Jobs I did this year and some musical collaborations

Today I want to let you folks know what has been slowing my ongoing projects.

To do that, I need to tell you about my jobs.
Starting the year 2011, I had a part time job with the University of Bradford which I did for about 3 months. I was the teacher's assistant during lab sessions for the 2d animation module. That was an excellent opportunity for me to meet with the majority of first year students and get to know their work. I helped the class with anything technical Flash cs4, also helped with constructive feedback on animation when asked to give such.

My other job with university was as an open day assistant. That basically sounds like advertising university to people who are thinking of signing up for it. But what it really was - assisting people in their decision to pick a university
; answering questions about accommodation, on going modules, chances one might get to get industry jobs. The tuition fees have tripled this year thanks to the UK government.If you want to work in USA though as a CG artist, then you really do need the diploma to get the work visa.
Education is a topic by itself, which I am going to postpone for some other time.


Then in March this year, I got a job with Cogworks Studios !
Work there continued to end of June- almost half a year. Unfortunately I cant post anything done there because of the disclosure agreement.I did the graphics and animation on two iphone games, using inkscape,toonboom studio and then Adobe Illustrator.




Some time during that period I applied for an intern ship at a couple of places. One of them- Disney Interactive invited me to an interview. A week after that I got a call confirming that the position is mine. There were over 100 candidates from the uk and only two placements.
From what I gather, the thing that gave me advantage over the other candidates was not so much the showreel and the cv as much as my game pitch and ideas.
Signing the one year contract ,I found a disclosure agreement with the size of a book. You will understand if I don't write (or say) anything about my work there. :)

So all I can do now is write about past projects. Here are some of the ones from this year- before starting work at Disney.




The sound assignment
For this assignment I worked with Thomas Mcfadden. The task was to put together an animatic with sound and music. Tom made the animatic. I made the music and helped with the sound effects. What you'll hear is the result of a couple of hours in the uni's sound lab. The music is really an improvisation- stuff made at the spot. They have a bunch of really nice one octave M-audio keyboards there, hooked to mac computers with garage band and Logic.

Tom has an excellent sense of humour and voice acting talent. He's doing all of the characters btw. You might see me doing some cartoon project with him next year ;)

And while on the subject of Music, there was another project that I took part in. A group of final year students from my university just finished an xna game, called

Steamsunk:

They needed music for it. So this time I decided that I want to work with a friend on it. I got Preslav Jordanov assigned to the project. I really needed him to take charge of this one, because I didnt understand the music software really well. He's also more into guitars, while I personally prefer pianos and rpg music. My contribution to this was in adding more progressions to the track, also the boss battle bit.

If you would like to hear more of my music, there is an online gallery where i keep most of the melodic doodles.
http://soundcloud.com/blurymind

the mocap assignment

One of my optional modules for university this year was motion capture. The reason that I picked it over concept art and facial animation is simply the fact that motion capture technology is something rare and hard to get access to. One of the unique aspects of the University of Bradford is indeed the fact that we have a motion capture lab here.

I've been blogging about this in the past, so there is no point in introducing you the project again. Instead, what I like to do is just present you with the end result and share with you what I learned by going through this trial.
My hope is that next year students picking this module will avoid making my mistakes while capturing the data.

So here goes a short video. Please, use the pause button to read the text.



The skinny guy , holding a pair of wooden sticks is yours trully, trying this for the first time. My tutor intentionally (i bet) "forgot" to warn me about some things on the day we did this.I am thankful for that, because sorting them mistakes out later on was a valuable experience. It taught me how to correct badly shot mocap data xD

The goal? Record mocap data and sample some of it, then turn it into loop cycles that can be used in a game engine. Those sampled actions (some looping) have to smoothly blend between each other.

So lets go through this thing. First of all , HERE is a report I did for uni about motion capture technology as it is today. It looks at the limitations of the current approach and what the promises of the future might be to sort them out. Written in simple english, it should be easy for non technical people to understand it. :)

And HERE is a very very non informative and dry list of the things I did to get my loop cycle.

1. Cleaning it up in Blade-1.7.
The main problem there was really dissapearing markers. Markers switching names (especially the wrists). The software is NOT very smart at this.In fact, if you try to do things automatically, you are left with a mess most of times that leave more work to fix than doing it all manually. So I did manually. Thank god in this I didnt roll on the ground or didnt fight with the other guy in the suit from very close. Things like that are sure to leave a lot of work in this step.

This is what happens if you callibrate the character in Blade and you have not cleaned up the data completely.



Blade is known to be very unstable, but it didnt really crash on me- not really.

2.Getting the data to Motion builder 2011 and sampling loops.

