July 2008 Archives

This is better. There's a much clearer indication of a window in the room, and the early morning light with the incandescent light in the background makes a nice primary color palette. I got rid of a lot of physically accurate yet unnecessarily distracting shadows too. I may still bring out the hand holding the toothbrush a little more because there's not much contrast over there, but this is definitely enough to start shading. I did this with one diffuse pass that included shadows and then composited an ambient occlusion pass over it. Wish I could get a separate shadow pass that worked, but for one pass this is pretty good.

What's up with Maya's shadow pass anyway? I can't turn off self-shadowing (I set it to "ignore" but it doesn't). I'm ok with that except the rendered image has negative cast shadows and positive self shadows. If it were one way or the other for both kinds, that would be fine, but doing it both ways in the same image makes it completely unusable. How am I supposed to demonstrate compositing when I can't even get a shadow pass? If I had about $900 I'd upgrade to Maya 2008. Don't know if it's any better but it can't hurt. Maybe in a few months.

I thought it was an attainable goal. But considering how much I had to read and learn before I could get anywhere, I still made a lot of progress and I'm glad I took Monday off. I learned about area lights, something I didn't have in Maya 3, and I learned about Maya's shadow pass, which doesn't work very well with mental ray (despite many wasted hours trying to get it to work). I also learned about ambient occlusion passes, which I LOVE. And I did a lot of lighting and a lot more tweaking. And there is even more tweaking to come when I get the shading done but at least the basic lights are in.

My goal for today was to have a finished shot posted on my site, and revise the site design and get my promo materials laid out. I did redesign the home page but since I don't have a finished shot yet, the new home page isn't up. I can actually see the shading and light tweaking taking me the rest of the week just on this shot. That's annoying, but if that's really the case then I'll be doing the night shot in addition to this and leaving it at those two. The night shot has a lot of lighting challenges and if I can pull it off, it will really show off my skills. There's really not much to the shot with the toilet, and the one that has him on the sink is another early morning scene, which I have covered here. I'll save the toilet shot for last in case I have the time but I'm not betting on it at this point.

There's one thing that's annoying me about this shot. He's standing in front of a window. I feel like that should be more apparent, and at the same time, it's very early morning just as the sun is coming up so there's not a lot of light coming in yet anyway. I don't know. I probably need to stop looking at it for a while. Makes me glad I have a job to go to tomorrow.

Despite my three day weekend (which I will make up for over the next few days at work), I still stayed up until 7:30 this morning, then took a 6-hour nap, so it feels like it's too early to go to bed right now (at almost 2:30). But I guess I should. I should be proud of this. I think I am, I've just stared at it so long that all I can see when I close my eyes is a white chalky potato under colored lights.

I created four shots to light and shade before SIGGRAPH, but I'll be focusing on just one this weekend. This shot will be the basis for my promo materials. I'll light him in this scene and then render him without the background, leaving him on a small area of tile (no step) on a white background. That should make a pretty versatile image for print. This and the other three stills will be my focus until SIGGRAPH, and hopefully only for the next week as I would still like to give people something to see before they get on the plane to LA. Beyond that it will be too late, and one week in advance of the show is REALLY cutting it close as it is.

Currently all four shots are lit with Maya's default light and they all use a basic white Lambert shader. Using a white shader makes it easy to set up the key and fills without getting confused by shader complexity and color bleed. Once the basic lights are set up I'll do the shading and then come back to the lighting, making sure everything works together like it should. The next update will still use the white Lambert but the lights should convince you it's an early morning scene. Once I pull that off, the shaders are just gravy.

I consolidated the slide show tonight, taking it down to only six categories. Navigation is a lot easier now. The four shots I set up last night and tonight are included in the new Lighting & Shading category, and I hope to show a progression for each one through lighting, shading, tweaking the lights and then the final render. And all in a week if I'm lucky. And since we're hoping for miracles now, we might as well look for 99c gas and affordable health care while we're at it. And peace in the middle east. Maybe even a presidential candidate to vote for rather than against. But I digress.

Did that sound pessimistic? Actually this is the most optimistic I've been in a while. I'm sure I can do one shot this weekend and do it well. I always want to do more and I always want it to be perfect, but like I said a few posts ago, quality is more important than quantity. I'll be writing that on a few hundred post-its and putting them around the house soon.

The rig is almost done. I still need to add some influence objects in his fingers and shoulders to help them retain their shape when the joints bend. I also want to do a blend shape that turns his mustache up or down according to mood. I've hidden the extra parts here and put him in xray mode so you can see the skeleton and controls better. Did you know a potato has knees?

