Wow! Time flies. I haven't updated this blog in a while. I've been working on lots of things, teaching, doing freelance animation, technical editing my former professor's book (which you should totally pre-order!), and also modeling random things and writing in my spare time. I'm currently working on modeling a 1962 Mercedes Benz (in Maya using NURBS only), so I'll try to post that when it's finished. I'd really like to have one come to think of it, and I do, as one of my students said, in the 'imagination land' that is Maya. LOL
What the hey, I'll share with you the work-in-progress: here's a test render I did earlier today. It's not finished and I see things that need to be fixed, and I haven't done all of the interior yet. As you can see I've been playing with HDRI maps (the lighting still needs more work) ;)
This is my first attempt at animating in Flash (version CS3). It's a simple and cartoony spider building a web. I would like to do a more detailed version now that I understand how flash works. I would also like to do a different aspect ratio next time. I accidentally went with the default size and would prefer to work at 720x480.
If you know me, you know I'm primarily an animator and rigger, but I decided that I like modeling too and would like to improve. That is why I started modeling things for TurboSquid. I think my modeling has improved immensely since I began doing that and so the other day I decided to model a human. I've started it and when I have the preliminary geometry done, which I'm hoping will be later today or tomorrow, I'll post a render.
I modeled something pretty cool today, an oriental fan! It's available for sale at turbosquid.com. I'm very happy with how it turned out. It took me a while to work out how I was going to get the paper part of the fan to deform and I tried two methods before finally figuring out what worked. Check it out, there are .mov files over at TurboSquid that show it deforming.
After posting the instructions on how I made the old facial rig I designed, I decided that I would re-design it. I had already taken some of the 11 Second Club's models for my students to rig, since they're such nice models and work so well for animation and facial animation. The geometry is also clean and simple enough that they're easy for my students to work with. I like the model that they designed for the club, and after stripping the rig out of the model in Maya, I exported the model as an .obj to 3ds Max.
I started it by adding some shapes where I wanted deformation, I added some helpers and constrained them using position constraints and look-at constraints. I liked how it was moving, and then I walked away and slept on how I was going to hook all that up to some kind of interface that would make it easier for an animator to work with. The next day, yesterday, I got back to work on it, and had the brilliant idea of using a Position List with multiple XYZ Positions instead of using a ton of helper nodes. That in and of itself made the rig much smaller, with much fewer nodes.
If you're interested in more details about how I did this, some of it is similar to the tutorial I posted earlier, or just drop me a line.
As some of you may know, I'm currently seeking employment. This morning I received an email from Collision Studios. They wanted me to take a rigging and animation test and had sent me a shark model to do just that with. They said they send the test to all candidates. No better way to get me to work! I had it rigged in about two hours, if that, and started animating on it right away. I finished animating it about dinner time and decided to make a playblast of it and put it on my blog.
I left my computer to render last night and it was finished this morning. I've uploaded the rendered version to youtube. The only problem with youtube is the quality is a bit worse than if I hosted the video myself because they're compressing an already compressed video, but I would probably eat up all of my storage space on my website if I hosted every video there. I also can't really get the quality any better (i.e. uncompressed) because of our internet connection. We live way out in the country and all we have is mobile wireless, no cable, no DSL. So, it is what it is :)
I didn't get all of it rendered, but did get the last half done so I thought I would go ahead and post it. I merged the last rendered half with the first portion as a playblast so you can see the rig. I will post the fully rendered version tomorrow.
Youtube has some strange artifact-ing going on in a couple of frames, and that is not there in the original. I guess it's their compression. I would try to upload it again, but we have a fairly slow mobile wireless connection so I'll just live with it.
After all that rendering I found a problem with the back leg, it's a bit wrong. I'm going to work on it some more, and maybe get the animation posted tonight. Maybe I'll just post the playblast as soon as I'm done, and then I can post the rendered version whenever it's finished. I'll see, our internet is being really slow today. I didn't see the problem with the leg until I saw the rendered version, I think the shadows accentuated the problem. It's a good thing, I want it to be right.
So, check back later today (or maybe tomorrow) for the animation.
I've finished a walk cycle for the giraffe, and I was hoping to post it tonight, but that ain't going to happen. It's after midnight and there's still over a hundred frames to render. I will post it tomorrow, hopefully early in the day, and then I can get back to work on the temple room that I designed.
I thought that I would start a blog to keep up with what I'm working on at the moment. I decided last night to model a temple, I had an idea in my head of how it should look, but then my computer went a bit crazy, and I had to run check disk. Long story short, I had some bad sectors on the hard drive, it seems to have recovered my files and everything seems fine, for now anyway. I guess I need to look into getting a new hard drive.
I have been updating my website with what I'm working on, but it's a bit cumbersome to edit the html code every time I want to update, blogger is so much easier.
The latest thing I've posted on my website is a rotation of the giraffe model I did.
