13 second TV gig
I’m still freelancing for now, and thought a 13 second ID is cakewalk! Well, not quite, but was doable. Can’t speak of specifics yet, but a 1 person do-all faces lots of issues I thought were easy.
Transparent mapped polygons and shadows have lots of issues.
Set shader shadow attenuation=OFF. Shadows (ray) cast are affected by angle of surface normals, so it must be off for any objects like architectural people boards.
Reflections are easy with useBackground, but shadows were a pain. I’m sure there’s a better method, but my shading experience is limited now.
useBackground for a groundplane doesn’t work, because this shader doesn’t have the common shadowAttenuation. So I get weird clipped out shadows and the ugly poly shadows. A makeshift method is use a normal shader instead, but colored. Key the color out later. It’s not great because the ground borders shouldn’t be visible in shot (curved up corners like a greenscreen set), and real uniform light for the plane is needed, since ambient/incandecence and other tricks of uniform color washes out shadows completely.
So far it’s all raytraced shadows, and soft shadows work but slooow. Although I should give mentalray a try, I need to hack my way in a short time and a test render shows mr shadows with the exact problem maya has.
A last issue I couldn’t fix with uping reflection limit or any other settings is when transparent mapped planes intersect, the shadow cast from that region is gone. So we get nice shadows with odd poly shapes cut out.
I’ve also defined an asset for “ambient occlusion” between these transparent planes. It’s really just final gather. But the boards were background elements so raytraced shadows sufficed. There are actually two ways for transparent AO (mentalray AO only supports plain geometry). One is normal FG, very easy and no special shaders. The other is the mr shader network you’d find if you google it. The FG shader seems more predictable, but I haven’t tested enough to compare their quality. I just find the simple FG has more varying shades (noise?). Theoretically AO is a white environment subset of FG, but getting FG to have clean results for sharp edge shading on white needs quite some tweaking.
Do I like freelancing? Well, it’s fun, sometimes. And exhausting, always. Don’t think of earning, because after you’ve done a few months, you’d be glad to earn a fraction of a month’s rent. I “landed” two official jobs recently, stable pay, insurance and all, but too bad this country’s foreign worker regulations make it impossible. What a shame. It’s a pretty island. If it doesn’t work out…well then it’s Singapore, Canada, EU, Hong Kong!
blue bird & vines fixed
After much encoder wrangling, the screencap cam out.
BIRD RIG: wing & leg
Shows parts of the rig, wings & legs. The challenge was the character required more cartoonish flexibility, and while working non of my colleagues made a bird rig before so I was left exploring whatever problems I’d find.
Im quite surprised why I made 60+ shelf scripts (mostly MEL) just for the BIRD. And a few arent just short tool scripts. I’d need to organize and improve the scripts/rig into a better package as usual.
An “industry standard” is often to rig/animate in Maya, but keep the feathers and its complex motions to Houdini particles. Here I’m just attempting a simple & fast maya feather method. But because most renderers slow down with numerous transparent geometries, the sw isn’t too fast. I can try tweaking the renderer if feathers can look good enough for the bird.
Next up is the facial rig, which used the majority of script tools.
VineGrowth fixed
Also fixed the vineGrowth presentation, pardon if the previous vine video caused more seizures than Pokemon!
bluebird…
i wonder why screencaps are harder for me than coding and fixing 3d? anyways. I’m organizing the old bird rig into a screencap presentation. Publicizing works is quite important, as it keeps me more organized and on task. I’m still quite surprised why I made 60+ shelf scripts (mostly MEL) just for the BIRD! And a few aren’t just short tool scripts.
Hoping this video turns out well, I’ll do a first pass into revisiting just what this bird does….stay tuned
vineGrowth screencap
Screen capture of a few tools developed for past projects
It is similar to a previous maxscript I wrote for recursive plant growth. But since maya has paintfx, the recursive part and manual curve shape designs are not coded into the version for maya. However I added more flexibility with an easier UI.
