Monster pen test

Some folks wanted to see a close up of the drawing I made in the Root - Timelapse post. Well here he is all his fifty-dried-out-old-pen wackyness. Yeah, he was the bi-product of me sorting through several buckets worth of pens, testing for the ones which were still good.

Root- Time lapse

Root

This is a time lape of me organizing some of the mess which is my home office. I added a few bits of animation here and there just to make it interesting. The roots are a maya paint effects setup. For some reason it took way longer than I thought to render. Oh well, time flies when your having fun.

Here is larger version 27M - Enjoy

-update-

Oh, I should add that the time lapse was shot on a Nikon D700 using an AF-S Nikkor 14-24mm lens. The camera was set to shoot one frame every 20 seconds and it was all compress at 24fps. I composited the shot using TVPaint animation software.

Silas Has Balls

Silas Has Balls

Motion tracking with Maya Live. Who needs to buy toys when you can just make virtual ones. I took some video footage of Silas on his Jolly Jumper and added in geometry and a bunch of nparticle balls for him to play with. There are a load of tracking mistakes that I could have fixed if I had used a few more tracking points but I was lazy and wanted to explore around with other things. The hard part was keying in his feet so they could kick the balls. I had to do that part by hand. This took forever to render, which is one of the reasons I was trying to set up the PS3 maya mental ray satellite earlier in the week. That did work out so I just had to let the 'ol mac crunch away for a day or two. I wanted my mac back for other things so I didn't bother rendering reflections. It was a fun side project. I like it and might try to do a few more things like this. I want to do something with a matte painting next. Where should we send Silas? hmmm... the possibilities are endless.

TVPaint - walkcycle

Recently I bought a copy of TVPaint animation to help me out with my storyboard work. It has a wonderful interface for this and is much improved compared to its predecessor, Mirage. Playing around in it I made this quick little walk cycle to combat the boredom of waiting for maya to render. Ahhhh.. good 'ol 2d. Instant gratification. Hand rendering is so much faster.

TVpaint- walkcycle

FAIL: Maya Mental Ray Satellite

I took a break from learning maya rigging to try and setup a Mental Ray Satellite on my Playstation 3. Let me tell you this was nothing but a very big headache. I did learn a lot though along the way and so I really don't mind that in the end it was a failure.

Setting out the goal was to take advantage of the PS3's graphics engine to do render tests of my maya experiments. I had heard of people doing this by installing Linux on the other OS option of the PS3 and running mental ray through it.   I know nothing about Linux so after spending a day or two searching around on the web I learned that there are hundreds of open source linux operating systems out there and that they are all rather pourly documented. The rule of the linux land seams to be, "you can find anything you want as long as you know what your looking for and where to look for it." Like I said before I had no clue what I was doing but was lucky enough to stumbled across a very helpful site called PSUBUNTU. With the help of some of their tutorials I was able to installed a Ubuntu 9.04 pS3 operating system on my Playstation and move on to the next challenge, installing Mental ray satellite.

Installing Mental Ray Satellite should be relatively painless.  Essentially its just a little application that waits for commands from a master computer, renders the said jobs and sends them back to the master computer. No big deal, just like a networked printer.   It should be a relatively painless install but no, this is Autodesk maya we are talking about.  It has to be hard.  Really, Really hard.  Fist off, the install specifies that you need to be logged in as a root user to instal mental ray satellite on linux, that would be fine and dandy if logging in as a root user was possible.  After a lot of searching it turns out you can't login as a root user you can only use something called sudu commands from a terminal window.  Ok so I figured that out and moved on to the next step uncompressing the file on the instal cd.  Of course the linux instal file has to come in a format which is non native to linux.   It can't be opened unless you install a special uncompression program to convert it into something that linux can uncompress.  All of this has to be done using sudo command lines in the terminal window which is particularly difficult for a visual person like myself.  But I did it.  I did it all the way up to the point where I got an error that said I was running a PPC kernel machine and that Maya Mental Ray Satellite was only compatible with Intel chip machines.  After struggling for a few day to get to this point I was pretty mad.  In none of the installation documentation does it say that mental ray requires an intel chip.  It specifies a 64bit operating system yes but not the intel chip part.   I FAILED!!   I have to hand it to Autodesk, they really know how to write terrible instal guides.  In the end my favorite instruction through out this whole ordeal was something like, "ask your system administator to do this for you".

When my headache finally goes away I'm going to look into rendering on the Amazon cloud.  I hear you can use programs like EnFusion, for a small price, to do this relatively painlessly.  Until then I will just have to be patient and wait for my little imac here to slowly render my files.  sigh...

I have a long way to go before this model is rigged properly

I have been trying to learn how to rig the little monster character I started building and its clear from the start that I was never meant to be a rigger.  There are a million mistakes with his rig.  Controls fly all over the place and the whole thing is generally a mess.  Still I want to keep at it since its it would be fun to be able to make things that can move.  Its going to take a lot of time.  Until I really understand how constraints work nothing is going to moving anywhere fast.  For now, I am going to need a lot of aspirin and a few stiff drinks.

I have a very very very long way to go...

Rough MonSTER model

I recently started to learn how to model characters in Maya. This is something I have been wanting to learn for a long time and just recently sat down and forced myself to do. Working with ortho drawings, rough clay sculpts and having to depend on other people to build my designs has always been frustrating and played a big roll in motivating me to learn the process. Although learning to use the tools in maya has been a bit painful now that I am beginning to make some progress those pains are fading.

Below are some rough topology renders of my first character sculp. A Silly little monster character I started last week. Learning line flow and polygon placement has been a big challenge but my biggest challenge has been having to build expressionless neutral characters. The character designer in me has been going crazy with this and I can't wait to move on to skinning and rigging so I break up all this boring symmetry. I'm almost at a point where I can move on to skinning so we'll see what happens. I imagine I will have a lot of deform problems where the topology is too low res. Oh well, we'll see! Until then, enjoy.

...and as a point of reference here is a rough doodle I did after the fact to give you an idea of what the final character might look like. As for now I am just making this up as I go along.

Caustics

Caustics

Another maya rendering experiment, this time with caustics. I should have render the scene with more rays, as you can see the refracted points dancing on the walls behind. Still I kind of like the disco ball effect it gives off. I had fun with this one. enjoy.