First time using a facial rig

Decided to have a go with a facial rig. I just used phoebe as my model.

I used the speed facial rig found for free on creative crash

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/speed-facial-rig-enhance-your-character


Found it interesting and challenging to do, especially as the guy doing the rapid rig tutorial wasn't speaking english(but I got there in the end).

It ended up being a combination of bones and blendshapes.

I then tried to emulate some footage from a film.

I'm thinking it might be a good idea if I try doing a 30 second club animation to get myself into practice, because my animating is still not that great.

UV unwrapping in blender

Today I was going to model a plane in blender and unwrap it but it turns out I've spent the time just learning how to UV unwrap.

Because blender handles its materials and textures in a way thats a bit different than maya, I was unable to work out how to simply put a reference image on a plane. That's why I've spent today working out how UV's work.

The problem was that a lot of things in maya happen automaticly so you don't think about them whereas in blender it has those properties but you have to turn them on! For example syncing between the UV's and the 3D model. And to cut the UV's you have to mark the edges which the equivalent of cutting, although handily you can unmark edges too so its not like maya where you have to stitch it back together if you accidentally cut the wrong thing.

I found this tutorial helpful;

http://blendersushi.blogspot.co.nz/2014/04/texturing-uv-editing-and-3d-paint.html

and this you tube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ha2rFR6qO0

And pretty much this is all I've done today....learn how to unwrap a sphere(crappily but it was only so that I would learn the tools)

Beginners tutorial in Blender

I've decided to diversify in my software so that I'm comfortable in using all types.

Today I had a look at blender using this beginners tutorial which gave me some flash backs for when I first started learning maya.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y__uzGKmxt8

I made a cup;

I got excited when I saw that there was a maya preset for the controls but they turned out to be too buggy so I'm using the blender hot keys.

It all seems to be pretty much the same except the rendering seems to be a bit different. For one thing I don't know what renderer it uses although I'm assuming it's just its own one. You can also create lights by emitting out of a plane(you can do this with maya but its not standard practice) and its common to blend materials(once again, it can be done in maya with particular materials but it isn't standard practice if you're just using blinns etc.)

I'm probably going to do a few more tutorials in blender to see how different the rigging and animation is. I think it's valuable to learn blender in case I don't have the funds to use maya in something commercial.

After blender I'm going to move onto 3DSMax so that I can do architectural stuff.

Painting skin-practice

Decided to continue the blog despite graduating because I still do study in my own time.

I noticed it was hard for me to paint people when asked by Mosely to complete concept art for him so I decided I would get better at this.

I have a lot of trouble with skin so I sought out skin tutorials online, I found several;

http://toyskunk.deviantart.com/art/Tutorial-Painting-Skin-in-PS-100328544
http://navate.deviantart.com/art/SKIN-a-tutorial-Part-2-145159387

I also found this site which I'm thinking of doing some of the tutorials

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/advanced-digital-painting-tutorials/

I'm also sketching faces every day because this was something that I have trouble with. I'm getting better but they still turn out wonky. I'm doing this by sketching faces from films.

Which is why my skin practice is a wonkily drawn Josh Brolin(No country for old men). Not bad for no reference though.

For this I used the ToySkunk tutorial from deviantart(above)

Here's a progression reel

compositing 13

I composited shot 13 with what I had. Unfortunately because my renders were interupted several times over the last 3 days(plain bad luck) I've got problems with parsed files and I can't go and grab the originals off the computers because I've had to switch computers so much. So phoebe doesn't have a body in the last shot and there's all sorts of ridiculousness going on with the turkey but at this stage I just wanted to hand it in. I'll have to polish up all the mistakes later.

Other stuff I modelled

I modelled the Pacheco-Sjobergs very roughly because I thought I'd have a go at getting them in the scenes. Now I know that I don't have enough time so they aren't going to be used. Same goes for the interior of the train carriage which I modelled various books and furniture etc. I thought I'd put them up on the blog even though I'm now not using them.

deadline

deadlines approaching, still not going to have a lot of stuff handed in. Shot 7 can be composited together, still not happy with that one though because I tried a different light on phoebe that didn't work out and the vue render didn't animate well(scale problems) so I'm just dragging a frame in after effects.

