Date of Award

8-2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Legacy Department

Digital Production Arts

Committee Chair/Advisor

House, Donald H.

Committee Member

Tessendorf , Jerry

Committee Member

Johnson , Kendra L.

Abstract

This thesis investigates a technique to effectively construct and simulate costumes from a stage production Medea, in a dynamic cloth simulation application like Maya's nDynamics. This was done by using data collected from real-world fabric tests and costume construction in the theatre's costume studio. Fabric tests were conducted and recorded, by testing costume fabrics for drape and behavior with two collision objects. These tests were recreated digitally in Maya to derive appropriate parameters for the digital fabric, by comparing with the original reference. Basic mannequin models were created using the actors' measurements and skeleton-rigged to enable animation. The costumes were then modeled and constrained according to the construction process observed in the costume studio to achieve the same style and stitch as the real costumes. Scenes selected and recorded from Medea were used as reference to animate the actors' models. The costumes were assigned the parameters derived from the fabric tests to produce the simulations. Finally, the scenes were lit and rendered out to obtain the final videos which were compared to the original recordings to ascertain the accuracy of simulation. By obtaining and refining simulation parameters from simple fabric collision tests, and modeling the digital costumes following the procedures derived from real-life costume construction, realistic costume simulation was achieved.

Included in

Fine Arts Commons

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