I got desperate this weekend trying to get the rig to work and decided that one way or another I was going to get those Maya 3 files open. So I tracked down my old Maya CD (I really do keep everything) and installed it on my Dell laptop running XP. I wasn't sure if it was going to work considering I used to run it under NT, but it did work and I was in business. I grabbed the files I got off backup a few days ago and tried to open one... error. And that told me it wasn't a Maya version problem, it was a file corruption problem. I would have given up at that point except that when I was digging for the Maya CD I also found all my animation files on CD. So I had another copy of them backed up directly to CD from Windows. Those files worked in both versions. Within minutes I was looking at the rig I had been needing all along.

You know what? That rig wasn't that great. But it gave me a place to start and now I have a working rig for the potato. Note to self: Don't back up Windows files using Mac OS9. Not that OS9 is an option anymore, but lesson learned. (When in doubt, zip your files first.)

So I have less than three weeks left and ideally I need to have something on my site in about one week, so as much as I hate it I've had to make a hard decision. Considering what I want to do in this field is lighting, animation is not my priority. I like following the logical order of production but in this case I need rendered images and I need them fast. So I will set the bar a little lower and hope I can fly over it. I'm going to use the rig to pose the potato in three key static poses (one from each scene), and then texture and light the hell out of them. Worst case, I'll have three really good rendered images on my site before SIGGRAPH. Best case, I'll get that done in a week and go ahead and animate it as the last step. I'm not expecting that to happen though (at least not to my high standards) so I'm going to put the bulk of my remaining energy into texturing and lighting. And I'm going to try not to be mad about it.

I used to know how to do this. In fact, I save everything; I even have my Maya files from my animation class back in 2001. So I dug them up, hoping to remind myself of how I rigged my characters. You know what? Maya 8.5 won't open a Maya 3 file. So much for that.

So I read the chapter on character rigging in my Maya book and found a couple of tutorials on the Internet. It wasn't the in-depth training I was hoping for but it was enough to get me started. And it's interesting, once I started organizing my models for different scenes, little things started to come back to me. For instance, I was in the middle of creating different facial and clothing setups for different scenes, and it suddenly occurred to me that I could add an attribute to my character and write an expression that turns different setups on and off according to that attribute. So I created an attribute called "Setup," which can be set to "normal," "morning," "day" or "night." Then I wrote an expression to turn on or off the different setup groups depending on how that attribute was set. The pic below shows "normal" next to "morning." And instead of showing and hiding things manually, all I had to do was use a drop menu.


Of course any seasoned Maya veteran probably thinks that's pretty basic knowledge, but I'm accessing parts of my brain that haven't been used in over six years. I'm just glad something's still there.

Speaking of buried knowledge, I got my animation project web site files off backup as well. Going through that site was beyond enlightening. I found a story synopsis I wrote but never developed. It was really smart, I'm going to have to put that on the future project list for sure. I'd also like to redo the project I did develop; I've considered that for years because it was a really good concept. I wish I had posted more information on the project I did develop but what I did post brought back a few things about modeling that I wish I had thought of earlier. The biggest find though was a presentation I did on advanced lighting techniques. It may even be a miracle I found it because I think I was about to embark on a pretty inefficient approach. Now I remember what I need to do, and finding that information even prompted a revision to the schedule. Lighting before texturing, not the other way around. It's starting to make sense again.

And you know what? I did some pretty good work back then, considering there was no such thing as an ambient occlusion pass. Can't wait to see what I can do now.

Somehow I still have to work in some serious web site revisions this weekend (and some serious sleep). Given the lack of official recruiting at SIGGRAPH by companies I was hoping to see, I'm going to have to get my name out there ASAP in case I can meet with anyone on the side. At least I have some friends in high places.

This is my latest weeknight yet. I'm sure glad it's Friday.

Finally, I can check "model character" off my to do list. All the latest models are posted in the work in progress slide show, and despite the hack I put in the ActionScript the other day I still find that I have to clear my cache before the new xml file will load. Annoying. But they're there, bunny slippers, shower cap and all.

I took out the links to the old car wash, bathroom and character slide show pages, which meant updating (or deleting) links in some old entries as well. Anything that linked to the old bathroom page now links to the work in progress page instead, and one car wash page link was deleted. I'm surprised it wasn't harder than it was to clean those out. My next task will be to consolidate some of the categories in the current slide show, but not tonight. I'm three days behind starting the rigging and I really have to get on that before I start anything else.

