Texturing & Re-targeting......

So, a progress report on my character is probably about due so here goes.....

Since my last post I've made quite a bit of progress on the old guy character that I'm working on. I spent a little more time on sculpting and then moved onto texturing the mesh.

As I'd been using Mudbox for the sculpting I thought I might as well investigate it's texturing tools as well, these allow you to paint directly onto the model in 3D space.... this workflow was a revelation for me. For years I have created 2D textures in Photoshop using the UV maps that I have made in Maya as a template, this workflow is fine but even the best UV maps can distort the finer detail.

Mudbox still uses the UV map as a template but being able to paint directly onto your model means that what you see is what you get, there's no need to jump between Photoshop and Maya to check that the texture is fitting properly or to tweak UV's after the texture has been applied. Obviously, 3D painting tools are not a new thing, it has actually been possible to paint textures in Maya for many generations of the software but the functionality has been more suited for roughing out rather than detail work. The painting tools in Mudbox, are fantastically responsive, working on layers allows the build up of texture and being able to use reference images as colour stencils is genius.....

The above image illustrates a visual evolution of the shader network that I have used in Maya for this character. Until this point I had never really used the Sub Specular Scattering (SSS) shader so I figured that with all of the other new knowledge that I have crammed into my brain through this project, a little more development wouldn't hurt.

The SSS shader works like skin, different layers allow light to penetrate and scatter as it interacts with the material. Rather than my getting bogged down trying to explain it all here's a link to an explanation from Autodesk.......

Mentalray Fast SSS Tutorial

Another area that I've been looking at since my last post is joint re-targetting through the Human IK (HIK) system in Maya. Since this character is going to be used as a motion capture puppet I figured it would be prudent to begin to develop my understanding of how this system works.

I figured it would be more entertaining to see the old guy move than a naked rig so I quickly bound a very rudimentary skeleton to the mesh and defined it as an HIK character. The fundamentals of the HIK system are pretty straight forward and the GUI (see below) pretty much guides you through the process of setting up the character.

It is as easy as selecting a joint on your rig and then assigning it to the relevant indicator on the GUI. So, after defining my simple rig as Character 1, I defined a mo-cap example rig as Character 2 and used it as a motion source for Character 1.... it's really that simple.

Below is a render of the driven motion..... Like I said the rig is very rudimentary and there was no attention paid to setting the joint influence but it kind of works. I find that because there is no facial or finger animation the resulting motion is rather unsettling, dead eyes and limp hands give it a peculiar reanimated appearance reminding me of Overtime, a dark tribute to Jim Henson from Supinfocom

The actual rig that I eventually apply will have facial controls as well as hand controls which will be animatable through keyframes... I don't think I want to start looking at facial mocap for this project but who knows I might end up doing just that!!

Getting Muddy....

In the little time I've had to play recently I've managed to make some progress with the character that I started in the previous post.

One of my aims in this collaborative project is to develop an understanding of the sculpting software Mudbox, it's toolset and the workflow between it and Maya. Up until this point I've never really had the desire to sculpting software but packages like Mudbox and Z-Brush are becoming a more and more integral part of the production pipeline and so I figured it was time to get my hands dirty.

I think that my reticence to use sculpting software stems from the heavy handed approach that so many artists have demonstrated through their practice. I have found that there is an abundance of work created through these packages which carries a certain look, a look that screams "sculpted" at the top of it's voice. Deep gouges and symmetrical lines are the most common offences and it is this style that I am hoping to avoid in my efforts.

Anyway, once I got over my fear of carving heavy marks into my model found the transition to sculpting pretty rewarding, the tools in Mudbox are very intuitive and after I had learnt to navigate 3D space with my Wacom it became a rather therapeutic exercise. Developing a workflow took a little time but I soon realised that, much like sculpting in real life, it's best to work down to the building finer detail from larger strokes.

Now that I have a project that benefits from the use of this software I am beginning to understand it's potential and will most certainly be using it again in the future. I still believe that it is important to understand that not everything needs to be sculpted and good old fashioned texture and bump maps are still absolutely valid practice in the professional workflow.

Can U Dig It?......

I've recently been working with artist Garry Barker to realise one of his characters as a 3D model and it's already been an interesting learning experience for both of us.

