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Zbrush Concept

November 25, 2011 / posted in General, News, Uncategorized, Zbrush / 3 Comments

D&D style attribute rolling for character modeling… WTF? Yes that’s right, our latest assignment involved rolling character attributes to create out next sculpt. After our attributes were fleshed out we had to do a portrait of the character. I lucked out with the following stats.

Gender: Female
Age: 41-60
Job: Explorer
Time Period: Prehistoric
Disposition: Corrupt

Well here is the sketch I came up with after a few hours. I did some loose painting in Photshop after scanning my initial sketch in. Over the next couple of weeks I will be posting the upated sculpts of the character. The whole sculpt and paint is due on the 12th of December.
Concept for female corrupt elderly prehistoric explorer (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Terry_Explorer_V2 NULL.jpg)

Breakfast Still Life – Rough

October 4, 2011 / posted in General, Maya, Mental Ray, News / 2 Comments

This image was created for my rendering class in college. We were given the objects and asked to properly light and render them. The style of render was left up to us. The challenge with this assignment is to get the glass looking right. Most of the objects needed to be unwrapped so that’s the first thing I did. Unlike my last apartment render (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/general/news/apartment-final-render-thoughts/) this piece can contain no global illumination or final gather. Any bounced light is simulated with secondary light sources. I had to remodel the glasses as their were lots of strange triangles buggering up the reflections. The pitcher and the glasses have separate faces for the inside and outside of the object. Under the glass mesh render properties the objects are set to one sided.

One thing to keep in mind while rendering glass in Maya and Mental Ray is black surfaces. If you are rendering a translucent or semi translucent object and you are getting black artifacts or faces on your render then you need to increase your reflection rays in the object’s material properties. Reflections and refractions take a long time to render due to the amount of ray casting going on. Too many rays and you can drastically increase your render time. Too few and you’ll get black faces where the rays didn’t penetrate the objec. Reflections are a little tougher as you actually have to know what should be reflected. If you can’t see them at all it’s a littler tougher to guess which ones are missing. If you’re casting enough rays within each material and you’re still getting black faces then chances are you have not set your ray tracing limits high enough in the scene’s render settings. In case you didn’t know there is a master ray trace control found under the “Quality” tab in the render settings window.

The colours of the piece are still pretty loose. I was playing around with Adobe Kuler (http://kuler NULL.adobe NULL.com/) and though it was a pretty fun tool to choose a colour pallet. My biggest problem at this point is the strength of the lighting in relation to the floor reflections. I’d like to keep the light warmer (3500k), but I’d also like to get some less harsh reflections in the floor. Most of what’s left to do involved tweaking materials and finalizing a colour pallet. I might take a swing at Maya fur again, but we’ll see if time allows it. I’ve been working part time in while going to school and it’s really been cutting into the amount of time I have to get homework (let alone personal projects) done. I would cut my hours down, but at my work the minimum for part time is 20. I did find a wonderful way to save time though… I set my computer up so I can login remotely. This makes it a lot easier to setup and look at renders. I suppose I could just batch render multiple files with a script, but I wouldn’t be able to change anything after I leave home. I don’t know about you guys, but I frequently get hit by ideas while out and about and this lets me incorporate those changes into the renders.

Rough Render for 3D Still Life involving glass (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/glassesRough NULL.jpg)

Final Round

September 4, 2011 / posted in General, News / No Comments

Life is good right now. I’ve started my last year of school at Red River College, working part time is less draining than full time, and my wife has started renting a studio for her Photography. I’ve woken up a few times and completely forgot that instead of going to my job I get to go learn about lightning and rendering or Zbrush. I just love being a student. I realize at some point all this has to end and I must apply for a job in my field, but thinking about that just takes things to a new level of awesome :D

I’m having a bit of trouble picking what I want to apply for when I get out of school. There are so many different aspects of 3D that I like. I thought about being a generalist as in my home town that seems the be the best bet, but I really enjoy the Unreal Development Kit. The first assignment we received this year was to build a small part of an environment for the UDK.

There are a lot of different skills that come into environment design that I enjoy. This first environment is a dry run and we aren’t taking it all the way to a finished product, but I do want to set myself up so at the end of the year I can finish it and add it to my portfolio. This leaves me a lot of time to think about the composition of the scene.

Labour Day (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/canada_labour_stamp NULL.jpg)I’ve decided to do a small section of a gothic church. For a simple scene I think it offers a really great silhouette. All the buttresses, windows and spires offer a lot of variety that can be reconfigured if the meshes are built in a proper modular fashion. I’ll post a couple of the sketches when I get home and I’ll throw out and update with the blocked out layout later this week.