I'm trying to get shot 12 and 13 done. I had trouble with the dress again in shot 13, always the right sleeve. I've changed the shape of it slightly because I noticed it collided with her shoulder, we'll see if that fixes the problem. If that was the case then I'll be able to fix the shirt in shot 7 too.

Shot 12 I'm using the bound dress instead of a cloth sim. I have to have the dress being pulled up by the dragon, I tried this with the ncloth dress and used a block inside the dragons mouth that was attached to the dress with a point constraint. Unfortunately the movement in the shot is so violent that I couldn't keep the dress from ripping off so I decided to used the bound dress instead. I'm going to use the bones in the bussle to shape the dress like its being pulled up.

Creepy food that isn't food

 Happily the dragon is rendered out for the last scene although the feathers on the nose get overblown in the light unfortunately and there is a weird film grain look which is apparently caused by the area light I used. I'm just going to hand it in as it is at the moment and maybe rerender it after the due date as it is a whopping 1711 frames long-just over a minute so it takes a while to render.

Been modelling the 3 dishes that the dragon vomits up for the last scene. I used skin texture taken from the back of my hand to create the texture of cooked meat which is really creepy. Also this is the only time I've ever had to make a bump map more extreme.

Progress

Doing ok so far although I think I'm still not going to have enough time to do the first scene and the last scene.

All the moving vue backgrounds have been completed. Unfortunately I had to do them in preview quality so that they would render in time (I have a scene that is 1258 frames long) although I'm hoping they'll look ok once they've been blurred and desaturated. Maya seems to be a bit funny with vue, I had to bring a camera in from vue and imitate the camera moves made in maya(easy enough because I just copied the keyframes) as opposed to using the original maya camera in vue.

The dragon has been rendered out in all scenes(except the last shot which I don't know if I'll have enough time to do) and is looking pretty good.

Compositing the dragon and the backgrounds is a bit of a laugh-If I do this in nuke it reads the indirect lighting as bright green instead of the alpha but reads the vue backgrounds perfectly. If I take them into an adobe it reads the alpha on the dragon perfectly but puts a black bar(alpha) through the vue backgrounds;

I modelled the exterior of the train and I'm now currently rendering the train passes. I just modelled two carriages and then reversed them and changed the textures to make it look like all the carriages are different. Its been pretty quick animating the train, I simply parented them to the closest bones in the dragon so that it imitates the dragons movements exactly. I'm going to reuse the windows etc. for the interior if I get time to do the interior scenes.

Now that I got the exterior train out of the way I'm sorting out Phoebe's dress. I was having a bit of trouble with it(she popped out of her sleeves) so I had a look at my cloth report that I did earlier this year. I found out I made the stretch resistance on Earnest 200 which might have been the problem(phoebe was only on 50 which I thought was excessive at the time), I also had higher iterations. 

Animation/Bones of essimer

My original plan of just rendering out the shots in the middle of my animatic if I ran out of time has screeched to a halt because apparently this won't be enough animation to pass the assignment(although it does not specify how much time in the outline). Now I'm attempting to make the full 3.30 minutes in less than 3 weeks. I am doubtful that I will be able to managed this but I'm still going to try.

Have sorted the issue out with the rendering-Rachel has changed the lighting so that it is renderable within the time frame. The problem was that I was rendering almost all shadow due to the shadow angle which gave a nice warmth(the shadows were brown) but increased the render time as well as having 3 directional lights. Rachel put in green indirect lighting which brings out the colour of the dragon as well as having a single brown directional light which gives the same effect as the lighting I had before but with a fraction of the render time.

So now I'm rendering out all the dragon shots. A few I'm going to have to re-render because the first pass the feathers went through the body(I didn't put a rigid body on the dragon because in most cases the feathers are stiff enough not to collide with the body).

I'm rendering out the feathers on the wings and the feathers on the body and face in seperate passes as I could not seem to get those feather systems to work in the same scene(I think Maya might have a limit to how many feather systems it can calculate at one time).

