Rendering Animators Obsolete

Now that the semester is over I can safely tell you that in Maya you can actually have the computer do everything for you. Just watch this tutorial (via the Hollywood ASIFA Educators Mailing List)

UV-ing Jane, Part 1

The eyes, The EYES!

I finished the first video of what I tried to have you all play along with last Wednesday. More to come.

Ambient Occluded Kitchen

In class today I quickly showed how to create Ambient Occlusion passes, referring to this tutorial. Building upon that, here is how to use photoshop to composite the passes, giving you more control that simply multiplying them directly in Maya
To the right you see the basic lit black and white kitchen

 

Here is the Ambient Occlusion pass, using the default settings

 

Simply multiplied on top, the way too dark ambient occlusion pass makes the entire image black. Not quite, but close

 

In Photoshop, I brightened the Ambient Occlusion render using curves. This clearly reveals the noisiness (click on the image to see that in a larger picture)

 

So next I apply a smart blur to the image

 

Multiplying the images was still making it to dark, so I added the Ambient Occlusion image to the normal render. Add is called Screen in Photoshop, and I set the Ambient Occlusion layer to 22%

 

Finishing touch: changed the outside color, using the alpha channel that was saved with the tiff images

Tip of the Week:

Check out this guy's tips of the week. He's been doing it for a while, and a lot of the stuff he's pointing out is really accessible to newbs like us. This is the same guy who wrote my favorite stretchy limbs tutorials. It's a good thing to keep your eye on - I'm subscribed.

Toon Wood

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

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.