstroke becoming significant:
Action # 2: Using glue and soft constraints create a simulation focused on the materiality of wood. Find a way to break this object so that the quality of the material or how it is made becomes significant to the viewer. It might be:
A wooden chair or table collapsing under a heavy object.
A battering ram breaking through a wooden gate.
A log cabin being ripped apart by a nuclear blast.
Here are a few examples to inspire a sense of material significance.
· Wooden churches in Russia collapsing
· Pianos found after the tsunami in Japan
Reminders:
The purpose of this project is to draw the viewer’s attention to details they may have missed. To magnify the way something is put together, weathered over time or broken. This becomes the window into a story about the essence of the material.
Resources:
RBD Material Fracture Documentation
Video Demo - Switching from Glue to Soft Constraints
Video Demo - How to break soft constraints
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