For 8th grade Science/Coding I am doing Pixar in a Box in Khan Academy. Currently, I am doing the tenth section in the course, animation.
The tenth section in Pixar in a Box has two parts: “Modeling Grass with Parabolas” and “Calculating Parabolas.”
Part One
The first exercise I did was labeled “String Art”. In the video lesson before the exercise, it explained that when making blades of grass for a movie, they use Parabolas. There is a lot of math behind this, but that will be in part two.
A more art friendly version of Parabolas are string art like this:
The green in the picture above is what the blade of grass would look like.
In the second exercise, I learned how the find the coordinate of a point between two points.
In a line segment, the middle point is ‘Q’, and the two end points are ‘A’ and ‘B’, you have to find the coordinates for ‘Q’. The formula for this is Q = A/2 + B/ 2.
The third exercise was quite simple. I was given a blue and green curve, and it was my job to move the blue curve right above the green curve.
Before:
After:
For the fourth exercise, I was able to make my own blade of grass! I was able to control the width, color, and angle of the blade of grass.
For the fifth exercise I animated multiple blades of grass.
Part Two
In the first part I learnt about the art in environment modeling, in the second part I am learning about the math behind the art!
Imagine there is a line with points A and B at the end. In the middle, there is M. But in this case, M is not in the middle of the line, but favoring B. Like this:
The formula for this line is (1 – t) A +tB
T stands for the distance between each point on the line.
In the second and third exercises I had to calculate the touching point. But what is a touching point?
The point P on the picture above is the touching point. The formulas in the picture are how to calculate P.
That is all I have learned in the 10th section of Environment Modeling. My next essay will be about Section 11, Character Modeling.
Sophia Elahi RPC Blog 