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!

Cosmo Bones

Cosmo bones are up.

I got help from this site too. I wonder if anyone will find this helpful. :)
http://web.alfredstate.edu/ciat/tutorials/SkeletonSetup.htm

Professor, what did we say we'd use to connect the arm and leg joints to the spine?

How two independent film makers created an animated short

looks interesting

Real Time nVidea Head

Next to being pretty amazing, it also explains how rendered light maps are used to get the Sub Surface Scattering!

kichen scene fof final composition

This is an idea of my funal composition for ARIL360, not completed yet.

Jack flying test

suggestions folks, this is test for the fabric only, my panda will not be flying in my final animation, but I will use the nCloth.

Ringling College Portfolio

Please go and check out the Computer Animation portfolio! The animation, "Dim Sum," had me actually laughing out loud!

I'm definitely going to apply here. I've heard Ringling's program has you work in teams to find and specialize your place in the pipeline. Great prep for a large-studio workplace, but not so good for expression of individual vision. Either way, it seems like a school worth looking into.

some call me crazy

I just figure im adorable so DEAL!

Anywho I put "bones" in my character, I'm redoing my rig and yes this is a necessary part. Its an early rig pic I'm further than this but I just like these pics so here ya go!









you can see the size of skull, yes he is disproportionate but intentionally so :P

Toon Wood

Prof. Koning (Wobbe) helped me figure out how to have a wood texture drive a toon shader! This is epic!

Again Gobelins

Un tour de Manège from Les Manèges & THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER from THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER team on Vimeo.

Just found these French animation via DRAWN! They did it again...

Nosy Node Thing

The compositing node-tree from Blender on the right resulted in the movie above. Unfortunately Blender does not read Maya IFF image files. Nothing except Maya and it's image viewer Fcheck does. There are plugins for Photoshop though I have not found one that worked properly yet. Figure out which image format to use to render from Maya to get the Z-depth channel to read in Blender I must!

Oh, and the file renaming / renumbering tool I use is called Seq911 (CreativeCrash does require you to log in to get to free downloads - rather silly but creating an account is trivial on that site)

UPDATE: I posted the .blend file on the instruction site.

Cel Shading/Toon Shading

CelShading.com:

Found here.

CelShading.com seems to be a community of artists devoted to the art of cel shading. Their forum seems to be down at the moment, but their downloads page features tutorials, articles, videos, plugins and models. If you're interested in getting a 2D effect out of a 3D program, this seems like a good resource for you.

Here is a cel shading tutorial from NMDigitalGraphics that Matt and Erika S. worked through today. Matt recommended it as a good one, so I'll try to follow through it before I continue looking for more. Their final product:

Squash and Stretch Tutuorial

Stretch rigging:

This tutorial guides the user through setting up a squash and stretch expression, and an attribute that can control the degree of stretchiness. It goes step by step through the math behind expressions, allowing the user to understand why the expression enables this essential of cartoon animation.

I am definitely interested in throwing this on Sleasel. I'll have to do it after I get the rest of the rig set up, but they say this will work over most any preexisting IK set.

Hairy Sleasel

We got fur to render on Sleasel in class. On the instruction station in the lab this took 12 minutes and 37 seconds :(

Sleasel's Favorite Pub

... from here. I like the feel of this a lot - the deep, reddish, well-worn wood, the bar stools, the assorted liquor bottles, the dark spots of red, green and blue, the neon lights glowing softly in the back. This feels like a place that Sleasel would enjoy frequenting. I'd like to incorporate these elements into my animation/texturing project.

In a separate room in the back of the pub, three pool tables will be arranged in a smaller, darker room. I won't be modelling this room for my current animation, but I thought I would include reference for it here to give you guys an idea of the feel I'm after. By the way, the pool room image is from here.

Now here's my issue - the fur I was originally trying to pursue is not a possibility for the animation. Rendering times make it totally impractical for anything but still images. Instead, I'm considering working with the cell shading look that Matt posted earlier. Wikipedia has some good examples here.

BUT - the visuals of the pub seem so dependent upon the deep woody textures and dark subtlety of color changes that the cel-shading, or toon shading, might not really capture the feel of the pub. I'm open to suggestions about how to convey the dark, cozy, but somewhat dirty feel of the pub using the toony cel-shader - do you think just using rich color choices would work? How could I get a wood grain with the cel-shading? OR - perhaps there is another rendering choice I could pursue...

I'm thinking of signing up for/posting this to the CGTalk forum, but I'd like to get your input first.

get it while its hot

Yes, it is...:P

update

body (758 KB)





oh and a really rough head test

Jack pose001

one of the final pose of my red panda - Jack,

I am not quite sure if I 'd make him play a numchaku or just punching n kicking

advises please.

first mental ray test kitchen scene

this is my first mental ray render test, I only used final gathering, no GI, no AO, still couple things need to be done.

