Particle Physics Anyone?



This is my final project for ANI480 Animation Production taken during the fall quarter of the 2010-2011 school year at DePaul University. The animation was done in Maya, clips of each of the five segments of the animation were rendered and imported into AfterEffects to create five QuickTimes and those QuickTime clips were imported into PremierPro to compose the movie.

Most of the work was done in Maya. The universe is a sphere with a stellar graphic that I applied to a shader. I then dropped the shader onto the sphere to create my universe where all the natural phenomena occurs.

The star is composed of two spheres which are centered on each other. I manipulated lattice points at the front of the outer orange sphere at different points along the time line to simulate a “belching” or “spitting” effect each time it ejected a particle. I pulled the lattices into the sphere to reveal the inner yellow core of the star and then forward to extend the front of the sphere to a tip as each particle left the core.

Each particle is a sphere that is stretched by a lattice deformer. Alternating the positions of the deformer lattice and the deformer base is what gives it the pulled effect. Alternating these positions is how I created the tail behind each particle. Pulling the sphere away from the lattice as it traveled out into space is what allowed it to reform itself back into a sphere again. This same lattice deformer option was used for the proton-neutron conversion, atom simulation and molecule simulation segments of the film.

The inner and outer star, atom and molecule components were all colored using regular color shaders. The proton-neutron converted particle was uncolored. I left it at its gray default and used a series of lights with green and purple color filters in order to simulate the conversion from one type to the other.

In the last segment I found an image of daVinci’s Virtruvian Man, applied it to a shader and dropped the shader onto a rectangle. Then I deleted the rest of the rectangle faces to end up with a plate showing the image on both sides.


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