Here is a honest rant on why I found MOBU to be one annoying piece of software.
Motion builder is somewhat unstable and has some usability bugs too. You would expect from such an expensive piece of software to be more polished. First of all, when you start it at first, the way it organises its windows on the screen suggests that it doesnt know what resolution your screen is and its set for a screen with very low one. So I had to move them around on every start (annoying as hell) until finding out that I can actually save myself a custom layout that will remember the new size and position. Then there was the memory leak problem. Mobu has a thing about consuming 90% of cpu while running, even when you dont actually do anything with it, even without a file loaded. Looking at the task manager I found out that if I leave it on and go get a coffee or something, there is a risk that my laptop's CPU would melt in an hour.
I had to get used to new shortcuts in order to use it. Yes I know that it has a preset that lets you use maya's shortcuts. But let me ask you something. Say you set it up with maya keyboard preset and then you have to assign markers to body parts of an actor. How do you do that then? Thats right, you can't alt and drag and drop while its using maya presets (try other modifier keys- ctrl,shift..nothing worked). You have to switch back to MOBU's presets to do that. And I tried and tried and tried to find what the assigned shortcut for that is for the maya presets. I couldnt. All I found was a guy at the official MOBU forum telling another to switch to the MOBU preset and learn that.

That is the biggest problem with motion builder - not a lot of documentation. A few pdf files, a few video tutorials on youtube and that was all. Not being able to research it properly before using it annoyed the hell out of me. So I was very much forced to try things and see if they work.

What were the advantages of Mobu and the reason people use it for this sort of work?
Mobu is very good at retargeting animation and non destructively editing it. Its all FK rig can be very useful for animation. I used it to retarget my mocap data to the character. So there are two approaches that I tried:
- using the point cloud to drive an actor and then retarget the actor to a rig, which drives the character: point cloud-->actor-->mobu rig-->charactorr
This approach proved to be more of a hassle and gave less precise results.

-Using the imported Blade skeleton to drive a mobu rig, which drives the charactorr:
Blade rig(already driven by point cloud)--some retargeting settings-->mobu rig (to layer some animation and be able to sample)--> character(end result to be exported to maya)
This second method is more precise. The first method with the actor , one has to set the actor (blue guy) to fit the point cloud. That turned out to be a pain to do because I did the silly mistake of t-posing in character (hunched and even with a fake hunchback-pillow under the black suit). My rig from maya was set to fit the character mesh- which is also in a slightly hunched pose. What I got out of that was simply one extremely hunched character- so:
Hunching actor+ hunched rig= result is too hunched, needed to reduce the hunching
hunching actor+ normal rig= better result, without that much to fix

The other thing that had to be done for this to work in an engine was to stop the actor from moving in space. I used a "inplace" modifier, which just mutes x,y,z of the root joint. I locked only X and Z.


I used its story mode to sample a couple of seconds and turn them into the final loop. In order to have a loop , one needs the action to end in the pose that it began. That was very easy to do with MOBU- just copy the pose and layer it over. It smoothly blends it. Then exporting that rig with the keyframes is easy as 123- just save it as fbx. When I imported that FBX in maya, where my character (target) rig was, because its name was the same, my already skinned character just snapped into position and started moving properly. But then watching it again and again, frame by frame, I found that there were issues with the data.



3. MAYA- more rigging work and fixing posture

1. the mocap suit hat was put on a wrong angle- instead of two front and two back markers, I had one marker for front,back,left and right. This made the rig think that my character's head is constantly twisted to a side.
2. the mocap suit right foot heel marker- because that marker wasnt leveled with the ground (like the one on my other foot), it caused the rig to think that my foot is constantly bent and going through the ground.



I fixed all these by using animation layers and also deleting some keyframes. The scissors are an automatic rig that is being driven by the hand joints.

Dont forget that this is all done very amateurishly and in a hurry. A good motion capture work is not something that someone who is learning the ropes can do.

Final verdict: This would have taken much less time and effort to just animate. Cheaper, faster, easier. Motion capture technology today is too expensive for a freelancer to use- both in time and money.

first try in CGFX - tracking and compositing

Been a while since I posted - and for a good reason! That however doesnt necessarily mean that I haven't been busy cooking new content. On the contrary :)
So This month I am going to try and catch up with you folks, also document my adventures with cg software.

Today I want to look back at an assignment that was presented to me by university. Let me start by posting the whole thing:


http://www.vimeo.com/23987995

No, my inspiration for this does not come from Jurasic park or Jumanji. I'd say mostly "Blade runner" and a game from the 90ies called "Flashback"

The footage that I got was grainy, and with a weird resolution (960x540) Pal (25 fps). The brief was to composit some elements over said footage by using after effects and tracking. The footage was only 11 seconds and I managed to get it ready in 11 days.

Here is how...

Motion tracking with matchmover turned out to be a semi-success , even though it wasnt very precise. Since the camera is not really moving in 3d space, just panning up- matchmover had a hard time determining where exactly are the markers in xyz. With some tweaking and even minor brute force I managed to at least get a coordinate system to use in maya.

Bringing the tracking data to maya revealed that there was a minor twitch of the camera. I fixed that by dropping two new keyframes over the group that contained the reference 3d objects and also deleting some keyframes. Some might say that this shot might have done without 3d tracking. The thing is that I really wanted to get to know the software+ there is some perspective distortion (on the roof of the building and the top of the entrance) as the camera pans up.

