Nurb gets a voice.

Well Haven’t updated in a couple of day due to the fact that I have been laying down the sound track for this assignment. Let me tell you that it was a lot harder than I thought, or it could be that I just don’t like the sound of my own voice, oh well it is at a point that I am mildly happy with it, although a friend is still interested in doing the voice, so who knows if we can get it together in the next couple of days before I start doing the lipsync then he might get another voice. Oh well. Other than that I have all 4 scenes setup for each shot (Added in a star trek warp scene to the beginning) and have been timing out the Ending Credits.

I have to say the credits are going to be the best part of the whole damn thing. I won’t spoil it, and just wait until it is finished to post it here. But I will have my revenge. :)

Anyway I will post more pics as soon as there is something worth posting. And oh yeah, the Alien's name is Nurb :)

Ahh, Fan mail...

Wow! I have been reading several of the blogs about these classes and am truely supprised by the great results that you all are producing. I use 3dMax and now think that I should get the MayaPLE so that I can do some of the stuff you are all doing and do the class. Great work . btw how much does the course cost? and how long does it run ?

In the Voice of strongbad: Dear 3dMax user. I understand your great interest in the Maya PLE and the Mastering Maya, the fundamentals class, especially when guys in pink thongs start showing off their stuff (I gotta give it to Neelz, if he looks anything like his avatar, then I take everything back that was ever said about him). The class is offered by the guys over at http://www.3dbuzz.com/ and will cost about 250 us dollars including shipping and handling and lasts about 5 or 6 weeks, but hurry, the July class is filling up quick and the next classes whenever they are offered could end up costing 400 without shipping. But not to worry, if you don't get in on the class you can always continue on with your meager existence and worship those of us who did.

Thanks,

DataForge
Wanna-be Digital Prostitute.

Waking up is tough.

Doh!

He's so Damn cool!

Damn this is so freaking cool… Just looking at this picture makes it all so worth the countless hours I have spent figuring all this crap out. Thank you, thank you, thank you Buzz and Zak.

As far as the texture goes there is a lot going on there. I played around with the ramp shader which has lots of options, and have a couple leather nodes being driven by fractal, noise, and luminosity samplers. From there I wanted to add in another bump to give lots of veins, but like I said before I need to move on. So I will make the changes if I find some extra time before the final render. Need to get on to the final project soon.

Last night was a bit more fun as I got into rigging the alien. Added a skeleton pretty much like Buzz’s for the body, but added some joints for the antenna and another for the jaw. This one started to get really complicated as I tried to figure out how to remove the rigid bind influence to add my own cluster until I noticed and remembered buzz saying that the rigid bind created clusters. Perfect. Opened up the paint cluster weights dialog, found the jaw cluster and started paining away. Also duplicated out my model (Which by the way kept pissing me off because I could translate it out of the way, but I figured out that I had to select the channels in the channel box, right click, and select the unlock option) . Here I added the blend deformers, and followed Buzz’s examples for rigging him up, just added a few more spline IKs for the antenna and his back as I did not want to animate every joint with as much as I am going to put into him.

All I have left to do is add back in the clusters for the blink, add all the controls to the Alien Control, and then start on the animatic. Like I said this is so freaking cool. :)

Texturing is done Dude!

Well it took me three days, but I am finally done with the texture maps. And I made the mistake of asking my daughter what she would like to see for a skin texture and she said “make it glow in the dark”. :/ go away I said as she laughingly walked out of the room. Well after several hours of tinkering around I am finally as happy as I’m going to get, and it glows in the dark!!! There is a lot I would like to tweak, but I need to move on… on to the rigging…

Hmmm.

easy as Pie. NOT!!

Kill me.

Well I was up till 3 again last night (When will I learn? :) and I didn’t get anything accomplished. I jumped into the classroom and Routb gave me the idea to check out the layered texture node. Seemed pretty simple, but I could not get it to combine the textures, but I was so brain dead I should have just waited until today. I am going to Google the layered texture as I don’t see any VTMs on it from the class. But worst case scenario will be that I add another sphere on top of the eyeball and add the reflections and specularity to it. Should yield the same result I am looking for, I just want to try and learn as much as possible here.

