Wardrobe Malfunction

Various passes tweaking the attributes for the uniform for my Shoeless Joe character rig. The first playblast shows the nCloth with basic attributes applied to it. The initial uniform mesh was first bound to the skeleton, just like the body skin, and the weights were copied from the original mesh onto the uniform mesh. At least then, you can pose the character however you want, and the uniform mesh moves with the rest of the rig. After binding skin, make the uniform mesh nCloth in the usual way. The belt was skinned the the main hip joint, and set as a passive collider, which in hindsight may be a mistake on my part. I'm thinking later trying skinning just the buckle to the main hip, making it a passive collider, and then making the waist portion of the belt nCloth as well.

The referenced rig in the scene. From here, I referenced a workflow borrowed from a gentleman who is absolutely brilliant, Duncan. If you frequent the Autodesk forum AREA, you can see his blog post regarding nCloth workflow for animation here: http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/duncan/basic_cloth_on_character_setup. Basically, you connect your original mesh to the posed nCloth and make a rest shape, which will pull back the stretched mesh in simulation. After that, you paint weights on the cloth mesh under a couple of different attributes, depending on how you want that part of the mesh to behave. It's trial and error as it goes.

Maybe time to cache everything out and finally inbetween and cleanup this piece- I can't believe I let it stay this way for so long. After the animation is clean, it will be easier here to diagnose problems with the cloth, and key the attributes necessary to make it look a little more natural.

Risky Baseball - Joe's Rig Test

Joe's rig test. I owe the walk cycle charts and timing to Eric Larson and Milt Kahl, so I wish you'd appreciate it when it comes around. I modified it a little, but basically, it is the same strut of arrogance and overconfidence that Casey, from Casey at the Bat (1947) had walking to the plate. Joe's bat's name is Black Betsy. Video below, rig is absolutely raw at this state, with no corrective blendshapes or PSD's. In case you wonder why he is in his shorts, the uniform is nCloth, and while I have some settings arranged, the model's rig test was to be bare to see weighting problems easier. The tangents are still in linear, and I sped up the end in the interest of time, but it's looking really good for good ol' Joe that he'll get to play baseball again.
Think he's proud enough?

L_Shoulder_RVS

Decided I'd tear up my shoulder this weekend. Thinking about gnawing it off, the pain is maddening. That's one way to get a girl to take a break...
More on Joe and his dirty feet. Decided to go with nCloth for baggy uniform and use a nurbs surface for hair instead of both. Started by just using a texture map on the scalp for hair, but he ended up looking too much like Obama, and that was not okay. Still painting it up in Mudbox, and now that I have some down time, I can experiment with cloth.

Blends Need Not Apply

I guess blogger took a dive and the original post was lost. Here it is again...

After tirelessly painting weights and managing all the driven keys, Shoeless Joe, my cartoon baseball player rig, finally has expression. He's a hybrid rig- a mixture of joint systems, deformers, and technical expressions. There's squash and stretch on the arms and torso. Boolean toggle for the mitt visibility and controls. Double hierarchy for driven/manuals keys on the facial controls. There's not a single blendshape. Not to mention a little help from a Comet Script called Pose Deformer/Pose Reader... and a beta called LipService. And it's a good beta! Lip Service is a product by Joe Alter that "is a powerful multi-resolution subdivision surface sculpting, rigging and animation system built into a Maya plugin. LipService's sculpting tools are comparable to ZBrush** and Mudbox*. Its animation tools extend this multi-resultion editing philosophy through to motion and rigging." So basically, no multiples of a hi-res mesh for blendshapes, and every pose is a golden pose- it will look good, because you can sculpt all of your corrections directly into your animation. Goodbye dozens and dozens of frickin blendshapes.

This is a lipsync rig test for Joe. Phonemes test for sentences in English. Recorded by Michael Hamm on November 3, 2003, with the aid of Mitchell Sommers in the Psychology Department at Washington University

Can a cat man a catamaran?

Merry Christmas! Mary Christmas will marry Christmas day.

Come to calm.com!

It's a long time, and I mean long.

Where's Nancy?

Who's "Nancy"??

I teach Ferdinand the calm cat to fetch cold cups of coffee. Who knows more about tasting things? He's used the book.
The rig has some more work to be done, mainly refining SDK and some other features I would like to include (hair and cloth). It's exciting for me to watch a project take on the fourth dimension. Time is the true test of integrity. More so I think with the things that we relate to as human.

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.

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.

New Placards

Using my butterfly test as part of the placard for my demo reel. The top is with a straight alpha and no motion blur. The bottom has a motion blur of 0.75 (rendered that way before composite).

Butterfly wing test - Rough

It needs some inbetweens and some tweaking, but so far, so good.

Planning my poses

Just planning some of my key poses for this little animation I'm putting together. My plans have changed a little bit over the past few days and I'm trying to organize my thoughts.

Additions to DinoRig

I didn't want the teeth to look very menacing since I consider this little guy to be a baby. The tongue is a little loud, but everything works. Setting up a GUI for the blendshapes and tongue control and it's off to the races.

Animation Time

Still ironing out problems with the butter fly rig. The MEL script for the wing flutter is giving me headaches. The lizard rig is WIP as well. I'm working out some teeth and tongue issues, and the blendshapes are non-existent. I atleast want some basic emotion to work with. Right now the jaw opens and shuts... and that is about it. The body is okay. Thinking seriously about gutting this rig and starting over. The butterfly is so small, a few issues won't really matter (which is why it lacks a normal map and some of the other things 3d models normally have). But the lizard, my main squeeze for this sequence, needs some personality. I'm already planning my shots for this animation, and I'll likely post some of my planning.

Butterfly screenshots

Posed the butterfly in some paint effects grass and branches in maya. Still trying to figure out the MEL script. Digging through the outliner, mostly, trying to make syntax jive. What a pain... may give up on it and do it the old fashioned way.

Butterfly rig

Wanted a flying animal rig and finally broke down and made myself one. Decided on a butterfly over a bird mainly because of billows in the wings and advanced rig things that I'm not prepared to try yet. Modeled a lot of the mesh myself, but got some help on the legs and body tweaks from modeler Heather Berry. The texture I threw on there just for the visual. There is nothing special about it.
The rig is a modified advanced skeleton file. I used the quadruped setup and then added the extra legs, the antennae, the wings (there are four) and joints for the proboscis. The legs are separate pieces, as are the wings. Plan to use this in an animation soon. Looking to check out a MEL script I've found for wing flutter- hope it works out.

Demo Reel

Not everything is redundant. There is some new material.

Early Rig Tests for STP

Here are about half of the rigs I've been dealing with the last few months. There is also a pillow (female), a toothbrush (male), a bookmark, a chart, and a stuffed sheep. There is a bear too. This is just a test where I have them move around and stand on a line, kind of like a lineup. I've hidden the visibility of the other characters until I can clean it up a little. Looks like I've got one more scene to do before my contract expires. About 910 frames.

Two More weeks of Vilppu

Just to recap...

The top drawings are two minute poses completed on the first day of Vilppu's 2009 Life Drawing Class at The Animation Guild Office in Hollywood. People who have drawn with me know I like fast gestures (fifteen seconds and less). Sometimes I lack the patience to sit through the longer poses. The bottom drawings are the fourth class. The center drawing is a ten minute pose and the marker drawings are half hour. The ten minute pose and the two minute drawings aren't all that different- just a tad more built up. The goal is to have the initial gesture completed very loosely, very quickly- in about 10-15 seconds. Then you build using your shapes. You just keep building it like anything else. Then time runs out.