I also spent most of yesterday working out how to connect the maya camera to a camera in Vue which I managed to do successfully-so soon I'm going to be able to do the moving shots of the sky rendered out(although at the moment it's not priority). Although for some reason I can't move the camera up higher in vue without it going black-I think this might be a scale problem between maya and vue but I can think of a few ways that I can troubleshoot this.

I only need to animate one more shot with the dragon in it, the long one at the end which is 1711 frames long. Phoebe needs to be animated in two of the dragon shots before I start the cloth sim but the major shot of phoebe on top of the dragon has been animated and will soon be ready to be cloth simmed and rendered.

A lot of modelling and rigging still needs to be done, this is why I think I might complete the full 3.30 minutes. The inside shot of the train-I'm modelling small things like bottles, jugs, windows etc. and using lattice deformers to create variations. This technique of modelling small componants that you assemble later like lego is the same technique we used on the buildings on essimer as well as on the bone ship. A rough exterior needs to be modelled for two shots. It doesn't need to be too detailed because its moving and in the distance.

Philipe, Hanna and Maria need to be modelled, rigged and weighted. I managed to model Philipe in a day a couple of days ago so Hanna and Maria won't take too long either hopefully. I'm also going to use the human IK. The weighting I won't worry about too much because there is a very limited amount of movement that these characters do in the shot they are in.

Bones of Essimer has also made a come-back, we got in trouble for not completing any of the shots so now we're slapping it all together, not with much success as the computers keep crashing and the tracking won't solve on some shots etc, to be frank I think it should be abandoned so that we can work on our personal projects-at least that way we might have some way of passing the paper.

Unfortunately I'm rendering out the bone ship which I'm not too happy about because it means everybody thinks I'm a total asshole for taking up all the computers. Its going to take several days because there's about a thousand components so I'm going to have to waste time travelling to SIT over the next few days. I pretty much have one shot to render it, there's no way I'm going to have time to render it if there's any mistakes with the shadows(I've made a mock up ship and put a black hole on it to get the shadows to fall on the individual componants)

Rendering issues

Trying to render out the dragon scenes and running into some problems, they're taking too long although they look beautiful. I'm currently expiramenting with rendering using maya software to see if I can render it out that way.

Camera in the ship shot

I've had to change the camera movement in the ship shot to get osseus in, here's the result so far;

getting all the feathers on the dragon(at the same time)

I've bound and weighted the dragon. Because it was a very simple rig and the dragon is such a simple shape it didn't take very long(although it was very annoying doing the mouth which I modelled closed).

Now I'm trying to see if I can put all the feathers in the same scene without the computer crashing. To my surprise the computer handles them very well. Here's the first attempt where I've posed the dragon to see if the feathers move properly;

Some mistakes that I've made is that I forgot to freeze the feathers on the left side of the head so it still had a -1 value. This made the feathers on the head on the left side of the head move in the reverse direction off the head.

I'm happy with the way the body feathers stayed on the body but the feathers need to be stiffer because they stick out too much at the moment because of gravity and the movement of the dragon.

I'm thinking(or hoping) that the problem that I'm having with the wings is that I forgot to attach the feathers to the body.

After these issues are sorted out I'm going to work on having different coloured feathers. By the end I'll probably have 7 or 8 hair systems in the scene.

I've also been working on the bone ship but I've ceased posting pictures because the files are getting so large that I can't render them out without crashing the computer.

Yesterday me and Sarah were trying to get the camera from the end shot with ossues into the maya scene. The problem is that the scale from Nuke to maya is wrong and I can't shrink the camera movement on maya's end as far as I can tell. Sarah was trying to help on the nuke end by messing with the scale of the camera and putting a distance inbetween the tracking markers but it still imported into maya the same.

Even when I decided to scale up the model in maya it didn't seem to work, weirdly the camera seemed to scale up with the model (?!)

This is a big deal because the camera has to be about .002 of its current scale to work to the scale of the bone ship, at the moment it seems positively clumsy and lurchy  because it is so large.

This is extremely aggrivating as it would be possible for me to start rendering if we had the camera movement finalised.

Testing feathers with blendshapes

having a little bit of trouble with reversing the feathers(they're originally on the right side of the face). This is just a test to see how the feathers react with wrinkling the nose.

update on feathers

here's the finished version of the feathers on the face of the dragon, they're a little longer now. I still need to sort out the feathers on the nose in theory.