Anyway, going to 7-11 to get some caffeine and will try and do a little research while I am on conference calls. Trying to figure out how I want my alien skin to look so that I can get him all rigged up. Can’t wait to animate him :D

Too brain dead to think of a witty title

Figured I would post my progress to this point. I have spent all night working on the iris for my alien. I tried other colors, but decided to go for an exaggerated version of my own. Damn this one is hard, probably the hardest thing I have done yet. This network is quite complicated in that I have ramps going into ramps and fractals that took me forever to figure out how to smear in an outward fashion. Turns out it was really easy. Just had to bring in the place2D texture node and stretch the fractal texture :)

Anyway, I have run into a big problem that I have not been able to solve yet (Working on it now) I applied a Bump to try and give the feeling of depth that the eye has but it causes the specular color to become all distorted. Hmm. Time to take a short break and think about it… Maybe I'll jump in the class room for ideas.

Work in Progress

I just can’t stop…

Well I got into the Ship Rigging after my last post. But before going on I have to state that I suck at math, but, I am finding that it is not all that hard when it comes to using it with Maya. Trust me; if I can do it then a retarded dyslexic chimp could do it :) So what the hell am I so excited about now? Well I figured out something else that I never thought I would. Seeing that I never made it past algebra II in high school, when I got through setting up my spinSpeed for the engineering, I thought wouldn’t it be great if I could add an erratic spin control to rotate my outer ring in X and Z and not have to worry about animating in manually. So I modified Buzz’s expression and added X and Z and it would have worked great if I wanted it to completely rotate in those directions. Hmm I need to rotate up to a certain value then back down, like a wave would… Yeah a wave, a sine wave even.. hung? Where the hell did that come from???

Not sure how I knew that sine and cosine were wave patterns, but none the less I started to Google “Maya, expression, and sine). Bam! Just add a simple sin to the expression. After playing around with it for a while (which by the way it is cool as hell to be able to edit the expression and see the changes in real time) I came up with the following expression that I added to RotateY on my outer engineRing.

engineRing.rotateX = (shipControl.eraticSpin * sin(time * 5));
engineRing.rotateZ = (shipControl.eraticSpin * sin((time - 10) * 5));

I added the time – 10 to the rotateZ to offset its rotation a bit to give it more of a wobble. Anyway back to the Abduction.

Holy Ship!

Well I finally got nine hours sleep last night and feel quite refreshed. Also took the day off from work to do a little around the house and work on my planet and ship. And holy crap am I happy with my ship. Here take a look :) Never did I think I would fully understand the Hypershade, but not only was I able to follow along I was able to figure out how to add a duplicate the file texture adjust the gamma and make these nice almost black top and bottom pieces. Quite nice isn’t it. Well I didn’t stop there because I was not happy with how clean the model looked so I added a fractal node into the mix using a vector product node to kind of tarnish the specularity. I think it gives it more of a natural worn look to it.

I also added my own console after following along and learning about animating textures. With the more realistic look I was going for the one provided kind of clashed, so I dusted off my Photoshop skills and went to reproducing a Star Trek TNG style console. The glow effect is straight from light saber style glows from Star Wars, you know that pure whit center with the colored glow.Anyway, on to my alien; Damn this is just such an awesome class…

Revenge, sweet, sweet revenge.

Another update. Finished all but the happy expression last night, and a few misc expressions for fun, but this weekends set back put me behind for my schedule (Although looking at them again this morning I am so happy with the way the blendshapes came out). I also have the set built, with the exception of the house I need to add (Well just the back of the house). I have watched a lot of the VTM,s so I really just need to follow along to get the earth finished and the house should only take a few minutes.

But no big deal, I took Wednesday off to help get back on track to have this project completed by Sunday so as to give me three weeks on the final project. Even if the rest of the VTMs are not available, then I should be able to rig up my characters for it in the mean time. Damn this is all so cool.

On a side note, I have to give a thinks out first to Zak for first putting that damn song in my head. Three days later it was finally gone and I couldn’t even remember how it went anymore… All was well in the world. Then this weekend, Anodynamic strikes and says those dreaded words… maha mahana.. And I am still singing it today… How to make them pay? hmmmmm…

Lessons learned:

Don’t reset transforms on a duplicated model you intend to use for blend shapes. Yeah I did that this weekend but did not really catch on at first as to what I did. All I knew was that when I tested the blendshapes, one of them made my alien keep sliding across the screen. Scratching my head I started breaking it all down and thought back to the lattice VTM’s and how they worked with the base object. A little checking and sure enough one was sitting at a 0, 0, 0 transform. So the blendshape must work by calculating the change in vertices from the original object and by resetting transforms all of the vertices of the model then have changes in position from the masters origin, thus making the model slide across the screen. Moved it back to the world origin and froze transforms again and BAM! Working like a champ.

