Speaking of Dynamics...

Here is some real time rendered dynamic destruction:

 

Integration Simplified

I made you guys sweat (a little, maybe) over inserting a virtual object into a real photograph. Here is a system that can do the work for you:

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.

To be presented next week and not yet available. These techniques do make it to market in a few years...

Animation Tip and Tricks

Just came across this Free eBook on Animation Mentor .com. Seems to be a collection of columns (or blog posts) but still worth looking and and downloading to your favorite e-reader to read on the train.

Speaking of trains: is that a Dutch "Honderkop" (dogs head) in the background?

Kitchen progress example

I showed this example in class: the black and white kitchen work in progress entry by Jennifer Cram: Kitchen 2.0"

Spidy Walk

To create this animation, here shown in playblast, I hand animated just one leg. It turns out to be relatively easy to copy animation from one attribute to another with a time offset. If you want to copy the X translation of leg 1 to the X translation of leg 2 but with a 12 frame offset, the expression looks like this:

LegTwo.translateX = `getAttr -t (frame - 12) LegOne.translateX`;

The -t flag tells the getAttr (= get Attirbute) command to query the value at a specific frame. "frame" is the current frame.

Slow Sleasel

Render times have not been our friend this semester, especially in the lab. Jennifers Sleasel has been particularly hit hard by this. I did some test to try and figure out what was slowing it down. Here is the original render, which took 1 min 9 sec (Mental Ray preview quality @ 640x360, on my laptop):

I tried to render it with a single ramp shader on all objects. Did render quite a bit faster: 14 seconds!

Even when I made the material reflective it only took 22 seconds:

But of course this was not the look Jen was going for. But is renders way faster so the fact that the original scene has a gezillion shading groups or many empty UV sets was not bogging down the render. Tried to render the entire scene without any raytracing:

Now that rendered in 17 seconds! But then again, it also has no shadows. I turned raytracing back on but disabled the shadows, which are obviously all set to ray traced or they would have shown up in the non-ray traced image. This took 33 seconds:

But we want shadows. What if we kill the transparency on the glasses? Rendered in 38 seconds, so that is one of the most important factors in slowing the render down:

The image looses a lot of visual quality. Digging through the scene I did find one other thing. The counter (Wood Red) had a reflectivity of 0.002, and one of the ramp shaders feeding into it had a reflectivity of .1. So full reflection had to be calculated for it though it hardly showed up. I found a few more reflective ramps and killed the reflectivity on the ceiling:

Render time: 1min01seconds. So that is 61 seconds versus 69 seconds for the original, a more than 10 percent gain. May not sound like much, but considering that the entire animation is 150 frames, this will shave of 150 times 8 = 1200 seconds or 20 minutes of off an almost three hour render.

I also tried rendering it using Maya Software. To get the smooth Sleasel one has to create a proxy. Still it renders really fast. And with a lot of aliasing artifacts at preview quality. Needs to be close to production quality to get the wood pattern to look nice again, and by then it renders at least as slow.

Turbulent Ball

A Mental Ray displacement test, animated using expressions.

Point Animation

After the family left I found an hour or so to play with Maya, and found out it is actually possible to animate every single point on a Mesh individually. I tried it on a polygonal sphere, messed a bit with the shader and rendered it using Mental Ray. No Bones, deformers or blend shapes!

Rigging Logistics

Just stumbled across these tutorials/threads in my research - I'm collecting them and thought I'd share them here to run them by you guys. Some of them seem complicated/over my head, and I was hoping you could let me know if they're feasible options.

Stretchy Spines:
http://www.darksuit.com/tutorials/StretchSpine.html

(or, apparently, I can just scale the bones mathematically - check out the last post):
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=88&t=821678

Spline IK for the Tail:
http://www.animationartist.com/2003/08_aug/tutorials/softbody_tutorial.htm