The first step for me was getting the trackers to work, in order to be able to pin things to the footage. Seeing if things would flow with the 2d and 3d tracking was also the right time to plan the shot. So After I got my 3d tracking done, I made a bunch of really basic non textured models and animated some of them. Later they were replaced by proper ones.

2d tracking with mocha

Just had to use mocha tracking, in order to pin some texture to the walls of the building. It turned out to be one intuitive and useful piece of software. Again- tutorials from youtube :P

I discovered that graininess and lack of focus on the background elelments make the tracking markers unstable. Thankfully that was something that could be fixed quickly in Mocha. It even has an "auto" button. Adjusting trackers with a mouse can be paintstaking , because one has to point at an exact pixel of the screen. One cool thing that I found out is that using the laptop's touchpad for this sorta thing is actually better than the mouse. By some lucky coincidence my mouse broke down at that time and forced me to do so.
Mocha was also excellent for rotoscoping (export shape data). Its capable of pinning the nodes of a mask to trackers, dynamically masking a specific area (used that for the top of the roof).



I pasted that tracking data onto a bunch of solids in aftereffects and then replaced them with testing uv grids. That is how I made a UV map of the faces of the building. Making its layer semi-transparent so it was possible to see both uv space and the building details underneath it.



After rendering that out of after effects and bringing it to photoshop, I laid it over the 960x540 original uv map image - using the free transform tool to unwrap it. Knowing where exactly the windows are enabled me to paint detail on the building walls. Its all hand painted in photoshop with the help of my cheap tablet.



The sky color mask was created with the help of the new amazing roto brush in after effects. I dropped a green tint on it, to make it look more surreal and to fit the mood of the shot I was aiming for.

Compositing the cgi footage:

In order to get my render to look right, I first made sure that I am happy with the colors in after effects and the building detail that I added has the right colors too. Then I rendered a single frame (Aftereffects) out of that and brought it as a frame in the tracking image sequence( that MAYA is using for the tracking camera ). I also opened it in photoshop, so I can pick the colors while painting textures on the cgi elements.
Uv work and texturing was all done in blender..

Scrubbing to the aftereffects touched frame in Maya, I was able to set up the light and materials as close as possible to blend in. A trick I did to make the cgi blend in more was using some reflectivity on the metalic materials and a sky dome mesh (which was set not to render, but to be visible in reflections). There is also a surface shader on the faces that I needed to key out in after effects. I separated the car in the sky from the landing car to two separate render layers- so it will be easy to quickly blur out the first in after effects- creating the illusion of depth of field and improving the composition of the shot.





Bringing the 3d footage to aftereffects revealed a number of issues that needed my attention. Some of it was covering the entrance of the building. I fixed that by getting some mocha shape data to aftereffects for the front of the entrance. I dropped some gaussian blur filthers, outline blur and hue/saturation on the elements. Some things needed to be desaturased. The cgi stuff was still too crisp so one last thing i did was dropping a slight Noise filther on it.

Things that can be improved:
The motion tracking data can be a lot better. Time restrains really left their mark and there are some minor issues that need attention. When the camera pans up, the top of the building shape twitches a bit, revealing a slight blue border around the bars of the roof top. The piston on the side of the landing zone is dropping a slightly unrealistic shadow which shouldnt normally be there considering that the light source is not close to it- its day light which should cast softer shadows.

All and all, this excercise was a really challenging and thus also fun one for me. I hope that I get another chance to do this sort of work again. Hopefully not with after effects! After effects makes it hard to find problems when problems occur. The layering way of approaching compositing is also a bit limiting. I had to toggle layers on and off to see where the problem is. That is in my oppinion a very inneficient way to deal with compositing, especially when there are more than ten layers in the shot. Nuke, Shake,autodesk composit (formerly Toxic) are all excellent packages to do cgi compositing with a proper node-based approach. The problem is that Universities (or at least mine) are not teaching it at the time that I'm writing this. :)

Blender vs Zbrush on normal maps

I've been juggling a number of projects lately. The animation on piggybank has been in the background and I haven't done much work on it since the last post. The models for the moCap project are ready now and this article will focus on the technical side of things as normal maps are concerned.

There is also a freelance job (a short 2d animation) that took some priority- I just want to make sure it ends up looking very good. :) I wont go into detail about it right now, as it wouldnt be professional to discuss it in early stages, while the client is very much deciding on how it progresses. I am not the type who would release anything I'm working on without the client's permission.

Anyway, onto normal maps.
It has been my main interest since the first day I started using a 3d package. How do I get a LOT of detail projected onto a low poly mesh. And whats with that obsession with low poly stuff (!?) some might ask. Am I just being a cheap bastard here , with today's technology advancing so quick. :D
Let me state the obvious advantages of keeping your mesh low on polycount- use geometry only where you need it.
- your computer can handle the files, especially if they are part of a giant scene.The files can be used in real time rendering engines. The playback speed while animating is near normal- no need to playblast it a billion times- its a waste of time.
- you can edit the files faster- its easier to edit the overall shape (especially with maya), its easier to paint weights (skinning) when you dont have to deal with a lot of geometry= that equals faster workflow
- You need geometry only to define the silhouette of a character and to define how the character deforms. The details can be achieved through bumpmaps and even better - normal maps. It makes me cry a little, every time I see a model that has been subdivided a million times, has geometry to define cloth wrinkles, face wrinkles,creases/cracks/etc, hair detail, etc etc. Why oh why dont you just make a normal map and bake all that stuff there?