For me, this project began when Garry and another of my colleagues, Annabeth Robinson, had been discussing ways that Garry's digging character could be presented through alternative media, this led to talk of motion capture which ultimately requires a 3D model which in turn led to my own involvement.

Although there is plenty of reference through his work and the attributes that make up the character are pretty identifiable, it was difficult for me to consider it as a 3D model so I figured I might as well ask Garry to provide me with some orthographic drawings to work from. I thought  that this wouldn't be particularly hard for him considering it is his work after all and the character shares a very similar blueprint to the rest of the figures that he draws but, it turns out that asking an artist who deals in two dimensions to consider anything that they've created and then drawn countless times as a three dimensional object that can be animated might throw up all sorts of new thought processes for them. He got there in the end and produced some images that I could easily work from in Maya.

The character style is rather doughy, no insult intended Garry, which leads to interesting proportions and an asymmetric look which is very different from the style of character that I might normally build. Still, modelling is modelling and this figure didn't really cause me any problems in it's construction.

I'm pretty pleased with the base mesh, pictured above, the geometry is clean and even without textures and bump maps it has a pretty good level of detail... I could feasibly rig it right now and have a nice model to animate or motion capture but why have a nice model when a flippin' brilliant one could be the order of the day..?

So what's the plan?

I'd say a bit of learning in the form of Mudbox, sculpting software which I am a familiar with but have never tackled anything like this before, and muscle systems, dynamic deformation that has been available in Maya for some years now but something that I have never really had the desire to use. I also intend to develop my understanding of Mental Ray shaders, in particular the SSS (subsurface scattering) shaders that allow rendering of realistic skin.

So, I've got my work cut out for the next while..... I'm not sure how long this is going to take considering the limited free time I have but I'm pretty excited about developing it into a pretty amazing puppet that can be used to bring Garry's art to life.

I'll be posting progress here as and when it happens.

Rain, Rain Go Away......

Hi, I know... it's been a while hasn't it.... have you missed me?

I was hoping to have something super awesome to present for the start of 2014, something that would reflect a new beginning, the journey into the unknown....... something to inspire my creative practice for the coming twelve months.....

Rain.... that's what you're getting, just rain..... well procedural rain, but rain nonetheless.

I think I've been inspired by the weather over the past few months, I don't know what it's been like in whichever country you're reading this in but here in the UK it's not been too pleasant.... rain, floods, weather warnings, the whole bag!

So what's this all about then, procedural rain.... how does that work and why have I bothered?

Well, it's a technical exercise really... another one that I will develop further and one day hopefully use in my creative practice. I wanted to find a solution to making rain in Maya that didn't look like it belongs in a computer game, not that there's anything wrong with rain in games.... 

"The rain in games falls mainly on the planes" see what I did there... heh heh.

Anyway, like I said I wanted to find a solution to particle based rain that looked cool with splashes and ripples and other rainy stuff and the solution is presented in the video above.

The splash geometry was made using Realflow, imported into the scene as a .bin and then converted to a geometry sequence. When the falling rain particle hits the ground it triggers a collision event that plays the RF geometry sequence through a particle instance, the secondary particle is set to live for the duration of the geometry sequence.

The ripples were created by calculating the collision point of the rain particle on the ground and then applying density to the equivalent point on a 2D fluid container. The resulting texture has been used as a displacement map on the ground geometry, a single face polygon plane.

There's plenty of scope for development in this technique, here's a couple of avenues I intend investigating....

• transferring colour from the rain particles to the instanced splash
• transferring colour from the rain particle to the fluid container
• multiple versions of splash instance

Stay tuned for updates :)

Rotoscoped Nightmares......

Ok, so no posts for a month and then two come along at the same time...... typical!

As well as attending BAF I have managed to do a bit of practical work this month in the shape of a rotoscope and stop motion animation... check it out!

Since my work is primarily computer based I've neglected my drawing skills over the past few years and decided to learn how to hold a pen again by rotoscoping the "here's Johnny" scene from The Shining.

The animation is approximately one minute long and I figured that, drawing at 12 frames per second, it would be manageable for me to finish the project in a fairly short period and get the hang of using a Wacom tablet again..... sitting down and drawing, how hard could that be?....

Man alive, the effort, both physical and mental, that was required to complete this was astonishing and was something that I never expected.

