Blendy Curve Fun!

Wow, it really has been an age since I last posted anything here but I think it is time to breathe life back into the old blog!

It;s been a busy.... erm... half decade since I last wrote anything here, I'm still plugging away with Maya though, making things move, look pretty and scripting little tools to help me with my work which is why I'm making this post.



A while back I made a tool  (see video above) to assist with a workflow that I wanted to employ in a short film but life and things got in the way of production and the tool got forgotten and sat gathering dust in the bowels of my google drive until recently when I had another idea of how I might be able to use it, below is a proof of concept for that idea....



It seems that a lot of my ideas make it as far as proving a concept and then they grind to a halt..... it might be the academic in me only requiring the sweet fix of new knowledge or it might simply be that to progress beyond proving concept usually requires time and money - two resources that are in short supply in my world!

So, as I don't appear to be able to produce anything to completion I figured that I would release the script into the wild to see what super awesome stuffs you might be able to make with it. Here's a video to give anyone interested a very rough explanation of the tool and how to use it.


And here's a linkety-link to download  zip file containing the script and bonus shelf icon....

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD CURVE BLEND TOOL

Note: PFX will only follow the animated curves when the animation mode is set to DG (Preferences > Animation > Evaluation > DG)

Feedback is always welcome and, if you do download the tool, I'd love to see how you have used it so please share :)

Cheers,

Mat  :)

Lights, Camera, Scan......

So, today I had a really interesting afternoon at Ten24 in Sheffield where they make their bread and butter through 3D body scanning.

3d body scanning is the process by which a subject is photographed from many angles at once and then a 3D model, which can be used in video games or visual effects, is created from the images. The process is similar to that used by 123D Catch but Ten24, being a specialist company and not a free app, produce a much higher quality product.

Above is an image of their camera rig.... lots of cameras all of which are synced to fire at the same time to capture whatever happens to be in the middle them. As the studio was already set up, the shoot for each person only took a matter of seconds. It was a case of getting into the right position for the hand or head to be captured and take the photos.

With the information captured the next step will be to let the computer do it's job to create a mesh from the images. The raw mesh will be very noisy so then it is down to Ten24's skilled artists to clean it up and make it suitable for use in whatever capacity it has been commissioned for, or to be put on sale in their store. This part of the process can take some time depending on the model and their workload and I am very much looking forward to receiving my head scan when it has been completed in a couple of weeks.