1. increase antialiasing

2. fix the shadow on the wall

advises please.

Final Project Ideas

So I wanted to do a snowboarder type dude. With awesome scenes in my head! :)

But I don't think its going to happen as of yet. I've encountered some difficulty with the model a tad, but I should be able to get that changed in tomorrow's class. If all else fails, remodeling him might be my quickest solution.

Thoughts? I also thought of using my little Cosmo, for those of you who don't know him, here he is. :)

woo! done

a quick pose

Banner

Changed the banner but somehow lost the MSU logo :(
Will try and get that back tomorrow!

Thought this would amuse you guys...

From this comic, Toothpaste for Dinner, that my friend just showed me.
www.toothpastefordinner.com/archives/2009/Oct/

Toon Shading

A quick tutorial thingy

link

jack move test01

still under testing, advices?

Banner change proposal

I figure that since we now use maya and lightwave, we should adjust the banner to reflect that.

how you doin?

Okay well I tried...I really did. I was adjusting my head modeled I made by hand and thought, oh well I'll just pop it into zbrush for texture painting...

I really tried to keep this as hand made as possible...

I really did..

so anyway about an hour and half later I got this(click for full size):




I'm thinking about maybe putting him in a mugshot and calling the piece "Wise Guy"

oh and here he is before I adjusted hime and he got the crap knocked out of him...well sort of:



I'm smelling the beginnings of a portfolio piece!

On a side note: My body rig is acting a wee bit funny, I might have to reweight some of the joints. poo...but the face rig is working well. I was hoping to have them working well together, but no such luck. I guess I'll just try to merger in class tomorrow... that should be funnnn.....

mental ray gone wild!

woo! actually What this guy does with mentalray shaders, procedural textures (all of them!) and displacement are unholy haha. Check it out: link

Joint Adjustments

Here are images of Sleasel's adjusted joints - you can see, there are more in the neck. I also adjusted the positioning of the hip/collar joints.
Now he can shrug!Here's a general body-rigging tutorial I'm working through right now. Useful so far - gives info and useful tips about setting up joints: http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/tutorials/P-maya/T-Maya-Rigging-Rigging-a-biped-character-for-animation/ID-125/

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

Hatter Boned...hard

Currently I'm setting up IK and FK controls, so that when clicking on that little box the arm becomes IK yet selecting the joints leaves it FK. I'll have a motion test up tomorrow.

maya redesign

a.k.a: Maya and XSI's love child

this guy gives a pretty convincing proposal

Sleasel, Boned - in greater detail

I made a couple of edits since these were taken, but this will give you a general idea of how he's laid out.

The first bone in the neck and shoulder chains seemed fused together and could not move independently. Since these photos were taken, I shortened the first neck bone up from the breast bone, and added another neck bone to lend more flexibility in the neck.

I've also added a short collar bone between his breast bone and shoulder so I can lift/drop/roll his shoulders and get slightly more realistic arm motion. I'm trying to decide if these motions should be FK or IK. Any suggestions?

head with shader

scene file (280 KB)

Textures (31 MB)

I'm uploading my head with textures and skin shaders. I figured the intro class could light it and stuff and have a cool looking shader react. This is a rush job, just something to help me relax in-between facial rigging and cloth tests.

Just place textures in there respectable slots when asked. Actually when you link one, it automatically links the others, isn't maya great? :)

Cornell Box Revisited

Remember the disco version of the Cornell box I showed in class?

I increased the amount of photons considerably and pushed up the accuracy to get this much smoother result:

Both images are rendered using Global Illumination only, with caustics. The smoother one rendered in 28 seconds on my laptop, not bad eh?

Interesting.

Interesting article on how Pixar rendered the food in ratatouille

WTF?

the New head:

new head (347 KB)

Now fixed

as some of you might know I had some problems with SSS on my updated head model. now its gotten really interesting:



Take a look at that picture, the shader is exactly the same on both. Both being lit by one directional light. Both side by side. And Only ONE has SSS working. I tried other models and the SSS works. So Its not the SSS, its the model. I'm really curious to know what is going on with that model.

It gets better:



Thats the file on the blog to the left. Hatter on the right. And pretty boy in the center....
Fixed:



Now how did I do that? I didn't, Zbrush did. Figuring that Zbrush is god and that it was angry at the fact that I didn't use it for this head, I humbled myself before it and imported it in and then exported it. And you know what? It worked! The Zbrush gods be praised! It fixed my model and now I'm happy. There is nothing that program cant do. And for those who say animation, zbrush 4 is going to have a preliminary rigging system based on the spherical rigging approach it now implements. this will be exportable to maya. yay.