Otherwise I've modelled the dragon and have been starting to sort out the feathers on the wings. I spent all day yesterday trying to fix a twist on the feathers. I still don't know the exact reason why the feathers have started doing this as I managed to keep them straight when attaching feathers to other objects. Now I'm just going to go through individual folicles and correct the twist that way, there's few enough flight feathers on the wings to justify me doing it this way.

continueing character concepts

finished doing silhouettes for the remaining characters, now I can do some character portraits

wing tests, picture of the feathers on the face of the dragon

Just thought I'd post a picture as to where I'm at with placing the feathers on the face of the dragon. I have to sort out the feathers on the snout and in some other problem areas. To get it looking like this I have to have two hair systems, one on the top and one on the bottom with different clump twist values;

Otherwise I tried another way of making a wing system. Instead of using a script like wing creator I've actually just rigged up a wing that uses nhair feathers much like what I've done with the face of the dragon. The advantage with this is that I don't have to have a complex rig for the wings because I don't have to control the feathers, this is left up to the simulation;

I actually like the way it turns out in playblasts;(I had to reduce the quality some to get it to upload to the blog)

Links to feather tutorials and scripts and expiramenting with own rig

Pretty much figured out the feathers for the dragons head so now I'm looking at how to do the wings, I'm going to put the tutorials I find here so that I have all my info/links in one place

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xThiBnEyPs

script called wing creation tool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1bQmmPEHNM

Wing creator script

I've also tried making a mock up of a rig, I just wanted to see what happened when I used smooth bind on a wing with the feathers joined;

didn't work out too well, here's a playblast;

messing with it later I found out that the rig isn't actually too bad, it's just that I wasn't rotating the controllers

Tried having a look at the bald eagle rig in creative crash but I can't see the bones on it so I can't figure out how it works. It looks as though the feathers system is really complex too.

Odds and sods

Been up to this and that lately. Have been continueing trying to make the feathers sit right on the dragons head but it's a hard slog because even though there are scripts etc. there isn't a real magic bullet. So instead I'm methodically looking at all my tests and taking the bits that I like from some of them and putting them together then working on the problem areas deleting out individual curves and putting more in where needed.

Otherwise I'm working on my water report which is time consuming so while I've been waiting for it to simulate I did some concept art for Mose, one of his characters haley;

Further refined one of the concepts and made variations on it;

BLendshapes

Finished my blendshapes for phoebe. I should probably start to rig and weight her now.

Mountain

Been sorting out the spires and making the mountain on the top of the bone ship. I'm not sure if its better to arrange the towers in one file then bring them in as a reference or bring in one tower in and arrange them. I'm doing the former at the moment because I don't want to have to place them in the final file. I made the mountain by doing a cloth simulation then texturing it in mudbox. I had a go at making the mountain in vue but it was too much of a hassle.

Otherwise I've been helping Mosely out with the art for his project;

front of the ship finished

I've been doing some artwork for Mosely's project and working on the bone ship today;finally finished the front of the ship;

finished modelling dress

Finished modelling all Phoebe's clothes. been having some fun with some quick cloth sims. The shirt really doesn't want to stay underneath the corset, I'm probably going to have to give it some more space inbetween.

Update on bone ship

I've been out at lornville helping with moving sets and digging dirt for most of the week, had no clean clothes within 3 days. Decided to continue work on bones of essimer stuff, I've been continuing work on the bone ship. Unfortunately I still havn't finished the front of the ship. I spent another 4 or 5 hours yesterday modelling the one off peices like the mouth of the ship.I've been making use of the animation motion path tool and the animation snapshot to make the chains wrapping around the skull at the front of the ship.

Heres the current iteration;

Dress modelling

Currently modelling the dress and it's going well. I'm using the cloth simulation to help place things and gather things.

front of the ship

Been working on the front of the ship again, finally finished the skull, I had to model it again because the original file corrupted. It's taken around about 6-7 hours to sort it out

Concept art

Forgot to put the concept art up here, these were made a couple of months ago when I was pitching the idea