Normal maps are just fancy bumpmaps. Some people convert bumpmaps to normal maps ( not much of a difference there lol). Some people convert textures to normal maps. Want to put some cracks on a rock? There is a photoshop plugin that should do it for you, you can also use xnormal. There is nothing wrong with that- it's just not good enough for something like a next-gen character. While bumpmaps contain information about depth, Normal maps go a step further. They contain information about direction of that depth. So one can have a really low poly character look very very detailed. The only thing that will give it away will be the silhouette of that character.
I know about displacement maps, but I wont go there now :D

So for next gen characters, one basically tells the software to compare the low poly mesh to the high poly mesh and create a normal map for the low poly mesh. Mudbox, zbrush, maya, blender- they all have tools to do that.

Since blender has a special multiresolution modifier for its sculpting mode, it is actually pretty damn good at detailing characters and baking a normal map. It might not be as good at handling giant meshes as zbrush, but its good enough to do the job.

I spent about a week in learning from trial and error about normal maps. For my little experiment, I used the two characters that I made for the moCap module. These guys are pretty much a work in progress and I am not even near pleased at where they are at the moment. Both of them have tangent space normal maps (tangent space is good for meshes that deform, but its a bit more expensive to render than world space, which is good for static objects)


Scarlet Thorn:

Scarlet was made almost entirely in zbrush. I made the hi res mesh (detailing) and exported a normal map from it in zbrush. The texture was also made in zbrush.Whats good about Z and I think is one of it's killer features (correct me if I'm wrong but mudbox doesnt have it) are the selection mask modes. Just with a click of a button, Z is capable of masking all the crease areas- that makes it extremely easy for the artist to flesh out detail..


On the screenshot, you can compare how it looks like with detail in zbrush (actual looks) and then how maya portrays the normal map on the low poly object. I didnt show render, because rendering has million of options to tweak and that alone can make it look like anything.

Zbrush flips the map vertically by default. It also left me with some slight edge marks, which I had to clean with the smudge tool in Gimp. That was a bit annoying, but it still got me a decent normal map.


Sepia Baron:
I dont have to tell you how much more advance zbrush is at sculpting than blender. But the new blender has some key features that make it worth my time. First of all, its a modelling package that has sculpting capabilities. The brush engine in blender is actually kind of nice.I can do the whole pipeline in it- from modelling the low poly (check metaballs as a nice alternative to zspheres), retopology, uv mapping, detailing (sculpting). Blender can do it all :D. Maya is useless at sculpting- utterly useless... So I sculpted detail of my character in Blender- the newest build , then I baked it and got out a nice normal map.



What was surprising about Blender's normal map was- it actually was cleaner than the one I got from zbrush. I know he's a simpler character, but I didnt get anything that needed my attention in gimp.
The only annoyance in blender is that when you subdivide the model, you can really feel the weight. It's probably a good idea to turn off skype while sculpting on subdiv 6. But that is likely to change, when the unlimited clay modifier gets released in some of the future builds. :D


I used the normal map as a basis for the texture, since I wanted to bake some slight shading on the finer detail. The texturing was done completely in Blender+gimp. Its incredibly easy to use them at the same time- blender has a really nice integration with gimp, when it comes to image editing.


Normal maps and rendering engines~ This is pretty much where all the hedaches start for the artist. Different software handles normal maps differently. Maya has three ways of rendering it-
~hardware (viewport) render- seems to display the normal maps without any problems. Note that you should avoid having flipped uv islands- that always offsets the map slightly and creates really ugly seams. I got away with fipped island on the hands and feet, since I wanted to preserve some UV space... but that backfired on me. I needed to go back change the UV of Scarlet thorn in order to get rid of seams. Thankfully zbrush is capable of projecting detail from one mesh onto another (both texture and shape), so I didnt have to redo all that I had.
~Software (maya) render- is absolute rubbish at rendering normal maps. :D I might have missed something. I've tried my best, but not only do I get ugly seams everywhere possible, but its also not very good at representing the hi res detail.
~ Mental Ray render- Seems to be pretty good at normal maps. I got no seams, the hi res detail is pretty good. One thing to note is that it desaturates the textures. I dont know a lot about mental ray. Everything I've posted this far has been rendered with maya's native software render. I dont have the time to learn mental ray, so what I posted now at flickr is as default as it gets.

While still being on the subject of rendering and normal maps, it would be worth looking into how it works and why there are seams/hard edges in some cases. Blender developers have been hard at work on documenting that and improving the normal map baking magic that happens . It certainly has been a growing interest for me to follow its development and there have been some pretty exciting things happening there-keeping my attention.

my vector graphics workflow

I thought that the time is right to take a break from all this 3d business and talk about vector graphics.

