Oldies but Goodies: Part I

I've been trying to find some of my older animations. I have a lot of rotoscoping and converted 16mm films I did in college I've been trying to find.  Artsy fartsy stuff. Some of the ones I've been trying to find are unfortunately, still on film. Others are lost on some buried hard drive.  As I find them, I'll post them.

Some of the ones I DO have, though, are some of my later Emerson creations. I came from a more 2D background, hand-drawn animation and scratching the emulsion off of film. Things like that. I made some charcoal illustrations for a Jaques Prevert poem.  Though the perspective is a little off on some of them, I still like the piece overall.

I hope you enjoyed that. I enjoyed getting my hands dirty over it.

The next semester, my last at Emerson, I got more into 3D. I had taken pretty much all of the classes Emerson offered at the time, so I took the capstone course, where you work on an individual project for the entire semester.  It was like producing a BA Practicum project, only it was in the New Media department. At the time, New Media and 3D was very VERY new at Emerson.

I have an addiction to incorporating tangible art into my projects. I guess it makes me feel like even though there's nothing in the 3D generated world that's actually real, there's still something I can still see as tangible. It gives it more of a feeling of texture to me. I love texture. Charcoal, watercolor paper...hey, even elephant skin. It's something tangible to touch in a totally un-physical realm.

So what did I do? Everything is 3D, but everything is also modeled and textured from an object I physically painted and made. I hand painted all the textured seen.

In terms of the content, the world through a child's eye is an amazing thing. There is innocence, and they (typically) have an idealistic way of seeing things that goes beyond what you see with the naked eye.  Everyday things become extraordinary.  BUT...when children get older and turn into adults they loose that way of looking at the world. And that little tragedy is represented here as a metaphor: a pop-up book. Enjoy.

FINALLY. The "Henry" Rig

I started modeling Henry last summer. It didn't take me too long to actually model him, I used Maya for the actual model and did some fine tuning in ZBrush.

It took me about three months to texture and sculpt the displacement/normal maps.  I was working on several other projects at the time and painted for about 2-3 hours a day for several days per week. Very pain staking but I love the result. I plan on having a nice print of him displayed in the next CDIA gallery showing.

The rigging. Oh, the rigging.  Simple enough, he has a typical IK set-up in the legs, spline set-up with clusters in the spine.  The trunk has preset positions that can be accessed from the main trunk control, very much like a finger control set-up on a bi-ped rig.  The most unique part of the rig is the two hair follicles, one in the belly, one on the tail, that allow that geometry to hang and sad with the body.

The ears are the only thing I would change. I used soft bodies controlled by a series of joint chains throughout the ear.  It was very temperamental, more then other kinds of dynamics, it was time consuming, and I don't think they look as good as they could. Looking back, I would have used nCloth.

As a rig overall, its functional! Take a look:

The many Hairs of my younger self.

The BANE of my existence.

Yeah. Dynamics.

So why the heck do I insist on using them?




I made my 'little girl' character a while back to put in a scene with Henry, the African elephant I made.  I hope to have an entry about specific rigging techniques I used for Henry, but for now...the girls freaking hair.

I wanted to use myself (a much younger self) as a reference.

Everyone say "AAAAAWWWWWWWWWWW".

Okay, whatever. I'm still ginger.  Now when I first made her, I wanted to use hair.  I knew I wanted it short, so I rigged up fur that is controlled by hair particles. I should never have done that.  While it moves and floes more realistically, it was very  hard to control. She looked like a monkey.  Even though I made the geometry of her body a rigid body so it couldnt pass through, it still did, making it look like some kind of Curly thing from the Three Stooges (original please, I'm not touching this 'remake' with a 10-foot pole).  The result is....yeah...

No.


I'm not putting that on a modeling/texturing/dynamics reel.  No way!  Solution: Game Hair. Now why didn't I think of that in the first place?

I love painting textures in ZBrush and Photoshop.  The girl's face is painted entirely in ZBRush. Even Henry is sculpted and painted in ZBrush. Henry took about 2-3 hours a day for 2 months to do.  For the girl, I painted a patch of hair in Photoshop, threw it on an alpha card, and sculpted her hair out of alpha cards. SO MUCH EASIER. Genius.  Here's one of the links I used as a tutorial:

http://www.paultosca.com/varga_hair.html

The other one I used, which went into more detail about what custom brushed and painting techniques to use in Photoshop, I forgot to bookmark like an idiot.  But if you google "paint hair" and "Photoshop" you'll get tons of references. Just use whatever will help  you most for the project you are trying to accomplish.

