Shoeless Joe

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Joe. Based on baseball legend Joe Jackson, and a drawing I did waiting for maya files to load about a year ago, I've made it into a personal project.

He's a about 9000 polygons. Thought about taking him into Mudbox, but the uniform (Maya cloth) will cover much of the work, and the anatomy in Maya alone looks fine. I'm a fan of Advanced Skeleton for quick rigging, but I created my own rig for this model. The blendshapes were awkward and didn't work well for the facial shape, especially around the mouth, so I did a little research, and decided to rig facial bones and animate the attributes as blended weights. So limited blendshapes.I used locators for the bones in the face to change the pivots of the facial bones for the driven keys, but still maintained manual control of each joint. The locators for the joints in the mouth in chin were in the middle of the head, and the cheeks and eye joints in the center of the corresponding eye. Other pivots were placed as I needed them.Double hierarchy for the locators of the facial bones for the set driven key. Driven keys first, then manual keys. Undergoing a few animation tests and I'll set the cloth up.

Housekeeping?

Blood splatter/artery spray for a kill scene in a kitchen. Maya/After Effects. Virtual bleeding at it's finest.

Ghost Rider

"I don't resent working long hours. I shouldn't - I'm the one who set my life up this way. I love to work. It's the thing that I get the most satisfaction out of- and probably what I do best. Not that I don't enjoy days off. I love vacations and loafing around. But I think much of the world has the wrong idea of working. It's one of the good things in life. The feeling of accomplishment is more real and satisfying than finishing a good meal- "
Jim Henson

Haha, but man, would it feel great to eat a good meal...

Driving Ms. Audi

This is my Audi sports sedan student car rig from a few years ago. This car is rigged with basic expressions, some set driven key, and standard constraints. Put it on a motion path and key frame your heart out and you can see it animates all right, but I've decided to totally strip it down to the mesh and re-rig it in Craft Director Tools. I haven't smiled continuously for this long in months. Love CDT for Maya.

Saturday Night Render

The project is fun, but waiting for it to render is not. Motion blur for the propeller was something I had to render in Maya, but I decided to use the Trapcode Particular plug in in After Effects for the airplane exhaust. The camera is a challenge, I need to learn about z-depth and lens shaders, but the pictures right out of Maya with a little color correction and post-work look promising.

A couple of still frames.

The Squeakeasy

Of late, I've began using my free time on the bus playing with ideas for a short. Thinking about a something going awry in a "Squeakeasy" called "The Funky Fur."

Naval Dentistry

Decided it was time to see a dentist, since it had been, ummm, since I got out of the Navy. Haha, they said my mouth was in remarkable shape, scraped some stains away and sent me home without incident. It almost never works out that way, so I don't recommend delaying your appointments. I, like many people, dread the dentist. When I was seventeen, this old Navy dentist ripped the wisdom teeth out of my skull using just local anesthetic (Novocaine shots in the roof of my mouth). Anyway, I never forgot it.

Work Smart

I think this has to be the coolest Maya learning moment ever. I heard about Craft Director Tools for the first time at CTNX 2009, and I wanted to learn about it, but I got busy. The last few weeks, I've been working on an airplane stunt, and have had the opportunity to work with this plug-in, and it's incredible. This is the fastest way to produce physically correct vehicle animation- it's a combination of attribute settings and real-time input from a gamepad or joystick. It's like playing a video game, only more control, more cameras, everything. I rigged my cessna with the basic setup and flew it around Racetown freehand. Just using the basic controls, you can see real possibility here.

Plane Crazy

I don't do a lot of modeling, so when the budget couldn't pay for an airplane, I had to dig deep into my bag of tricks. This is a Cessna 180. The base mesh without the smooth is 1024 polygons. It's on smooth division 1 for this render. The texture is a headache- it's an mr layered shader with stuff on alpha channels and clamps on bump maps and all kinds of things. It's got a full interior with gauges. I rigged this model to fly in an aerial sequence. Specifically, I'm using Craft Animation Director Tools for Maya to animate this plane. I'm putting the rig on Creative Crash, the textures maybe not. Gotta work for something. It needs some UV/light linking modifications. The hard part is done; we'll see how it flies.