Frank Abney

I wanted to share this little tip for something I used in this work in progress scene in my upcoming animated short film, THE TURNERS. With independent films MOST times we can’t afford to bring all the bells and whistles of big budget feature animation. The technical hurdles can be high. But I’m no stranger to finding a way.

In this campfire sequence, there’s a moment where Alberta ( voiced by @yolondaross_creator ) puts out the fire with her coffee. I knew I couldn’t afford to have real fluid effects, and didn’t have the time to do it in 2d, and integrate it properly etc. So, I thought maybe I could use a lattice deformed in Maya, and just pull the “fluid” geometry through it, to fake it.

I still need to fix some things, but it was a great solution, and didn’t take too long either. You’ll see the setup on the second video.

I created the path for the “fluid” with the lattice and constrained that to the mug. I had to make sure that was long enough to account for how fast I needed the pour to be. I didn’t wanna run out of coffee tube 🤣. I made some imperfections in the lattice so there would be some subtle movement while pouring. I widened the shape of the lattice near camera to cheat the perspective. Then just animated the y translation of the rounded off cylinder coming down out of the lattice. I exported the mesh as an alembic cache file to bring into @unrealengine where I’m lighting the scene, made a simple material, and now we’re in business and I can iterate on it for the final render.

Hope this helps someone out there!

#film #shortfilm #TheTurners #animation #tips