So what is the deal with vector graphics and how do artists generally feel about it?

Vector graphics technology is used in industry alot, because of its infinite-resolution nature. Printing, animation, design, websites, etc etc. The data of the illustration is stored in mathematical (geometric?) equations. A lot like 3d technology (vertices), shapes are rendered with points (nodes). Every line is made out of nodes and every node contains spline data. The splines dictate what the line between the two nodes will be. In 3d technology, I guess when comparing it to the splines, you can say that vertex normals are kind of like that, because they dictate how the surface is going to be rendered inside the silhouette of the character.

vertices-->edges-->polygons--> a 3d character(mesh)
Nodes-->lines-->shapes/fills-->a 2d character/object

Read in more detail Here.

While different software has different advantages, the basic tools for doing vector art remain the same and in this article , I am going to share my workflow with you.



This picture took me about 3 hours

Why Inkscape and not illustrator?

Since I dont own a copy of illustrator on my laptop, I had to use inkscape, which is much like what gimp is to photoshop..


My work process:

1. Draw a rough sketch with the tablet:


So in this part, I just plugin my tablet and make a rough sketch of my robots. Vector graphics software has pressure sensitivity, but since it makes the lines as fills, its almost useless further on.




2. trace the lineart-


Then the next step for me would be to lock the sketch layer , create a new layer and start working on it. In order to see better, I make the sketch layer semi transparent. My fills are by default empty (no color), so whenever I close a shape, it doesnt cover the sketch with some color.

As you can see from the picture, I first put my nodes at the right places, while knowing exactly where nodes are needed. Then To get the shape right, I adjust their splines or just drag-bend the lines. It's very important not too put unneeded nodes, because that would slow down your work.
In many cases, some fills will have roughly the same shape and number of nodes as others, so I usually just duplicate whatever is possible and readjust the splines so it fits.

When Modelling characters or inking them, It's always good to be economical- use just the right amount of nodes/vertices.


3.Put some colors in the fills-

Next on, selecting all fills that will have the same color, I would give them color. Since I hate the dullness of the lines in vector graphics, I tend to keep them either very thin, or completely get rid of them. In this picture example, you will notice that the guy in the car has some lines, while the female robot has almost no lines. I did it this way, just to compare the two styles and think about how to get around the lack of lines. To me lines are just a way to define shape. But when the shape has color, we dont always need the lines. We need to add some shadows here and there to fill the gaps - her neck had to be separated from the head (as a shape), so I added a shadow gradient.Without the shadow, the head and neck both look very flat. One big disadvantage of not having lines is when your foreground object/character does not stand out from the background, which in some cases might have the same/close color. It does look kind of nice though.


So the way I add soft shadows and put some blending between colors in vector art, is by using either BLUR or GRADIENTs.
Blurring does make the file a bit heavier.

Certain colors go well with certain other colors. Colors can be used to set the mood of the picture, to lead the viewer's eye to something. It's generally a good idea to avoid having too many different hues in a picture- it gets too colorful, too distracting.

=================================
So what are the disadvantages for artists and why is it usually a bigger task to make something in vector, than it is to just sketch it?

If you look at it, vector technology is so much better than bitmap (pixels) because of the infinite quality pictures you get out of it. Why is it not used more than bitmap by artists? Well, the answer to that question lies within the process of how that is achieved and in the complexity of the task of vectorizing something like say a photograph of your granny.

In order to get a nice, smooth and polished picture, inside a file that is throughly well structured (easy to edit and reuse for other purposes) you need to do a lot more than just sketch it and then brush in some colors.

To structure it well, you need to build it out of closed fills and define their lines as well. Some of them can contain a pattern or a gradient. They can also be blurred or made transparent.
The more nodes you have on a fill, the more time you need to edit them in order to get the right shape.

One drawback that I believe has always kept artists from vector graphics for cartoon style is the lack of line thickness data type in the nodes. So lines in vector graphics dont have varied thickness. A line is as thick in the end, as it was in the start and the middle. In order to get that natural flow effect, and when drawing with a tablet in flash or illustrator, instead of lines the software creates fills for you. So your brush strokes are being stored as closed shapes instead of lines. That dramatically increases the complexity of your drawing- it makes it harder to edit. It kind of kills the usefulness of a tablet to ink a drawing in vector graphics.

Of course, you can simplify the shapes with a keyboard shortcut in the matter of seconds. All vector packages have a "smooth" command that will clean up some nodes.But that doesnt change the fact that lines are being turned into fills when you use a pressure sensitive tablet.

