http://www.supercrumbly.com/3d.php?sid=207#.VzTjo_krJhF
Alec asked us to have a look into these two automated Rigging Systems:
Mixamo:
I uploaded a retopologised sculpt of mine and looked at the animations available. They gave me a laugh!
http://www.supercrumbly.com/3d.php?sid=207#.VzTjo_krJhF
Alec asked us to have a look into these two automated Rigging Systems:
Mixamo:
I uploaded a retopologised sculpt of mine and looked at the animations available. They gave me a laugh!
Fantasia (1940).
The Abyss
The Prince of Egypt
The mill did visual fx for gladiator in london. They mostly work on adverts.
MPC film fx reel.
http://www.moving-picture.com/reels/our-reels/
http://www.moving-picture.com/reels/our-reels/film-fx-reel
Lorenzo Lavatelli- effects technical director:
Art of destruction fx guide.
podcast- brave.
NCloth
My samples:
This is better to watch in HD as the particles are so small and barely noticeable. I wanted to get a firefly effect but it needs tweaking.
Ambient pass: flat colour. create an ambient light. bring ambient shade right down.
Direct light pass: just lights
Occlusion: change samples to change resolution. increase max distance if it doesn’t have the right spread.
Reflection: reflection of table etc.
Specular:
Benefit of having specular and reflection passes: can change the opacity later on or increase it. Separate specular pass is good to have for control over highlights.
Benefit of occlusion: good to have instead of final gather.
Multiply occlusion and ambient together. multiply rgb above it. direct light, linear dodge on top of occlusion and ambient. duplicate direct light on top of itself and change opacity. creates some more shading. set the reflection to screen it or add linear dodge. set specular to screen as well.
Order:
rgb_matte, specular, reflection, direct light, occlusion, ambient, beauty pass.
Create new layer, black and white gradient, from light window to dark room, multiply or overlay on top in photoshop to cheat some lighting.
If you want to change the colour of something you can replace it with an alpha mask to change levels or hue etc.
separate character shadow: assign material, use background, gives shadow in alpha channel
Add light to shot in photoshop
(Rendered in maya)
Change Colour of object after rendering
How to render a character separate to background
Compositing
IK vs FK
IK Pros
IK Leg Setup
2 IK solvers in maya:
Single-chain solver- simple solution that drives all joints by the single chain
Single- plane solver- allows control of the overall joint chain orientation- best for arm and leg ik systems.
IK legs are more common, FK leg animation is used only when a character is off the ground (swimming, flying, falling).
IK chain can be used on a joint chain with 3 or more joints. In a single plane solver it is common to control the rotation plane with a pole vector constraint (for animating the elbow or knee orientations).
Tutorial:
Class:
Create nurb circle- hold v to snap to vertices. hold d while in translate and hold v to snap to joint. freeze transform and delete history when done.
have 3 separate groups for geo, joints and controls.
create ik before parenting nurbs to rig. (ik between leg and ankle).
rotate plane solver- select first joint (top of leg) and ankle joint- can rotate without leg moving. parent ik handle (ik_leg), to under controls group. do this from ankle to ball of foot and from ball of foot to toe to have more control.
display animation- ik handle size, increase if its too small.
Use up and down keys to move up and down the hierarchy joints.
Create locators for heel, ball and toe- (can scale down in channel box). parent under foot control after snapping them to bottom of foot in areas. select the 3 iks (leg, ball toe) then ball and toe and parent to heel so heel is controlling the rest. Next- rotate toe locator (select ball loc, ik ball, ik leg and ik toe under the toe loc). can do toe swivels now etc. next- rotate ball of foot. move ik leg under bal loc.
To create control option in channel box, create attribute under edit options in channel box. windows, animation editors, connection editor (or use node editor to connect).
When animating try to use references. Can import the reference into another camera in maya. Use the sound as a guide as well. Any ambient sound may help with timing.
If you want to use Mery Rig in Maya 2016-
Windows>settings/preferences>preferences>animation>evaluation>DG
Stepped vs Spline Animation
Spline pros: ease in/ease out, walk cycle (simple animations), more organic, quicker to see how animation will work
Stepped pros: easier to plan ahead, good to work out complicated rigs and characters, good to work out timing, less random keys
Spline cons: get lost in the keys, messy, easy to get distracted by inbetween keys, more difficult to work cleanly.
Stepped cons: can look robotic, swapping to spine tangents early causes floaty timing.
Cameras: Create 2, ref cam, action cam, (go to refcam, import movie from sourceimages can change to image sequence instead
File- create reference file. can update.
Ref videos: Need slight pauses so the audience can catch up.
TweenMachine plugin: drag to shelf as mel script. changes averaging between two key poses quickly.
Manual Process | tweenMachine |
---|---|
Select all controls on the character | Select all controls on the character |
Change interpolation on all keyframes to linear | Left-click on frame 7 in the timeline |
Left-click on frame 3 in the timeline | Adjust a slider in the tweenMachine interface to -70 |
Middle-click on frame 7 in the timeline | |
Set a key | |
Change interpolation on all keyframes to stepped |
View Camera tools: grease pencil tool– can draw out movements
Planning Animation:
Automated Rigging Systems:
https://www.mixamo.com/workflows/maya
http://www.supercrumbly.com/3d.php?sid=207#.Vt7fepOLSRs
Mixamo– online rigging process- look into it.
Jesse Baumgartner: Engy’s invention blocking passes. Uses stepped technique for blocking animation.
Billygoat entertainment: HM SPIFFING walk cycle tutorial.
Alec showed us this tutorial on the varieties of textures and settings built in to maya. He told us to play around with our buoy models from last semester, to pick one and to texture it. He also gave us a HDR image to add detail to the reflectivity of the buoy.
Blinn: Specular shading-
IPR:
Adding HDR image for lighting: mental ray tab in render settings, mi reflection blur, under default, attributes.
Sampling HDR images with simple spheres:
I plugged the fractal into the bump mapping to add detail, plugged noise into the eccentricity, and played with specular colour and highlights.
I think it turned out pretty well, but I don’t have some extra detail of the buoy itself.
I enabled the colour management but it looks very shiny.
Enable colour management in settings under preferences.
Alec’s note:
Maya 2016 has colour management turned on by default, for a linear lighting & rendering workflow, which is awesome (no more fiddling with gamma nodes).
Though if you change the default openEXR file format in mental ray’s common render settings, then make sure to to turn on the ‘Apply Output transform to Render’ tickbox under colour management, so that your batch renders are in the correct colour space.
apply output transform to renderer if you want to keep colour in render view
render settings: Common tab, file output, image format, open exr.
Transferring UVs onto another object:
Ratio of UV snapshots:
For games: Textures all baked onto one map.
High poly sculpt: bake high poly onto low poly. Have UVs done beforehand. Ambient occlusion on uvs baked out helps separate objects in UV snapshot.
Use adjustment layers in photoshop to adjust these.
x-normals doesn’t load all the detail. Mix and match between maya and zbrush.
Texturing timelapse video:
Some nice handpainted textures:
http://www.deviantart.com/morelikethis/artists/410053908?view_mode=2
My progress unwrapping a biped model alec gave us:
Peter Cooper came to talk to us in class and gave us some neat tips when working with zbrush:
some of his work: https://www.uartsy.com/users/peter-cooper
I love how he lays out some of his pieces along with references:
I created this sample sculpt during his class from a previous sketch of mine:
It was really fun to get back into zbrush again since the last project, but I also realised how little I know still about it! I am eager to learn and hopefully I’ll be learning more and more zbrush because it’s what I most enjoy at the moment.