It’s been long enough. The intention to get back to blogging, probably the most enriching things that the internet can be used for, is not as easy as it the benefit would lead one to believe. It is often the hardest these sort of things in life that have the greatest benefit that go without being utilized, but that changes now with the mother of all instigators, New Years Day.

What’s the topic of the year that is a continuation and solidification of growing interest in the previous year? What else, the ubiquitous topic across the blog-o-sphere; filtering, utilizing and leveraging the mind-numbingly viral growth of open source hardware and software, DIY, Hacktivism, Public Domain, and Creative Commons information to engage in gratuitous amounts of geekery, life/career hacking.

Expect expositions in 2012 on topics in addition to the aforementioned and the regular posts on 3d animation and tech art ranging in this list of interests:

Linux
C-Shell Scripting
Python
Arduino
Use of hobby as a way of making money
Dynamic DNS
Game Dev
Futurism
Virtual Computing

Hopefully shedding some light on some of the fundamentals will blaze trails for others that are interested to get started in the most noble of activities of the modern era, one that is being affected by movements like SOPA; developing and sharing software and media and artist entrepreneurialism.

 

How I've felt for so long about working in VFX/Anim industry.

My first project

Done!  After a few weeks of back and forth and interviews I finally landed the job of my dreams, well, for the time being.  Blue Sky has always been on the radar as a potential and it’s finally a reality.  It’s everything I could ask for in an employer and more.

Don’t think that it’s going to stop me from being active on my blog though, quite the opposite!  Well, maybe the first month or two starting now there will be a pause, but after that it will increase.  I’m super excited to learn and share knowledge with people and stay really connected and dedicated to innovating personal and industry wide workflows, tech, and of course animation.  Technical animation and tech art to be specific is what I’ll be working on in the coming months, same as usual.

Thanks to everyone that’s been involved in the process of landing this, you know who you are!  I don’t think they know yet what a valuable asset they just acquired but soon they will find out just how serious I am about the work I do and how inspired I can be!

 

Fighting the urge to be unproductive, I locked myself in the house for the past few days to get some work done on a new character TD demo.  Been under the weather anyhow and didn’t feel like doing much else, not even surf *gasp!*.  Here it is in all it’s beautiful animator friendly simplicity.  I plan on extending this demo with character animation tools.  I can’t wait to get away from creating demos and rendering video and go back to actually programming and rigging stuff!  I have so much more advanced rigging techniques to show and some that haven’t gotten to a finished stage on my characters yet so stay tuned.

Additional Credits:

This latest demo features the Kaylee rig which is provided by Alex Curtis, director of Hephaestus the latest short animation project to have my work in it and soon to be released.  More on that soon.  It shows techniques I think are in the top 5 of all rigging resources out there provided by Autodesk’s Animator Friendly Rigging series by Jason Schleifer.  Special recognition goes to Image Metrics’ proprietary facial rigging tools for the automatic setup of the control rig for the face–I worked after hours on this one.  Of course my favorite track at the moment Little Dragon’s “Feather” off the Machine Dreams album is being used.  The whole album you must listen if you haven’t already.  Last but not least, I supervised Suchan Bajracharya (@tweetBoucha ) for the goggles and hair rigging.  Follow him on Twitter for great rig tips.  Big thanks to him for helping me get done on a tight deadline!  All of this work was afterhours spending long nights at the office when everyone else blissfully went home.    Hope you enjoy!

Shot breakdown coming soon!

 

Sunday Pipeline is the way to go.  If you haven’t installed it yet, head over there, read up on it, and give it a try.  They are updating it with new scripts often.  It’s a simplified asset manager that houses everything from shaders to geometry to a script repo, and best of all, programmed in Python.

I’ll be updating this .rar from time to time now with VRay shaders from the internet and what I create or use on my own.

Sunday Pipeline Warehouse hosted by CGHijinks

All links in this post

Browser for the Asset Library

Add and Remove Assets

Create/Customize/Get Crazy!