Future work: more integration with Maya’s other modules besides paintFX.
Website organized
Website! Yay cleaned up the homepage, mostly CSS details, and clean graphics (gophercg). I still prefer the minimalist feel (maybe major turn-off by making a text console style LOL), but now it’s all pleasant and tidy. As for the grid in galleries I know how to use divs/spans for the presentation, but so far my site is fine in firefox and IE, so before I decide on a pure flash site, I’m keeping em tables! Image galleries are converted to Flickr sets too.
a few weeks…
At the same time I’m trying to focus on a career path, and learning a wider range of CG/web. I don’t get my oxymoron situation. It’s something in the realm of null, 0.? and 1+. I’ve too many 0.? or half-baked skills, and some have a negative apparent value. So I’m planning to level up my website to acceptable levels, since it’s a required part of either CS or CG. And at least know how to create cloth (on character) & hair, basics of effects. Then coding and houdini could be worth training for ++ levels.
I forgot about modeling…ok maybe some more of everything…
cloth tear 02
Improved from cloth fracture 01, where the tearing was dynamic by the houdini cloth solver. In 02 I fixed the pre-fracture designs, by help of a houdini developer removing hidden fuse nodes. He filed this as bug 36556.
There is no tear/pull btw patches, but notice the left side are smaller pieces, while the right has longer strips. And I made the edge more jagged, which can’t occur if auto tearing does the breakage. It’d be nice however if I can pipe custom designs into the tear solve.
Also learned that packaged/defined nodes can be opened and allow editing (this is different from node lock). Basically change the default cloth object type.
zbrush (pics)
It’s quite weird as an effects/programmer to relearn CG modelling, especially when it’s been several years since I did extensive character/scene models. Now maybe I’m becoming a well rounded CG generalist, or maybe uping skills to extend fx ability even further, since a lot of effects do rely on understanding topology/model detail etc (more practical than supernovas and nuclear blasts?).
zbrush is pretty fun so far, but I wish to learn more about controlling topology, since it’s a bit insane to just make polys 16x denser whenever more detail in a small area or direction is needed. zbrush does surprisingly well on a laptop, but I’m worried for maya when it needs to process that poly weight.
First model in zbrush:
aweful head!!
(* 7 sided just for fun)
Initial tests with the basic Z tutorials:
Radial symmetry sculpting is very nice and takes practice. I haven’t figured out ZProjection brush. The top of a dog head is embedded onto the vase. Maybe it doesn’t work with models with concave areas respective to view projection? So it’s like a z displacement?
Move brush on the blade. I’d rather use some larger deformers like lattice, since move can distort details while moving in a nonsmooth way. The video did it pretty well, so I should try fiddling with settings and move more precisely. Handle texture I’m totally not getting, fillobject? I can’t paint color, only entire mrgb shaders, and the paint edges are poly jagged.
Later add old maya into the mix…more to learn!
(fullsized models)
CG models
new website
It’s a simple site so the challenge is more SEO and publicity.
I kind of like the logo, but I’m not sure how graphics/iconish the page should get, or keep a simplistic style (some optics research company). The contact form works now.
Akaylight Corporation
Houdini volumetric
dailies for Tuesday…
dabble in smoke. 1 clip rendered. I’ll post both when the 2nd render’s done.
There was a default volume material with no texture settings (1st clip), so I searched for a 3d texture that works like maya’s texturing in fluid.
It’s billowy smoke. I suppose it can be changed to perlin noise or others but I like the tweaked shadows+lighting now.
edit:
03 fixed motion, shadow, still a bit jittery:
02 good volumetric shadow, shading, “laughing intestine” is kinda disturbing:
01 flat aweful shading, too random:
For now I’m moving to web development. Maybe I could learn speed modeling to keep some dailies up, since every vfx takes longer timeframes to learn and develop.