Tomorrow is Labour day in Canada so no work and no school. I think I’m going to get outside before this summer weather goes away :)

Flower Stem Rig

July 6, 2011 / posted in General, News / 1 Comment

I had problems. I talked to people. I now have less problems. This is generally how I like my troubleshooting to go. The last problem I had with my project was getting the animation deformers at the top of the flower to follow the stem when I bent it. In newer versions of Maya (2011+) there is a constraint type “point on poly”. This worked quite well. I grouped the flower head along with all its deformers and then parented that group to the top center vertex of the stem’s poly cylinder. One problem down, about a dozen more to go. I don’t mind running into walls, not being able to climb them is a different story :P

grouped Deformers following vertex modified geometry (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/stembend NULL.jpg)

Grouped Deformers following vertex modified geometry

My next challenge was getting the stem to grow and take the flower head with it. There was a few different ways I could have approached this. While figuring this problem out I had to keep in mind that the stem might be bending and curving while growing. At first I thought I could just increase the scale of the stem, but as the stem got bigger and the bend modifier curve grew larger the mesh started to lose shape because it’s resolution was too low. A quick Google search came up with a video (http://vimeo NULL.com/7420996) on how to rig a vine by Jordan Blit. In this video Jordan hooks up a simple connection between the vine’s “Y scale” and a “poly split ring” node’s “divisions” attribute. This seems to be a terrific way to grow the stem and maintain its shape no matter the length. There are a few other things Jordan sets up to make this error-proof and you should definitely check it out. I should mention that your construction history must be kept intact for this to work. If you clear your history the connection to the “poly split ring” node will be broken. When finished I added a constant variable via Mathematic Nodes Mental Ray (http://www NULL.creativecrash NULL.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/rendering/other-renderers/c/mathematic-nodes-mentalray-support---2) plugin that multiplies the divisions by 2. This gives us a higher resolution mesh. Terrific :D Our stem now grows and deforms to our bend modifier, plus we’ve given ourselves a “hook” to grab via our math constant to increase our mesh resolution. Now I need to set up our stem so it can be affected by dynamic forces.

flower stem's "y scale" relationship with the poly split ring" node (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/stemscale NULL.jpg)

Flower stem's "y scale" relationship with the "poly split ring" node

A friend and fellow 3D student mentioned rigging the stem up with a skeleton and using IK handles. He pointed me to this video (http://vimeo NULL.com/6044700) by Alex Villabon. In this video Alex gives a grass mesh a simple joint chain and then uses a Maya hair to deform the skeleton, which indirectly animates the mesh. I liked this method, but I didn’t want to use any joints in my flower rig. Keeping the rig “light” was important given the possible amount of flowers in my scene. Instead of controlling the stem indirectly with a joint chain I decided to make the hair directly control the stem by making the hair a “wire deformer’. A wire deformer is a curve which shapes the geometry it’s parented to. You can alter your curve and watch the geometry conform to its shape. This works out well because the hair is inherently affected by dynamics and it will control the shape of our stem. Now that the stem is set up correctly I have to start on the animation for the flower head. It has to transition from a bud into a fully bloomed flower.

flower bent by dynamic hair deformation (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/flowerhair NULL.jpg)

Flower bent by dynamic hair deformation during interactive playback

At this point I still don’t know whether I want to use blend shapes or modifiers to animate the bud opening. I’m thinking blend shapes might be overkill as the bud is really just a sphere with 5 sections that peel back to let the flowers petals grow out. What do you guys think? In case anyone is interested I have started a thread (http://forums NULL.cgsociety NULL.org/showthread NULL.php?f=88&t=989384) regarding this project over at CG Society (http://www NULL.cgsociety NULL.org/).

Here are links to the videos and plug-ins I mentioned throughout the post.

Alex Villabon
Animate Joints With Maya Hair (http://vimeo NULL.com/6044700)

Jordan Blit
Growing Vine Rig (http://vimeo NULL.com/7420996)

Creative Crash
Mathematic Nodes Mental Ray (http://www NULL.creativecrash NULL.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/rendering/other-renderers/c/mathematic-nodes-mentalray-support---2)

Flower Update

June 24, 2011 / posted in General, News / 4 Comments

So everything was going as expected. All was well in the land of flowers and Maya… well almost. I’ve run into a snag when it comes to bending the flower. My non-linear bend modifier controlling the stem don’t seem to be moving the rest of the modifiers associated with the petals and filaments. Only the geometry of the petals and filaments is moved. I have tried all sorts of different parenting and grouping methods. Nothing seems to make the modifiers move. I think that when moving objects with modifiers Maya doesn’t register the geometry moving in the same was as if you translated it. Since the translate is not updated the parenting structures seem to be of no use. The modifiers just say in place. Quite frustrating if you ask me.