List of package contents:

(This list is subject to change)

Directory of \warehouse\V-Ray Shaders

08/26/2011  10:29 AM    <DIR>          .
08/26/2011  10:29 AM    <DIR>          ..
08/23/2011  10:16 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Metal
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Glass
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Liquid
08/14/2011  01:02 AM             6,148 .DS_Store
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Wood
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Organic
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Flooring
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Car Paint
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Textile
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Leather
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Plastic
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Walls
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Flora
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Stone
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Ice
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Fire
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Dirt
08/23/2011  10:54 AM    <DIR>          V-Ray Toon
08/23/2011  01:51 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Basic
08/23/2011  02:33 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Light
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Ceramic
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Pavement
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Concrete
08/23/2011  10:17 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray Brick

Directory of \warehouse\Scenes

08/26/2011  10:30 AM    <DIR>          .
08/26/2011  10:30 AM    <DIR>          ..
08/14/2011  01:03 AM             6,148 .DS_Store
08/19/2011  07:28 PM    <DIR>          V-Ray
08/19/2011  08:14 PM    <DIR>          IR-Scan
08/21/2011  10:23 PM    <DIR>          Light Setup

Check Here for Updates!

Texture Library Update: Check here for the latest Warehouse

I’m providing a link to all the original textures (FBI_shaderLibrary only) that are now hosted by me.  The pipeline tool has a confirmed bug when it tries to export textures that go with the shaders.  You can also use the link provided earlier to download the original from the source, they are exactly the same as mine.  Please refer to the Chaos Group forum thread for queries regarding FBI_shaderLibrary.

A lot of the shader resources that I posted in my library probably don’t have their associating textures so here you will find them all in one place so that you can fix the shaders yourself.  I will be updating my warehouse as the tools get fixed so there’s a chance that I could fix them all pretty soon.

source textures

my textures

Quick Shader Library Update

Most of the shaders have been rebuilt with textures. I’m sharing them here:

Download my updated sunday warehouse with shader library here
More to come! Car Paint needs to be done along with most other glossy shaders. Almost there!

New version .4 of the 3DG SP tools was quietly rolled out today, it fixed the export textures on selected shader bug. Still kinda unstable after long periods of use.

Textures Fully Updated

Textures have been fully integrated into the shader library for all FBI shaders. Importing has been tested as well, but a few of the textures remain MIA so those will affect the renders. It’ll only affect a couple of the very basic shaders like Dark Hardwood.

Good news! 3DG has officially signed-off on the shader resources as being Sunday Warehouse compliant and have featured a link to this post on their blog.

11.14.11 8:53 EST: Changed host from Sugarsync to CGHijinks

I’m not paying for Sugarsync anymore so I moved the warehouse to my website for the time being. More updates to come soon now that the relocation process is over and I’m back in the swing of things at home and work.

 

A fellow classmate from a while back, Jeff Gabor, has been putting up these really interesting reels that exhibit the capturing of a performance of an animator and translating that to a character.  We in the animation biz like to call that animation.  Tried and true, it’s the best solution there is to getting characters full of life!

use password: “education”

On a serious note, take a look at this post (link below)  challenging Andy Serkis’ statements that actors deserve Academy recognition at the same time completely disregarding the role of the animation team it takes to make a character lifelike and engaging.  While I think this shouldn’t be put squarely on Andy’s shoulders, He being the mocap spokesperson and Weta both definitely should have something to say about their actions most recently displayed in a making of video that completely neglects to have any footage about animators working hard to translate and polish the performance onto the digital character.

They must have some highly pissed animators working for them. It’s also stirring up emotions of other animators who are or who have been in the same position.   I know how it feels as an animator being left out of credits and getting no recognition working at Image Metrics, again a production run completely as if the software was doing all the work.

Be sure to take a look at the video half-way through Tim’s post.

 

From Director/Animator Alex Curtis comes his debut animated short that I luckily got to work on as a freelance pro bono character rigger/td.  Here’s a work in progress reel and Kaylee the character I rigged and supervised rigging the hair and goggles with the help of my friend Suchan.  Keep in mind this demo is months old at this point and a newer one is out that is password protected so I cannot share until later.

Kaylee showin' off her moves

Stay tuned!  The final is looking good!  Should be any day now…

 

Suchan, a buddy from Nepal, just broke the independent game dev facial performance capture animation barrier.  He deserves kudos for getting it to this stage.  This would be such a valuable asset to any gaming company if he brings it to the next level or even at this stage I suspect.  Suchan is on a solo climb of Mount Mocap and while he is a base camp right now, I expect he could make the difficult summit by himself!    Nice job!

I wonder how much harder it would be to actually be able to do facial mocap from your smart phone directly to a character in Maya or Unity app without any markers, to me that’s Everest.  It is, however, a tangible goal these days for developers and all the freely available mocap tech that’s on the market these days.

 

The simple breakdown:

Concept Art
1) Concept painting in photoshop is the first step to try and figure out a solid direction. I had nothing to go on except it needed to be a sexy female which is difficult because what makes just a head sexy? A lot of fashion models have killer bodies that obviously encorporate a lot of the determining factors, so blocking out and finessing the important attributes of a desirable face is imperative and what make this exercise challenging.