To begin with things were fine but then after a while the pain in my wrist and fingers began.... the best analogy I can come up with is having done no exercise for years and then running a half marathon, my body had become lazy and the muscles required to hold a pen were useless and ached for a couple of days after the initial drawing session.

The fitness in my hand soon caught up and after a short while drawing for lengthy periods wasn't too much of an issue but the concentration required was draining. Ensuring that straight lines on the frame I was working on matched those on the previous frame became stressful and the monotony of drawing the same thing over and over and over made me begin to hate my decision to start this project.

But, I had to finish it....There was no way that I was going to invest so much effort into something and leave it incomplete.... The fourth shot was the longest and was where my motivation really began to wain. It is a torturous process and one that has made me appreciate the work of traditional animators even more than I had previously.

The drawing did get finished and the stop motion for the note pad was very straight forward in comparison... although crumpling up over 600 pages of paper does actually hurt after a while.

I know it sound's like I hated making this work but I really didn't. I am truly pleased with the results but I simply wasn't prepared for the mental rigour that was required to get me through the project and, a few days after completion, I am already sure that I will undertake some more hand drawn animated projects in the near future.

20 Years of BAF....

It's been a month since my last post.... where did those 31 days go????

So, what have I been doing with my time..... well, apart from working and spending time with my family I spent this week at Bradford Animation Festival which was celebrating it's 20th anniversary.

Highlights of this years festival included a selection of inspiring animations from students and professionals around the world, masterclasses from Warren Spector, Dave McKean and Anna Pavlotova, industry presentations from Travellers Tales and Double Negative and interviews with Lee Hardcastle and McKinnen & Saunders.

It's been an really interesting week where I feel that the overall message has been one of preparation and pre-production. Providing that the initial ground work of a project is done prior to production then there is much less likelihood of it collapsing before completion.... I hope that all students who were present throughout the festival also got that message and will take the advice on board and apply it to their own practice.

Tangled Times......

Once again it's been a few weeks since I've been writing in my blog but here I am again, yay, writing about stuff I've been working on since my last post.... as much as a reminder to myself of what I've been up to as it might be a document of interest to you, the reader.

So, what have I been doing?.....

Teaching and preparing to teach mainly but I have also been able to spend a bit of time working on a couple of personal projects too.... I imaging that you're wondering "what could these personal projects be?".... well there's one one that I don't want to talk about yet and another that I will happily share, hopefully satisfying your curiosity enough that you will forget about the project that I'm not willing to speak of right now.

What you're looking at there is a product of the personal project that I'll be rattling on about in this post...... can you guess what it is yet?

You got it... my Lattice Modifier tool for Maya!!

Well, it's called the Super Lattice Modifier now and I think it's finished..... until someone suggests some other functionality that I may be able to apply through it to make it even more super.... perhaps even MEGA!!

I've made a whole bunch of changes to the tool and it's functionality and interface are now very different from the original version. Where previously I had used bevels and extrusions to create the lattice I now apply paint effects to the edges of the control object which allows for real time updating when geometry is added or adjusted making the whole process far more user friendly and efficient.

Watch the video to see how it works and stuff.......

Because I've used the docking function for the interface it makes the tool feel much more integrated within Maya, a part of it rather than a separate object that simply works along side it. I needed to develop my understanding of how to build a user interface with MEL and then ditch the old version and start from scratch with the new one to be able to dock it but it is totally worth it and I believe that the new method is in fact far more efficient than my old way........  formLayout (old way) Vs. frameLayout (new way) = no contest!

One of the big new features of the tool is the ablility to keep the original mesh that the lattice is based on, so if you have a textured object/character or whatever that you'd like a wire frame render of it's as simple as clicking a check box....... that image below was made in a matter of seconds with the script.

A more creative approach to using the tool can be seen below. This image was made using the new functions in the Lattice Control section. I used a Humster3D model of a Mini Cooper that came free on the front of one of my magazines and ran the Super Lattice Modifier twice over each of the main pieces of geometry. 

Obviously, running the script twice on any geometry will create a pretty heavy scene (a little over 4 million polygons in this case) but it's worth it and as I was saving the scene iteratively after each body part there was little possibility that the scene was going to die on me.

Needless to say, I'm pretty proud of the script I've written and although it utilises many functions that are already available within Maya it makes the workflow so much more efficient and puts all of the utilities under one user interface.

Download it and have a play.... you know you want to.......

DONLOAD HERE