Kiss My Ass Maya!

Well I haven’t updated in a couple of days to get away from cussing and yelling. You see Maya decided to be a real bitch this weekend and destroy the work I did on the blend shapes (Yeah the second set I was working on), so needless to say I was not happy. Not really sure what happened other than when I tried to open up the file I would get a syntax error on every line of the file. So as a tribute I give you the promised screenshot, a kiss my ass to Maya as the third go around has produced some really great blendshapes, far better than the last couple of tries (I am getting really good with the cluster and paint weight :) So I leave it at that and here you go, a low poly version before a smooth proxy is applied to get the final hi res look.

Kiss my ass Maya

So I actually got some sleep last night; 6 hours after watching Hitch, which was actually a pretty good chick flick. Feeling really good today which is good seeing that I somehow screwed up on half of my blandshapes last night and now the lips on my Alien are kind of floating all over the place. But that’s all right, you know why? Because the Cluster makes it all so easy, and really works a lot like the face does in reality.

You see what I am doing is selecting a bunch of verts around the region that I am trying to deform and then I start painting away. I caught on the whole painting thing without a problem, it was quite easy. I think all my Photoshop experience helps here. The easiest way I found to work is to flood the whole area with a zero value after moving the cluster to where I think I want it, then set it all the way up to one and set transparency to about a quarter to half. Then start painting with replace. The model usually get a little messy, but no biggie, set transparency to about 50% and start smoothing the whole thing out (I seldomly use the flood) and BAM! Instant expression. I was doing them in about 5 to 10 minutes by the time I finished last night..

But like I said I screwed up. I think I started to duplicate the wrong model about half way through last night, because half of my blend targets seem to have their lips float around the screen. Oh well, its all practice at this point and I will only get better. :)

PS, installed Hello last night, so there should be some pick of my Alien up tonight. :)

Lessons Learned:

When making Blendshape targets, duplicate the model to a completely different location on the screen to make sure that you don’t inadvertently duplicate the wrong mesh.

Another Quickie

Just popping in to inform that I still have a lot to learn. After spending several hours trying to figure out the whole Sub-D deformers thing without killing my machine I decided to scrap the Sub-D's and go with the Smooth Proxy Poly option. For this project it is exactly what I thought I could do with Sub-D. Oh well, anyone else out there think that Sub-Ds have a long way to go in Maya? Propbably just my ignorance, can't wait until the Advanced character animation/rigging course. :)

The good news is that I am learning more than I ever thought i could in Maya.

My Bawls get me through the day.

Well I went to bed late again last night; imagine that! Last night was because I was having way to much fun though. I think the majority of it comes from the fact that I got to finally turn off the videos, crank up the music, and just be creative. Let me tell you there was nothing like the feeling I had when I hooked up the Clusters and watched my alien blink. That is why I love 3D so much (character animation to be exact) I love breathing life into my characters and that one moment made all the sleepless night worth every minute of this class.

While I am in the mood to praise I have to go off about this class. Buzz and Zak say that they have redefined the meaning of fundamentals and that there is not really any advanced material. And you know I have to agree. Out of everything that I have even done it is not really advanced stuff, yes some of it like the Hypershade makes my brain leap out of my skull and start beating me like a drunk redneck, but this is some difficult stuff. Looking at some of the shaders out there, I see what advanced would be. The Buzz Crew also have a very sneaky way of teaching. I have learned a lot more than I even knew until last night when I found myself flying through the interface without a thought. I have become quite comfortable with Maya in only two weeks and have not really thought of this as a class. Even in my ripping and clawing to try and grasp the concept of the Maya architecture, the videos are just entertaining enough to break the monotony of learning concept after concept, until before I know it, I.. well… know it :) Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, who knows, but this class is the best thing to happen to me, and will mean the difference between me sitting on the sideline and actually doing something in CG with my future.