That has always kept me away from inking my own art in a vector package. The only times I have used Illustrator,inkscape or flash and need it to be in vector format was:
1.when doing design of Icons/software graphics on Vector linux (inkscape)
2. Building character libraries (flash/illustrator) for Scoyo(well, I did some) and my own short flash film from last year :D

There is also the vectorizing software, that would try and do all the tracing work for you. In most cases it does its job, though not perfectly. I would use an automated vectorisation only on clean black and white sketches. The best application for this task seems to be Vector Magic.

some models for the mocap and progress on pbank

The animation of piggy bank has gotten a bit longer than expected. The plan was 2 minutes and now its getting a little longer than 4. Truth be told, I hardly work on it lately because of all the other assignments and the part time jobs (I have two of them would you believe it). My plan is to render it when its absolutely perfect. If this was my job and I was getting my bills paid while working on it every day, I am pretty sure it would have been ready ages ago! It's the polishing that eats most of the time- getting those curves and the timing to work well. I am still relatively new to this 3d animation business, but that doesnt stop me from having high standards and be critical with the work.

You see, its not perfect and when its not perfect, I just dont render and post it. :)

It will be probably ready for the festivals this year, so anyone interested to send/suggest invite for events, please feel free to drop an email with the info.I do appreciate that sort of attention :)

The Mocap assignment
So this semester I signed up for one extra module that I believe will be a good addition to my portfolio, especially if I apply for work as an animator for video games. Motion Capture has been around for quite a while now in industry and we've all seen plenty of good ,bad and ugly examples of its use. My personal opinion about it is more or less the same as any other I've heard from classic animators. The truth is that the moCap data is often awkward when applied to the body of a character. I believe that is due to a number of reasons- one being the movement of the actor (often not an actor) not fitting the design of the character.The timing of the movement is too realistic and snappy, it has some random rubbish that needs to be cleaned up (like random gestures). It will never be able to replace good old fashioned animation, but it certainly will continue to be part of what industry needs, especially for sports games. What I hate about the majority of Mocap is just it's mediocrity and genericness.Generic people doing generic things- fighting, running with guns,doing some sports... That is why my goal with this module will be to give character to my characters, make them unique!

Speaking of the that, let me start by introducing them :


Scissorman aka The Sepia Baron
I created this character as a tribute to classic horror game "Clock Tower".. You might notice my strange obsession with stripes is present here as well. He is kind of like a limping clown. The scissors are there to cut off the next character's head off.


Plant man aka "The scarlet torn" is a character that I created a year ago. The idea for him came from my obsession with venecian masks+ Edgar Alan Poe's short story
I studied Philology back at the university of my country years ago, so that helped me develop some literary taste and some understanding of ancient to 19th century culture. Ok, enough bragging from me xD moving on

So as you imagine, I will have to model these characters. Well guess what, I already did. I want to talk a bit about the process and some tricks I developed to speed it up. Both characters took two days to model and I spent about 10 hours in total to do them both.
Starting with Z-brush, I first sculpted a high res plantman. Then retopo-ed and UV-ed it in 3d Coat. Getting him back in maya, I started adding the detail that will be on separate meshes (to ease skinning).

The hair, roses, thorns, leaves and so on was all made with CV curves in maya.

Moving on to scissorman,I did him from zspheres and there was no need to retopology, due the nature of his design- Just a bit of extra work in Maya to get the right amount of geometry where needed. I got to the conclusion that the bit that takes me the most time during modeling and is usually the most boring part is getting the topology of the hands right. So, I decided to make a set of hands to reuse in my pipeline, by just attaching them to the model. I made the first hand purely in Maya. It is as low poly as possible. Then I made 3 variations of it, each having a different number of vertices at the connection point- the wrist.



So I took one of them and just stitched it to scissorman and made some minor modifications in the shape. The topology is the best of what can be done on a non realistic character. I dont want to sound a bit arrogant by saying this and it usually happens when I am being critical, but I've seen ALOT of bad topology on hands on the internet. I know mine is no masterpiece too, but some of them real bad ones are being sold for a fortune at cg store websites. :D It's mind blowing. Have they no shame?



Moving on to UV mapping, I realized that I dont really need to use different space of one uv shell, if its going to be exactly the same as it's symmetrical counterpart. So when I uv-ed scissorman, I made sure that his left and right hands,arms, feet, and so on have the same uv shells. So after unwrapping them in Blender (of course- because its much much much better than maya at this) what I did was flip over and lay the left side uv shells over the right side ones. So the left and right hand of the character would occupy exactly the same place in UV space.

The one disadvantage of this is the obvious inability to be asymetrical with the texture.
The advantages are too good to pass on though- Not only do I have to paint only one side of the model at certain parts, but I get to give them all more UV space, more pixels for the texture!


The mocap data is going to be put into short loop sequences that can be used for a game. So the big picture is , if this works out nicely, we will be able to assemble a team of other students from gamings course and import this stuff in a mini UDK or other engine project. I am not going to go into detail about the game at this point, as it is not clear if it all will work out..

Piggybank animation WIP update

Happy new year , folks . :D

The deadline for the assignment is up and some of you might be wondering as to how far I am done with the piggy bank project. Well, I submitted the body animation - so I did what was expected of me by university. But having only body animation is not enough to tell a story and be satisfied with it. No, I continued working on the animation and have got a bit more than 3 minutes of animation by now- pure action body animation.

I tried to get the character to do as many different physical actions as possible, but while staying in character and telling the story. One of the most common mistakes of young animators is putting too much action too quick to the point where it gets confusing to watch. Another thing I tried to avoid is having a CG camera. I really wanted the camera to feel like its a real camera.

