Matt's animation presentation: Updated

heres a link to my presentation, the other wouldn't pause :[

Here I have my animation presentation up for people to look at a head of time. I don't want to bore anyone one with tech stuff so I made it as general as possible.

and yes that is the music the short will use :)

The Valley of the Uncanny Apes

Looking at Matt's Hatter the subject of the uncanny valley came up during this weeks class. A friend of mine posted this link on Facebook. He especially liked the reference to the Polar express at the end.

Image from the linked article on Wired Science.

Ball Turn

I fixed the weird artifact in the turntable example I showed Monday, and made it turn slower. The problem was quite unexpected: it was the ray-traced shadow from the key light giving these blocky artifacts. All lights are using shadow maps. The ball is now subdivided. Maya subdivides UVs just fine, but not after you created the Proxy (the image is rendered using the Maya Software renderer).

Jack Saved!

I Retopo'ed Harry's Red panda thing, named jack, in Zbrush. I took the mesh that was giving him such a hard time with the normals and bascially (point by point) drew a kind of cage mesh around his original, this cage snaps to the highres model and out puts a model of the same shape (close as it can get), however I tweaked the geometry layout on the model seeing as I suspected being made of a single sphere was causing some of the normals. There is a problem area near the stomach, I wasn't exactly extremely careful :/. however any problems with the mesh I'm sure he can smooth out himself. I'm supplying the Ztool for you buddy, just load it into Zbrush, it has also a color texture painted on it, I believe this is what your original color scheme was? I hope so, if not just do what you need. Hope this helps.

ztool:
jack.ZTL

P.S. There are no UVs on this mesh. Simple way of doing this is a UV Transfer in MAya. Just import the new mesh as an Obj. and place is exactly on the original, should do that automatically. then in Polygons > Mesh > Transfer Attributes, select UV and click apply, it should work well I tried it. The UVs of the original mesh are tranfered onto the new mesh. It analyzes face placement in relation to the original so it just slips the new geometry into the shell UV of the original. Enjoy :)

This model will need some tweaking so be prepared.

turntable round two.

The second version. it looks more like skin. also changed the geometry and gave him bump on the body.

Hatter Turn Table

Just a test to see how the skin shader works out in motion. Need to adjust it a little bit. but overall I'm happy with it. The hands need some attention from me, but right now I'm doing a simple rig. The model is actually pretty low res, and because of the beauty of subdivision, I'm allowed to up the detail without loosing my control. the entire head and body are on one UV map. Its easier to detail that way, and normal maps are created smoother. I have a base idea of what he will say, I'm not posting that yet, cause its very rough.

Image still of turn table:

Online communities you should join!

If anyone is serious about CG there a few communities you might want to affiliate yourself with.
the big one is http://forums.cgsociety.org. This is basically CG Mecca. Forum attendees include animators and lighting techs from Pixar, Rockstar, and ILM. Its also a host to a lot of great advice from artists in the field.

Another is http://www.conceptart.org/ This is a little more specialized but it also has an area where jobs are posted regularly for appliance.

I'm also going to put http://www.3dtotal.com/ on here as well its a very good source of information on the industry in general.