Anyway, my lunch break is almost over, so back to work.. Think I’ll treat myself to a little extra sleep tonight, otherwise its time to go and buy some more Bawls.


Lessons learned.

Incremental saves are your friend. I forgot to mention in the last post that I ended up modeling the basic NURBS alien 3 time because I would convert it to poly and not save original, then I would save and have to remodel it again. If I would have had incremental saves enabled I could have just imported it back into my scene. But I am not going to enable it for one reason. If I screw up and have to model it again, then that is just more practice. And don’t worry, when it comes to the complex things like the Sub-D model I am saving backup copies. :)

Dazed and Cornfuzed :/

So Tired, oh so tired. I have been sleeping like 2 or 3 hours a night for a day over two weeks now, and it is starting to get the better of me. Now for all of those that are not in the class don’t let this scare you, the class is not this involved. But I am making it that involved. With a full time job, family, and everything else in my life, Sleep just had to move down the bottom of the priority list for a while. I must get this alien talking and singing. And my progress for having a week and a half is still very good with the added 3 weeks (Wait till you hear what I have in mind for my next project, how about two fully rigged and animated characters. Let’s see if I can pull it off in two weeks)

So where am I in the progress of the alien? Well I followed the assignment and got a nice smooth tentacular little alien with one eyeball, just like Zac’s, but I duplicated it, converted to poly and started modeling away. Well it wasn’t quite so straight forward as that as I have spent the last two days trying to model a mouth on it. First in NURBS, but I finally gave up on that because I am just not educated enough to deal with stiching as it caused all sort of problems as well as bringing my system to its knees. Then I ventured into the wonderful world of Sub-D in Maya.

I am not new to Sub-D modeling as I have been using Silo for a little while, but Maya is an entirely different workflow, and not near as intuitive. But with the help of the Sub-D MS videos I was off and running and got it all modeled. Now I just have to hope and prey that Buzz and Zak will let me go with my idea.

Currently working on morph targets… :)


Lessons learned…

Jeez where to begin.

Sub-Ds in Maya are a lot more intuitive with a little help from the hypershade which let me basically model the Poly object and easily switch to see the smoothed object. I will write more about that later.

NURBS suck for character modeling compared to Sub-D!!!! Just my opinion, and I’ve got an asshole as well.

Maya blows Max away when it comes to rendering. I am just scratching the surface of the Hypershade and am blown away by its potential. Would love to get into Houdini to see what it can do :)

The big one… When NURBS patch modeling is involved, the rebuild surface is your friend. I had my little work broken up into 7 pieces and was able to reduce the amount of detail quite a bit and almost got my system running at a decent speed thank to this handy little command. Not to mention the fact that I needed it to keep tangents in order…

Kicking and screaming.

Well it was a very long weekend that seemed to just fly by. I say that because I worked on a lot on things this weekend. First I have to say Thanks to Anodynamic for posting the easy to find link on Virtual Dub as it saved my project this weekend. In laying down the sound to my final animation it went to total hell at 24 FPS as nothing synced any longer. No Big deal with Virtual Dub though. A few setting adjustments and Bam! Project completed, turned in, and passed.

On to The color wheel. Well I spent many hours on it and found this assignment to be a hell of a lot harder than I thought. After exhausting my brain to the point of exploding I turned to the class where I was informed that it only took 6 nodes to complete. Well all I could do was laugh. Here I had spent countless hours trying to figure it out, had a screen full of conditional nodes, and I am told that only 6 nodes. Well I think I was led in the right direction and have it starting to work with 4 nodes, just a little erratic, but I think I am on the right track.

So after walking away from the color wheel for a while I dove into the Abduction Project. First thought was “No, no, no, no, not NURBS, please god no… after getting the ship and the Alien done I am now thinking “Fucking piece of shit NURBS, DIE, DIE, DIE!!!”. Nothing against Buzz or Zak, they actually gave me an understanding I never had about the Rules for using them. You see I knew a lot of the rules, but never really understood why I did them. Now you could say that I understand why I hate them so much.

So why do I hate them you might ask, well I like to play around with my models a LOT. The main reason is the difficulty in getting them to work right. I have created several models 1 human, and now 3 aliens, with NURBS and always hated every minute of it. Then I found SUB-Ds and it was like this golden ray of light shining down on me, a choir of angelic hot super models caring me to a feast, It was a freedom to create that I had never known. Really it is the reason I prefer Photoshop over paper. I can experiment and its so easy and quick.