So let me start by crediting Shutter for the excellent screenshot+presentation tool that it is. A completely free piece of software that helps me save time from photoshopping, in order to present you with screenshots.



In this particular setup I am using what is known in Maya as the blendparent node.Whats beautiful about is the fact that I can directly parent constrain objects, while still having the ability to key them and have on/off switches - partial(rotation, translation, etc etc) and even to what degree is it affecting the object. Sounds confusing , but its really simple and what I get from it saves me hours. So in this setup to make her swing that hammer, all I need to keyframe is the left (fk) arm. I dont have to touch the hammer or the right (IK) arm, they just follow. And since the hammer is a natural extension of her arm, if we look at this as far as posing is concerned, its naturally fine to control its position and angle with the rotation of the left wrist. I picked FK to drive the hammer, because fk gives us nice clean arches. IK is a real pain in the neck. I found myself using IK only in cases where the character's hand must stay put on an object (pushing something, or hanging onto something). It might look like less work to beginner animators, but IK DOES NOT SAVE TIME in most cases :), but it does in some. The conclusion is that a rig must have BOTH or the animator is stuck spending much more time than needed. Ok moving on.

Speaking of arches, lets take a minute to appreciate the importance of having them clean and natural:

As you can see in the picture, I used maya's ghosting tool to keep track on the arches where needed.Its basically the 3d equivalent of onion skinning. On the right side of the screenshot, you can see the graph editor. I was extra careful with my curves this time. The stoneage animation really suffered because its timing was bad, but also the spacing had zero work put in it. So , after reading books, looking at tutorials and so on, I began to appreciate the power that I can get out of this spaghetti nightmare machine. It's really simple after one gets to know it better. For instance, I could offset a big number of poses by just moving their keyframes up/down in the graph editor (add more +X on that range of poses+controls, more +Y on the other range...) . Another example of neatness is the ability to just scale down an action- both in timing and poses. Are your poses too extreme? Select what you need in the graph and scale them down on the Y. That and so many other ways one can save time, makes it a BIG advantage over other animation methods. I can see now why adobe is bringing it to FLASH and appreciate that.

While animating, I noticed that I made her arms slightly too long. That might be both an advantage and disadvantage, but its not as bad as to force me to fix the model and rig. Should be fine to do it safely though, since its referenced and the animation data is kept in its own file.

Speaking of models, I felt somewhat creative and made these two flash viewers as promised:

Link- guitar version

The poses are not excellent, but one can at least take a nice look at the model.

Link- piggybank version

Whats left now for me to do is add a couple of shots to finish the story and then do some more cleaning up in the graph editor,most notably the center of gravity control- thats the most noticeable thing.The controls that drive the action must have good curves this time. Also put the facial animations. For that part I already have a few tricks up my sleeve to save me hours of fiddling around. Bless R&D

pbank animation 50% + the "Kinect" video project

I've been limited as to how much time i can spend on the piggy bank project, but there is seemingly hope that I will manage to finish it before the deadline (dec17). The storyboard that I had went through some revisions and now the film seems to be much more fun to work on. The Story is an important thing to me, working on something matters only when it has a meaning (or you get payed to do it lol, or in the best case- both). I am not going to spoil it too much though, so no animatic will be posted at this point. I even started reading a book on screen play writing!
Its still about buying shoes. I only made it a bit more unpredictable and imaginative.

Anyway, let's have a look at my current setup in Maya (ignore the poses- its WIP) :


First of all- this time I am keeping my rigs, the background and props in separate files. The scene file contains only the keyframes, the camera rig and lights. That way I feel a little bit tidier/safer. Every time changes are made to a file while being referenced, maya stores them changes as nodes, it doesnt touch the rigs or whatever is referenced. But doing geometry/other changes to the items while they are referenced is not the best of ideas. Maya adds unneeded history to the scene file and it causes it to crash on loading in some cases, as I found out. Luckily, I could just open the file without loading its references, then go to the "reference changes list" and clean it up. Works beautifully now.

Second- the Camera setup is much better than the one i had for Stoneage. Its incredible how much more control one can get just by parenting the most normal cam to a simple locator.

For the animation- This time I have even less time to work on it, because of the greater number of side assignments and the part time job that i have. For the two weeks spent on it, I have worked very little on it, hardly full time. You can say only 2 days of the week full time and the rest- on and off for an hour or two. This time though, I feel more comfortable with the tools. I found ways to save time by using character sets+ selection sets. Its incredible how much of the frustration goes out the window with these.
I also took my time in research before putting a single keyframe! I have a big mirror in my room now, also shot some home videos of me doing stupid stuff (ended up hardly using that, but still fun)

The Background- I have uv-ed almost everything with Maya and painted the textures with Mudbox+photoshop/gimp.

With all this said, I want to assure everyone following the progress on this that I am certainly not going to abandon it at the deadline and leave it incomplete. I will continue polishing it and adding to it and then use that on a showreel. What I submit will have only body animation- no facial animation and no animation on the fingers, it will be rough. I think of not uploading it to the web yet, maybe just a playblast or two.

