July 2008 Archives

This is better. There’s a much clearer indication of a window in the room, and the early morning light with the incandescent light in the background makes a nice primary color palette. I got rid of a lot of physically accurate yet unnecessarily distracting shadows too. I may still bring out the hand holding the toothbrush a little more because there’s not much contrast over there, but this is definitely enough to start shading. I did this with one diffuse pass that included shadows and then composited an ambient occlusion pass over it. Wish I could get a separate shadow pass that worked, but for one pass this is pretty good.What’s up with Maya’s shadow pass anyway? I can’t turn ... more

I thought it was an attainable goal. But considering how much I had to read and learn before I could get anywhere, I still made a lot of progress and I’m glad I took Monday off. I learned about area lights, something I didn’t have in Maya 3, and I learned about Maya’s shadow pass, which doesn’t work very well with mental ray (despite many wasted hours trying to get it to work). I also learned about ambient occlusion passes, which I LOVE. And I did a lot of lighting and a lot more tweaking. And there is even more tweaking to come when I get the shading done but at least the basic lights are in.My goal for today ... more

I created four shots to light and shade before SIGGRAPH, but I’ll be focusing on just one this weekend. This shot will be the basis for my promo materials. I’ll light him in this scene and then render him without the background, leaving him on a small area of tile (no step) on a white background. That should make a pretty versatile image for print. This and the other three stills will be my focus until SIGGRAPH, and hopefully only for the next week as I would still like to give people something to see before they get on the plane to LA. Beyond that it will be too late, and one week in advance of the show is REALLY ... more

The rig is almost done. I still need to add some influence objects in his fingers and shoulders to help them retain their shape when the joints bend. I also want to do a blend shape that turns his mustache up or down according to mood. I’ve hidden the extra parts here and put him in xray mode so you can see the skeleton and controls better. Did you know a potato has knees?I got desperate this weekend trying to get the rig to work and decided that one way or another I was going to get those Maya 3 files open. So I tracked down my old Maya CD (I really do keep everything) and installed it on my ... more

I used to know how to do this. In fact, I save everything; I even have my Maya files from my animation class back in 2001. So I dug them up, hoping to remind myself of how I rigged my characters. You know what? Maya 8.5 won’t open a Maya 3 file. So much for that.So I read the chapter on character rigging in my Maya book and found a couple of tutorials on the Internet. It wasn’t the in-depth training I was hoping for but it was enough to get me started. And it’s interesting, once I started organizing my models for different scenes, little things started to come back to me. For instance, I was in the middle ... more

Finally, I can check “model character” off my to do list. All the latest models are posted in the work in progress slide show, and despite the hack I put in the ActionScript the other day I still find that I have to clear my cache before the new xml file will load. Annoying. But they’re there, bunny slippers, shower cap and all.I took out the links to the old car wash, bathroom and character slide show pages, which meant updating (or deleting) links in some old entries as well. Anything that linked to the old bathroom page now links to the work in progress page instead, and one car wash page link was deleted. I’m surprised it wasn’t harder ... more

I still have to model the towel, shower cap, newspaper and step stool. The shower cap is the only one I’m worried about, but then I was worried about the mustache and I ended up doing that in 3.5 hours. It took the weekend though to do the teeth and the shoes, and that’s because I decided to learn about displacement mapping at the same time, although I didn’t use it very much in the end. So here’s an account of the last few days of modeling the details.The mustache and teeth are each single modeled surfaces. I used displacement mapping to do the lace holes on the shoes and the pattern on the hat. The shoes, like the hat, ... more

I would stick it out tonight and try to model the mustache but I’ve been missing a lot of sleep lately. I’m not sure I’ll get much more sleep tonight than I have for the last couple of months but I can at least try. If I get the mustache done tomorrow I’ll still be on schedule. Of course I also have to do the detail on the teeth and shoes. I’m thinking displacement maps for those, they’re way too complicated to model.I’m getting into the habit of crashing on the couch as soon as I get home and waking up at about 7:30. That’s not good. That’s a lot of time lost. But I obviously need the sleep so ... more

Boy do I miss having a sound booth and a library of royalty-free effects. Even in the middle of the night I have to hide in the innermost room of the house (the other bathroom) and wait for cars to pass to record even one sound. I’ve never used high pass filtering so much in my life. But I have a workable soundtrack now with a complete animatic. And no, the scream is not mine. I got it off the Internet. Not bad though. And thank God for Bose and their noise-canceling headphones or this would have all been useless.The title has become “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Potato But Were Afraid to Ask” and follows with ... more

Ok, I’m doing things a little out of order. At the beginning I figured I would do three separate projects and they most likely wouldn’t overlap. Now I’ve found a way to make two of them work together as one, and only after one of the models is already finished. That leaves me doing the storyboard in the middle of the project rather than at the beginning where it belongs. But at least I’ve done it, and it’s included in the slide show on the work in progress page I set up the other night. Now I’m going to get this pencil lead off my hands and go to bed. Tomorrow I have to figure out where I’m getting the ... more