My plans for the Abduction is to add a mouth and do a little lip syncing to the animation. Well I got the curve on surfaces created easily enough with the make live function, then duplicated surface curve deleted history and duplicated several copies to make a nice little tube like mouth. Well I say nice, but it still looks like crap as I am adjusting the heck out of vertices. This would be so easy with Polys :(

Oh well, will work on it some more tonight.

A quickie

Just had to make a quick post. You know its funny, some people read magazines and to tell you the truth, I really don't know what people do while they are on the crapper. But me, well today I think it came to me. I think I figured out the logic for the color wheel and making the colo darken once it gets past the outer circles. Woo Hoo!!!! Can't wait to get home and start putting it all together to see if I actually got it figured out.

Finished playing with my Talented balls

Well I got home last night, made dinner for my girls (Slaved over the counter at Burger King to order them a top notch dinner), and settled down at my desk to realize what a dumb ass I am… You see there is this little point light hiding at the top of my stage just behind the curtains set to .4 just to add a little back lighting to my scene. Well somewhere along the way I enabled shadows on it, and although the light is not very noticeable by itself, but add to that a nice reflective floor and curtains that open and close and it becomes very noticeable. As a matter of fact it was down right distracting. Ahh well.. disabled the shadow and re-rendered last night and checked it before I went off to work and it looks great. Yeah, I get to turn it in tonight.

So I started playing around with the color wheel last night and I am pretty sure that I got the logic down for the actual color wheel part of it, but figuring out how to lay it all out for the outer rings is going to take some more research. I think I have an idea, but I will have to go back and watch a couple of the architecture videos again.

Other than that it is raining like crazy here in South Florida, so it will probably be a slow day at work, so I hopefully I will be able to crack open some of the abduction VTMs :)

Lessons learned:

Well I tried to figure out how to turn this into a lesson learned, but it is really something that was apparent only during motion; stills looked great. Guess in the future I would have to do low quality renders maybe every 10 frames or so and stuff like that might stick out.

Maya hurts so good.

Well, after last nights post I laid down and just couldn’t go to sleep. I would tell myself that it can wait until tomorrow, but then I would start to think about the +/- node and the fact that there are all these numbers in the x y and z direction. Then I would say “stop it and go to sleep” but a moment later I would be thinking that there are conditional nodes that would let me decide what to do with the color depending on how close to 0 the locator moved.

Well it was no use, I got up and went in and started clicking away… yup started working on the color wheel assignment, and now I feel like I am being taunted. Sitting here at work eating a burger, I want to be at home trying to solve the problem. This class is so much agonizing fun that I am wondering if I am actually a masochist? While I am doing it, my brain all but wants to shut down, but it is just so much fun…

Funny thing is that I think I have learned more in the past week than I did in the whole two years it took me to get my visual communications degree, but that is a whole different story.

So while I am at work and through eating lunch I though I would sit down and use the blog to start brainstorming and kind of share my thoughts. Now I am going into this without a clue of how to accomplish it, and it has not been easy as I have had to not read posts on 3dBuzz as well as another blog because they started to talk about how they did the assignment. I want to do this, and I want to do it all by myself. Good thing I do have Photoshop here at work… oh wait, even better, I have Visio :)

Brainstorming:

This section removed due to the fact that I thought about it and don't want to spoil this for future students.

Putting the talentedBall to rest.

Well I have to call it quits on the talentedBall assignment. I know myself and I will never be happy with it and although there is so much I want to do, I am learning way too much on my own here and need to get back on track with the assignments. One of the things I am afraid of at this point is getting into bad habits as the things I have learned are coming easy now and I find myself quite comfortable with the graph editor, but I am struggling with a lot of new stuff that I am sure will be covered in what is now 75 hours of video. So although I am having way to much fun I know its time to turn it in and move on. The thing I am most unhappy about is that I really want to break up the monotony of the repeating bounces more, but like I said, I must move on...

So I write this as I sit waiting for a hundred frame render test to finish to make sure the particles, glow, and lighting all work well together. Adding that in was a little bit of a disappointment as I got this really cool looking hardware particle system going, but the PLE does not let you render out hardware particles. Oh well, Switched it over to software, added the glow and I am as happy as I am going to be at this point… So I say it again, time to move on.