Ok, lets move on to the other assignment. This year I have a new module at university- Video production.

I worked in a team with 5 people to make a 2 minute film. I was assigned as the writer and director, but also ended up doing most of the editing in Final Cut pro. This proved to be a very good learning experience for me. I learned quite a lot about final cut pro, about the common mistakes that can be made when compositing, about the pitfalls of organizing a film. I have to say though, I enjoyed being a director on a live film. Not being supposed to build all the characters and sets and then "animate" everything. But it was hard to get the actor to do whats in my head. He didnt say some of his lines properly, we were missing a prop and I had to cut off some of the shots- as a result the story is a bit disjointed/inconsistent in the end. The blue screen had different tonal values, his clothes were dark and had some reflectivity - that made it a bit hard to clean up in post.
The film was shot in 5 hours. Here are some of the failed takes of some shots- just for the fun of it. :D

None of us had any prior experience with shooting life action. I wrote the story the day before- in half an hour. The sound should need some extra editing too.

pbank - rig done

I finished this rig a couple of weeks ago, but since I had other university assignments and part time work I couldnt do much on the skinning process for a while. It took about a week to learn all the new stuff and make this rig.

The previous human rig that I made had some disadvantages. One mainly being the spine area. When animating the cave man, I quickly found out that too much twisting would cause collapsing in the geometry where the joints are. So this time I did my research and tried other rigs. That led me to what Digital tutors' Delano has in their latest dvd. It's called n-spine and it manages to do the trick beautifully while also being relatively simple to set up.Here is an example of a twisting spine:

Another great thing about this rig has to be the fact that everything has "follow" switches. If I move the torso, the head and arms will follow now!

While i wasnt supposed to make any facial controls,I kind of did it anyway. I wanted to practice that more. The previous models that I made felt kind of limited in that regard. So I sat down and looked at my own face doing weird expressions, figuring out how the muscles are pulling the skin, also remembering everything i know from observational drawing...I am a big believer in trial and error learning. So I challenged myself yet again, deciding to make a face rig that is simple, yet effective, no blendshapes. All the controls are on the face itself, since its easier to access them like that.

This face rig is quick,experimental and a bit messy. The eyebrows are made of just a bunch of joints.

The mouth is purely my work of fiction and it's made out of joints too:

(top lip,bottom lip, left and right

lip)+ a couple of corrective blend shapes

The left and right joints of the lip have set driven keys on rotation. As I move them on Y, a rotation is triggered to put a small twist. as I move them closer together, that triggers a corrective blendshape to stop the geometry from collapsing and keep the volume in the lips

The jaw can go backwards and forwards( appart of up and down) , just like a real jaw..

when she smiles, the cheeks would come out a bit through the magic of set driven key:

The system is not perfect. I might need to do some work on the weights.It's biggest advantage is the low number of controls and the power you get out of them.

The less you have to keyframe to get what you want, the better! This is basically my mantra now. If its possible to get the same amount of flexibility with something that is simple and straightforward, I will go through fire and ice to get it to work right.This applies for facial animation the most. I will probably do my rig with only blendshapes next time though. This painting of weights of joints on the face was a real pain in the neck.

Things to note when it comes to skinning:
Keep the inside of the mouth as a separate mesh, if you dont want to waste time getting the weights there right. One common problem when skinning is when the interior of the mouth comes through the surface of the skin. I really hate painting weights, so I didn't spend too much on that part. One of the most annoying parts for me personally is getting the weights on the fingers right.

As you can see from the picture, the eyebrows and the lips may need some more work when it comes to skinning xD




Saving time~
The rig is the thing that takes most of the time in the pipeline, so I am looking into automating the process and even reusing what I can on the next model. I learned how to copy weights from one model onto another,so I can use the same rig on models with similar proportions/posture. But doesn't solve the problem. 3ds max and blender have automated rig generators. maya has mel scripting and plug-ins. The best one out there has to be the setup machine.
If I was to do this in a short deadline, I would go for the setup machine and just customize the rig that it generates.Thats what i did with the mammoth rig and it worked out beautifully. Tsm is very very flexible!

The only reason that I keep doing it manually is because I want to learn how it all functions under the hood. Having problems and resolving them is the best way to acquire experience.

I know that for this uni assignment I will probably not need a lot of the controls that I have here. When I start doing something for a second time, and there is nothing at stake,but my time- then it's best to try to do it in new ways. It is so tempting to stray from the standard path and see if there's another better solution to each problem. It's just never perfect. Some people are telling me that I might become a generalist if I keep going like that- trying new software and techniques. But I will always think that doing that is giving me an edge over anyone who sticks to only one way, one software. It's just not good to be too satisfied with something when there's always a new way to do it better,faster, simpler.

Animation:
Last time I did my animation in maya, I was really messy. Since then, I've managed to learn more about the graph editor, tweening and generally how to do it properly.
I will try to put up another 3d viewer thingy for Eve in the next post