I’m looking into parenting the modifiers to a vertex or face. I quickly came across this plugin: DJ Rivet (http://www NULL.djx NULL.com NULL.au/blog/2006/11/11/djrivetmel/). DJ Rivet creates a hair follicle and parents the follicle to a geometry face. It then parents your object to the hair follicle. This plugin looks to be exactly what I need, but I am having 2 problems with it. One; it doesn’t want to install properly for me. When I got to load the plugin it doesn’t show up in Maya 2011. I have placed it in the bin/plugins directory where all the other plugins are, but it doesn’t show up in the plugin list in Maya. Two; it has been said by a few people that this tool doesn’t parent well to geometry that is being deformed :(

I might have to write a custom script for this. I’ve never done that before and it’s actually a little daunting. I figure I can track the position of a face on the stem by averaging the world position of the 4 verts surrounding that face. I can then grab that faces normal orientation and use it to set the rotation of the grouped deformers. As long as the face referenced is one from the top cap of the stem cylinder I’m thinking this should work. Consequently if anyone knows a far easier way, or a script that’s already been developed please let me know. To better visualize the problem here are three pictures showing the static flower, the bend flower and the deformers themselves.

Flower unbent (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/flower_static NULL.jpg)

 

Flower deformers (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/flower_deformer NULL.jpg)

 

Flower with bend modifier applied (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/flower_bend NULL.jpg)

 

I think now is a good time to take a break from the rigging side of things and concentrate on the materials. I always like to switch gears when I become frustrated with a project. This way I can keep making progress without deterring myself from continuing on. For now I think I will just model a branch and manually place the flowers along it. When that is done I will get back to setting up the modifiers properly.

As always any comments, critiques or recipes for the best summer cocktails are appreciated :D

Flower Power

June 13, 2011 / posted in General, News / 4 Comments

Hello. There’s been a little bit of a transition lately as I’ve moved to a new apartment and wow am I happy to be back in Osbourne Village. If you don’t have a car this is the best place to live in the entire city IMO. There are so many shops and I’m a five minute walk away from Safeway. On top of all of that my new bus to work takes 25 minutes and it’s an express. WUT! I’m almost entirely unpacked, but the most important part of the move (my computer :D ) is all setup and ready to go. I’ve wanted to do some kind of flower render for a long time and now I’m just getting one under way. I really like taking pictures of plants and flowers wherever I go and when I went to Nice a few years back I snapped a plethora of shots for inspiration. Here are a few thumbs.

Flower thumbs (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/flowers NULL.jpg)

I’ve modeled the main flower so far, but I still have to do the branch and buds. My plan is to model one flower and hook the petals and filament up to non-linear Bend modifiers. The petals have one running vertical as well as horizontal. This way I can control the petals cup shape on the fly. After I model one complete flower I will group the objects that make up the flower and then apply “Duplicate-Special” to the group and check the “duplicate input graph” section of the option box. If you don’t do this the non linear modifiers will duplicate, but they won’t control the duplicated geometry. The next part of this project is to animate the flower growing. These bend modifiers will help me control the movement and shape of each element through the diffrent stages of growth. If you’ve never used modifiers before they are located in the Animation menu set under Animation < Create Deformers < Non-Linear < TypeX. Each modifier has unique controls that are dependant on the type of modifier. A “‘Bend” modifier has a curve attribute as well as standard controls to extend or lessen influence of the modifier. A modifier such as “Sine” will have attributes such as frequency, which you would expect from a wave based tool. All of the modifiers are curves who’s shape modify the geometry much like a lattice (http://caad NULL.arch NULL.ethz NULL.ch/info/maya/manual/UserGuide/CharSetup/DeformLattice NULL.fm3 NULL.html). In fact pairing these tools can give you some great control over your objects and their animation. The only drawback to this method seems to be the duplication.

The only way I can duplicate the geometry and keep the modifiers working is to make the duplicates instanced copies of the original flower group. An instanced copy of an object references the source object for all properties, essentially becoming a copy cat object. This means when you pull on one of the bend modifiers it will control the same part of each instanced flower in the exact same way. I’d like to sprinkle some randomization into this, but I’m not sure how to at this point. Posted below are a few in progress shots of the flower with some of the non-linear modifiers applied. Like always if you have any questions post a comment and I will do my best to answer it :)

Flower geometry with non-linear bend modifiers (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/flower_rough NULL.jpg)

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