Really I am happy with the fact that I have learned a crap load about Maya, and the first assignment did not come out all that bad. Mostly I just want to polish it up and add the ending to it. Perhaps I will come back to it after this class is over with all my new found knowledge as I must say that there is something challenging in animating a simple ball to act like a character.

Oh well.. On to the next assignment…

Lessons learned:

Well, my whole animation is at 24 frames a second and when I tried to change it over to 30 fps it screwed up all the timing of the dancing and talking. Not sure where I screwed up and left it at 24, but hopefully it is not something that will earn me a failing grade. But it did drive home the point to make sure you are animating at the correct frame rate.

1 beer, 2 beer; where’s the fish?

Only updating tonight for one reason. The Maya class has affected my every thought. Took a well needed break tonight and found myself thinking about how I could model various things around me. Is there something wrong with me, well OK let me rephrase that… I am the type of person that throws myself into something 120 %. And well obviously this class is no different. Even after several beers (Becks if you must know) I found myself dissecting the bar stools in how easy they would be to model. Yes I have the Maya fundamentals class embedded deep into my psyche now, but for 5 weeks that is the best thing I could imagine… but like I said tonight was to be a break.. so no connection editor, no Hypershade, and definitely no script editor… but I couldn’t go without updating my blog in my impaired mental state at this point and all can say, is thank God for the spell checker )

HOLY FREAKING CRAP I LOVE MAYA!!!!!

Really getting into the animation of my dancing ball now and got into a lot of new things tonight and just kind of started winging it. Well it was a loosing battle trying to figure out how to create a long sequence of repeating bounces; like a thousand frames. I know repletion is not a good thing, but it is just the base of all the other animation I am adding to it. I have used the hypershade to connect 4 balls together to do some really cool things (you will really have to see it to believe that all the repletion is cool).

But anyway, after trying to figure out the Trax editor and wondering what use the dope sheet is (I know at this point I just don’t know enough for it to be of use to me, but I am sure Buzz and Zak will enlighten me very shortly) I went out and took a break. Then it hit me. The Script editor! So I simply sat down and clicked through the motion and started to cut and paste. Within a few minutes I had enough that I simply had to hit enter several times and BAM! The ball repeated bouncing…

Now I know there are easier ways to do this, but I am excited as hell because I am learning to think outside the box in Maya already and make her my bitch. Ok fine the truth be told she beats the living hell out of me most of the time, but tonight I was her master and she did my bidding.

Anyway, its going to be another long and tired day at work tomorrow, because I just can’t stop… Must animate… must learn more about Maya…

Lessons learned:

Tonight there were a lot of lessons, but the biggest is to leave my computer alone while making a playblast. Don’t know what I did, but Maya really had a fit and refused to make playblasts until I restarted my computer. All because I thought it would be cool to play the old playblast while it was making a new one. There was a half hour wasted deleting every Maya temp file I could find.

Oh the a-go-ny...

I was at the point on Sunday, where I was trying to decide if I should just render it out and turn it in and move on. Yeah I was tired of looking at the little fella, and then I would tell myself that if I was doing this for a living then I would just have to grin and bear it and finish it up. But then I would counter with the fact that I don't do this for a living, and it is the one opportunity that I get to decide when I am done. And it went on and on while I spent half the day yesterday delousing the house because my two little girls came home with a head full of the most vicious little critters you could ever imagine. Been there before and it can be a real bitch to get rid of, so we take no chances anymore....

Anyway the decision was… (insert drum role here) to take Wednesday off from work and add to the animation all that I can. I really want to get really comfortable with the connection editor, hypershade, and especially the hypergraph. “It will hurt me more not to do it” was all I had to tell myself to make the final decision, so off I went to add some really annoying music (you know the kind we appear to like in clubs to get chicks :) and start adding some dancing balls. So I spent several hours planning it all out and am now back in playing with the nodes as well as trying to add an actual velvet shader to my scene.

This turned out to take up a lot more time than I thought it would. After searching the net for examples, they were either too “fluffy” or the one I liked was mapped to incandescence, and well, lets just say that glow in the dark curtain highlights was just wrong. But it did introduce me to a nifty little utility; the sampler info (yeah I had to go look up the name in the hypershade, what about it? :) which lets you map attributes based UV coordinates, facing ratio, and other attributes that I am struggling to understand :D

Anyway back to work for now. Damn this is some fun stuff.