2) Orthographic views and 3/4 of the type of head I was going for. It turns out that I didn’t make the design decision of sticking with a pinup style female until after I sketched the head turnaround drawing inspiration from another concept painting I liked. Thus, I use the head turnaround purely as a generic starting point. Getting it into 3d was more important at this stage than making a final decision on the character design. Sculpting tools make it easier to finalize the design anyway, at least for me.

Concept Sculpt and Texturing
3) It’s hard to really nail down a 2d design before you get it into 3d especially when you have a couple of different genres competing for your affections. I was fighting with making a supermodel or a pinup style face. Luckily Mudbox made that process easier. The final probably looks like a mashup of both.

Sculpting the head is really where I made my design decisions take on an afterlife from their inception, attempting to distill organic forms that looked more finalized.

4) Texture painting with ptex as an experimental process was useful in further exploration of the design. Since I didn’t have to fully commit and make UVs, and I already had good sculpting topology, the freedom to experiment was limitless.

Model Rigging Prep
5) Retopology of the low res mesh using Modo produced the best and the cleanest generic mesh result in the least amount of time. This simple mesh is also highly reusable as a starting point for other designs.

6) The final mesh to be rigged needs to have just enough loops for an optimal resulting deformation after skinning, most importantly the mouth followed by the eyes etcetera. The low res retop is not a good choice for good deformation except if you are trying to output a low poly game rig.

Since I was under the gun to get the model and rig done in a week or two I had to continue to refine the proportions at the same time as modeling good topology. The resulting workflow is a sculpting approach to modeling low res whereby slowly adding more loops, followed by a pass of smoothing and carving the subdivision preview available in Modo, and then stepping back down to the lower res geo, got the job done. Beware when trying this technique in Zbrush or other software because editing proportions and sculpting high res and then deleting the higher divisions will indirectly smooth the resulting mesh thereby erasing the detail. I suggest using this workflow only in Modo where you can hit Tab to toggle on an off subdivisions, Catmull Clark being the best (Shift-Tab). I have to say Modo is supreme for modeling not only for these cababilities, but also the superior advantage of quickly lighting and rendering a preview with occlusion and GI. The physical lighting makes the model feel more real with a sense of scale from cast shadows and a simple skin texture. Blemishes and undesirable defects become glaringly more obvious as well, making it easier to spot and fix.

Rigging with Joints
7) Rigging Starts with joints only with a control rig that either drives the joints directly via constraints or by constraining parent controls so that they drive groups of child controls. Some controls around the mouth are driven by SDK as well so a system of using multiple null buffer nodes is used to get proper tranformations and rotations of the controls or else there would be not so desirable or predictable results.

The weighting process is time consuming but with adequate practice and great topology like this some people can get it done in literally hours. I’m slower but that’s because I am a perfectionist when it comes to weighting.

9) The control rig is a series of stock curves constrained to the rig when the rig gets built so it’s easy to modify and save those curves for a perfectly fast result that is highly reusable.

The Osipa style face rig is preferred a lot by animators and the next demo will go over how I use multiple styles of UI on the same rig and the tools to generate said controls.

Subsequent demos will include facial poses and blends and making this rig work with both also known as a hybrid rig. The advantage of poses made with joints only are great because its less computationally expensive but blends are necessary for folding, wrinkling, and some minor correctives.

 

Getting Started with Nurbs Curves

Download the actual curves if you wanna try it out yourself!

Bevel Plus Options

Bevel Plus Possible Issues

from pymel.core import *

for b in range(len(ls(type='bevelPlus'))+1):
    if b == 0: continue
        bevnode = PyNode('bevelPlus' + str(b)
        setAttr(bevnode+'.width', .009)
        setAttr(bevnode+'.depth', .010)
        setAttr(bevnode+'.extrudeDepth', 2.7)
        setAttr(bevnode+'.polyOutExtrusionSamples',5)
        setAttr(bevnode+'.polyOutCurveSamples',25)

for b in range(len(ls(type='bevelPlus'))+1):
    if b == 0: continue
        bevnode = PyNode('bevelPlus' + str(b)
        setAttr(bevnode+'.width', .008)
        setAttr(bevnode+'.depth', .010)
        setAttr(bevnode+'.extrudeDepth', 2.7)
        setAttr(bevnode+'.polyOutExtrusionSamples',5)
        setAttr(bevnode+'.polyOutCurveSamples',11)