I have a great idea for an update to my home page before SIGGRAPH but it will involve a little more modeling, some extra texturing and a little extra lighting. I haven't decided if I'm going to do that yet, it all depends on how fast I can get the rigging and layout done. If I can make up three days by Friday I'll spend a day this weekend getting my site updated. I want to have it ready well in advance of the job fair so when I create my profile on CreativeHeads.net and put in my URL, visitors won't be bogged down with a bunch of graphic design crap before they find what they're looking for. I'm going to leave my idea as a surprise though. I'm optimistic I can pull it off and yet I don't know why. I really have no reason to think I can squeeze in some extra work when I'm already behind. But it's just like me to try.

Think I'll get in bed with my sketchbook and iron out a design. It's only midnight...

Wait.

I just checked CreativeHeads.net again. They finally posted who's recruiting at SIGGRAPH. Basically, it's no one I was hoping to talk to. There are two or three companies I'd be interested in but they're not looking for a lighter, in fact one of them is looking for a web developer. SERIOUSLY??? Forget it. This throws a serious kink in my plan. I'm going to have to get creative. I'm going to somehow have to get my URL to the right people before the conference and hope I can meet up with someone while I'm there. More difficult, but possible nonetheless. Someone is testing me to see how badly I want this. Ok, fine. Do that. Test me. I'll pass. It's too late to give up now.

I still have to model the towel, shower cap, newspaper and step stool. The shower cap is the only one I'm worried about, but then I was worried about the mustache and I ended up doing that in 3.5 hours. It took the weekend though to do the teeth and the shoes, and that's because I decided to learn about displacement mapping at the same time, although I didn't use it very much in the end. So here's an account of the last few days of modeling the details.

The mustache and teeth are each single modeled surfaces. I used displacement mapping to do the lace holes on the shoes and the pattern on the hat. The shoes, like the hat, are modeled from multiple surfaces. I had to do an actual render instead of a screen capture this time because the displacement maps won't show up in a screen capture, but there are no lights or shaders as of yet. Therefore, there are also no colors or cast shadows. The lighting is weird but you get the point. He's a happy potato.

I'm glad I took the time to learn how displacement mapping works, especially with mental ray. It's does a terrific job, better than Maya alone. I also tried Maya's Sculpt Geometry tool along the way but hated the lack of control and the crazy amount of tesselation needed to make it look smooth. I even looked into ZBrush, which I LOVE, but can't afford right now. And they don't have a free trial for the Mac so that's on hold for now. But although I ended up modeling almost everything, I learned a ton and I found another toy for later on. So what if I'm a day behind. (Yikes.)

Models will go into the slide show tomorrow. I need sleep. Funny how that keeps coming up.

I would stick it out tonight and try to model the mustache but I've been missing a lot of sleep lately. I'm not sure I'll get much more sleep tonight than I have for the last couple of months but I can at least try. If I get the mustache done tomorrow I'll still be on schedule. Of course I also have to do the detail on the teeth and shoes. I'm thinking displacement maps for those, they're way too complicated to model.

I'm getting into the habit of crashing on the couch as soon as I get home and waking up at about 7:30. That's not good. That's a lot of time lost. But I obviously need the sleep so I have to figure something out.

I need to start rigging next week and do the layout. I realized the other day as I watched a tutorial video on HighEnd3D that I've forgotten a lot about rigging. I gave myself a week for this, I'm really hoping it won't take that long but at least there's a little time to do some research and refresh my memory. The sooner the better though. I need to spend most of my energy on texturing and lighting and I need as much time as I can get for that.

Hopefully I can post a completed model tomorrow. If not, at least by the end of the weekend. I really can't predict how this displacement map thing is going to go, especially on the shoes. Tricky.

Boy do I miss having a sound booth and a library of royalty-free effects. Even in the middle of the night I have to hide in the innermost room of the house (the other bathroom) and wait for cars to pass to record even one sound. I've never used high pass filtering so much in my life. But I have a workable soundtrack now with a complete animatic. And no, the scream is not mine. I got it off the Internet. Not bad though. And thank God for Bose and their noise-canceling headphones or this would have all been useless.

The title has become "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Potato But Were Afraid to Ask" and follows with three fun facts about potatoes and scenes that support them. I updated the storyboard I had already created and then built the animatic, and it holds together so much better now as a story. Now I can finish production knowing exactly where I'm going.

Check out the work in progress page. If you don't see the latest updates, be sure to clear your browser cache and try again. There are some parts of that slide show that just won't reload on their own.

Finally I can eat dinner!

Ok, I'm doing things a little out of order. At the beginning I figured I would do three separate projects and they most likely wouldn't overlap. Now I've found a way to make two of them work together as one, and only after one of the models is already finished. That leaves me doing the storyboard in the middle of the project rather than at the beginning where it belongs. But at least I've done it, and it's included in the slide show on the work in progress page I set up the other night. Now I'm going to get this pencil lead off my hands and go to bed. Tomorrow I have to figure out where I'm getting the sound effects.