Well, here is the final product:

Tea Time Redeux

It has been some time since I visited my tea room. I decided to come back to it to make some improvements.  Now, it should be known, since I'm going to be using this piece in my generalist reel that when I modeled the assets in this piece, they were intended to be more cinematic.  This means that they have way more geometry then they should. There is no way that I would want these assets to be used in a game.  And that is my only regret.  Had I extra time to do a major overhaul of this piece, I would remodel the assets so they only have as much geometry as needed.

That said, I did add some dynamics to the scene.  I have a reputation of wanting to throw dynamics into everything, which is the reason for most of my head-bashing later on.  In this particular instance, I added steam to the teapot and water pouring out to make the matcha.  Again, because of time restraints, they aren't as polished as I would like, but they serve their purpose.

The best part of finishing this scene (worst, really) was when I rendered the beauty with all of its dynamics.  I spend quite some time getting the water to pour out of the pot in a believable way, and I think my attention to detail for the pour itself took away from what happened AFTER the pour. Because, when the teapot tilts back to stop the flow, this happened:

Haha, yeah. Water isn't supposed to splash upwards and defy gravity.  Unfortunately, I discovered this like....they DAY BEFORE I needed the final product.  Like I said, big time constraint.  What's a girl to do?

Playing with the dynamics and re-rendering the entire segment again was out of the question.  I needed a quick and dirty solution that would be believable.  The problem area was only in the last 100-ish frames, so I decided to only re-render THOSE FRAMES...but without any dynamics. It wouldn't take long to do because, well, no dynamics.  In post I put the two layers on top of each other.  Then I got my rotoscope on in After Effects and masked out the crazy-gravity-defying-water so all you can see is the clean, dynamics-free layer.  Phew!  Not the best way to solve the problem, but it was the best I was going to get in the time I needed it.

So enjoy my traditional Japanese style tea house, complete with self propelled matcha set!

Alive at the Smithsonian: Elephant Becoming Alive

The idea from this wasn't actually from the movie "Night at the Smithsonian". No. Growing up in D.C. one of my favorite places to go to this day is the Smithsonian (its for that reason that I'm shocked and outraged at having to actually pay for museums). I loved to imagine what it would be like to see all those creature in the Natural History alive.

Hence the inspiration for this piece. I've been animating this piece for about a month. I used my 'Henry' rig, which you can see him in progress in some of my older posts. I hope to have a video about his rig posted soon. I'll admit I'm not proud of the little girl's rig. I did it very quickly, and wanted to try my hand at hair and nCloth-I originally had the girl's shirt entirely made of nCloth. While I love nCloth and its versatility, I couldn't get it to perform the way I wanted, no matter the settings. It would get to stretchy and looked more like chewed up gum and would constantly go through the girl's geometry, making it look like there was a giant whole in her shirt. Even making her geo a passive rigid body to the nCloth and adjusting the collision settings wouldn't fix it. In the end, due to time constraints, I painted the shirt onto her geometry like I did her jeans. Her hair was also a nightmare, but it serves its purpose. It is made of fur which are controlled by hair follicles. For whatever reason, the fur will pass through her geo, most noticeably through the top of her head, making her some kind of crazy long-haired-Captain Picard-ginger-freak. Again, due to time constraints, I could not find a permanent solution.

Enjoy!




You can also find a link to it here.

Henry & Sasquatch

I'm now well into production of my final-a short 1 minute film where a little girl is in a museum (ironically modeled after the Smithsonian Natural History Museum) and lets her imagination go wild...literally...the elephant becomes alive.

Right now I'm in the process of importing Henry and the Girl into the Museum I modeled, and in the process forgot to copy over all of the Girl's texture and fur attribute maps into the new project directory. So Maya, being the smart one, said "oh...no baldness map on the Girl? I guess that means there's no baldness ANYWHERE FOR HER HAIR!!!"

Yeah.

So when I did a test render instead of getting a little girl, I got a sasquatch.

Elephants don't like close ups...

Oh, shit, the elephant is charging the camera! This will make a hair-raising addition to my reel...




Here's the link to the video.

Henry's First Steps

Henry now has a walk cycle. Walk cycles are a pivotal thing to master. They are the basis of mastering any other motion a character will go through. This is the first time I've done a walk cycle with anything with more then 2 legs...4 legs are twice as hard as 2...



Here is the link to Henry's walk cycle.

Meet Henry: 13 feet of awesome.

Henry has been my project for the past few months. I started modeling him in August, and he's come a long ways from the scraggly verts and polygons he was shaped from.

It took me about 2 months to paint the skin. All of his skin texture is hand painted in ZBrush. I have him here with a normal map-I'm still working the kinks out of the displacement map. He is rigged, which was a process and a half, I'm surprised I still have hair I've been ripping it out so much over him. His ears are soft bodies, and has hair follicles controlling his tail and gut motion. You'll get to see those next when I finish animating some cycles!