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.

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.