Lessons learned:

The hypershade is like a woman. It's really sexy, and I can't wait to get into it, but sometimes I wonder if I will ever truly understand it. Ok not really a lesson learned, so I would have to go with: Jason and Zak know what they are talking about. Don't scoff at the power of the hypershade and say "those rendering nerds can keep it". It really is very sexy and makes me wonder if Maya likes being on top.

Comfortably Numb

Well I have been animating all day and i have 24 seconds of my animation done. Whose idea was it to animate my ball talking anyway? oh yeah... Anyway, I still have about a minute left of the dance sequence. Anyway here is a playblast of it as promised. Usually this would be rough animation, but for this assignment I am already going way beyond the assignment, so it will have to do if I want to be able to get all the other assignments done.

http://217.68.23.17/~quantumd.com/Modeling%20contest/blast6.avi

This clip uses the XVid codec.

Comcast Rules! (Can you smell the sarcasm?)

Well have not been on BuzzNet for almost 3 days now thanks to Comcast. Not sure what they did but they had to re-provision my account and it took three days to finally get someone on the phone who even had a clue that they worked in tech support. But not having access to see the next assignment it did allow me to delete all my animation and start anew.

So now I have sound, and a complete control rig for my little ball and was in the process of connecting transforms in the connection editor with the help of the handy little multiply/divide utility :) Gotta say that I love what I have learning so far and never thought I would be so comfortable in Maya. This class is that damn good! Anyway, I am back online now and will try and post a playblast of what I have done before I go to bed tonight, for now back to work.

Lessons learned.

Name everything right away! In creating the control rig I have three bend deformers, a squash deformer, and a twist deformer all hooked up to custom attributes on my tallentedBall. And when I started using the connection editor it was a nightmare trying to figure out which was which until I went back and renamed them.

Maya, under the covers.

Well, last night was a long night (Again!) I have finished the Bouncing ball animation up to the point that I am supposed to add my own animation and I couldn’t resist getting into the Maya architecture. Started watching and couldn’t stop, then spent about two hours just playing with different connection and utility nodes. And although I didn’t do anything that was even remotely useful, I think I have a good handle on the basics of it all.

Then I stated watching Buzzes examples and decided to stop and take on the challenge of the intelligent SDK doggie door myself, as I have a vague idea of how to accomplish it. Besides it will be fun as hell to sit down and try to figure it out, I'm weird like that. So I will be spending quite a bit of time tonight playing with all of that and finishing up my animation. Who knows, I might even throw some of this new found knowledge into the control rig for my little bouncy ball.

Lessons learned:

Well I thought I would keep a section in each post of lessons learned, or rather areas that I found difficult or just had stupid troubles with for people that may run into in future classes. This one will be all bout the soft body curtains.

When I made my curtains and added the collision plane, it kept making the edge of the curtain fly across the screen in the wrong direction. Wasn’t hard to figure out that one of the particles lay on the opposite side of the plane, so a simple adjustment of the plane corrected the issue and BAM! Everything worked as it should have.

F!cking Function Curves!

Well did not take long to get out of the very basics. Went over set driven key, no big deal as I have done that one before, but also learned how to adjust SDK using the graph editor Which will be invaluable for my plans to create a bones driven facial rig something like the one Anatropous did (http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=129516 - http://www.anatropus.com ). Quickly got into function curves and fought a massive battle last night trying to figure out why my curves kept flying all over the place. Well when I finally went back and re-watched the VTMs I finally caught the info on handle weights and BAM! All was well with the world. Now my little ball is all squishy just like it should be.

As I Get into adding Attributes, SDK, and Expressions I must say that I get excited about thinking about what can be done with these tools. Things like making generic Walk cycles, but with controls that let the animator change the over all movement of the body to add more hip sway, more or less head bobbing, etc… Or what I want to be able to do most is create a script that automates rigging a character, especially my facial system. Just think how nice it would be to lay down locators in the hands, feet, etc then lay them down on the eyes, Lips, and other facial features, run the script and presto, instant skeleton and rig….

I expect to be able to accomplish this once I am finished with this class, although character rigging techniques are a completely different story.