Recently in Work in progress Category

Here's how to make your own photography studio out of an extra bedroom. This room has more light than anywhere in the house, considering it has three windows and a back door with a window. My mom suggested I go buy black felt to cover the windows so I could control the light better for a still life. It beats only working at night, although I tend to do that anyway.

So here's the thing. I blew off photography early on because I couldn't control the light like I could in a real studio, so I decided to paint a few still lifes instead, thinking what I couldn't do in real life with light, I could do with paint. Well, maybe I could control the light in my paintings but I couldn't control the paint in my paintings. I was working too small and too fast to really do my best. So I gave up on painting and decided to play with pretty much every light I have in my house. I had already bought some colored light bulbs for my still lifes, so all I had to do was improvise some bounce cards and a barn door for the key light. The hardest part though was rim lighting. The white card you see at the top is actually a 16x20 canvas board improvised into a bounce card. It failed, but it made a nice snake light holder for a back light. The blank canvas on the easel came in really handy too--whenever I set the timer on the camera I grabbed that canvas and held it over the top of the setup. It provided just enough bounce light to put some volume into the shadows.

I've learned more about lighting in the last 6 hours than I think I've ever learned in my life. I'm saving the photos for the reel because they are just way too cool for the blog. And no, the car's not going in. I finally figured out how to manually set the exposure on my camera so I might just give that one another try. So stay tuned. It's going to get really interesting in the next few days. And Pixar still has that lighting job listed!

I've been wanting to get this shot for a long time. This is the house next door, and the light is coming from their greenhouse. It would make a really cool painting but I don't have time for that right now, so maybe I can put this photo on my reel along with some other photos and the paintings I'll do over Thanksgiving.

I may not have set up the lights myself, but I know good lighting when I see it. Call it a reference shot. There's some great texture in the car too. I particularly like the green glow coming through the car windows--there's a street light in the distance.

It's my first weird still life. I've been wondering what to do with that phone for a long time.

Pixar has a Lighting TD position open. The listing asks for personal work in addition to cg. I know what they're looking for--the ability to light. 3 point studio lighting, creative lighting, lighting for mood--paintings, digital photos, you name it. Now I wouldn't send this photo in a million years, but I just might paint it. I can have a lot more control over lights in a painting than I can in the back bedroom with a few standard bulbs and some bounce off the semi-gloss. And a flashlight. I highlighted the doll's face with a flashlight. It comes out too hot in the photo.

Currently, all my paintings have pretty flat lighting or else are done from old photos, most of which are lit with a flash. So this is my chance to really do something creative with light. I'll have to improvise colors, because I don't have anything colorful I can place over my bulbs that won't catch on fire. What's really going to suck is painting in the dark. If I turn on the regular lights in this room, this gets washed out. So I'll be doing this pretty much in the dark. At least Daylight Savings Time is over, so it's dark when I get home at night. I don't have to fight the sun coming in three windows and the back door.

The possibility of doing this the way it needs to be done, getting it on my reel and getting it to Pixar in time is a long shot, but I'd feel a lot worse if I didn't try at all.

So I took last week off. I can't call it much of a rest though, my mom was here through last Wednesday and then my dad came to visit on Friday and left Sunday. If I'm not going to rest, believe me that's the best way to do it because I don't see them enough as it is. But despite very little time to myself since the conference it's time to get back to work. And to that end, tonight I posted a fixed bug ship to the reel and stills pages on the main site.

It took me a couple of days to figure out what happened but it's really pretty simple. At first I thought I had lost the link to the texture but that wasn't the case. Actually it had to do with two things. First, when I set up this project years ago, I didn't do the specular pass right. I used it solely for the sharp highlights on the windows and tentacles and left the sheen on the rest of the ship in the diffuse pass. Second, that came back to bite me when I turned off the specular component of the lights in my diffuse pass this time around. That wasn't an option in Maya 2 and 3, but it is now, and usually that makes a spec pass a lot easier to do. But when I turned it off, I lost that shiny surface as well as the sharp highlights. I'd like to think that if I had been getting more sleep a few weeks ago I would have caught it in time but who knows. The important thing is, I caught it and I fixed it. It's not on the DVDs--I figure I'll get rid of the ones I have before I make new ones, unless something drastic happens--but it is on the site.

The next thing I want to accomplish before working on anything new is posting the entire hippo animation on the site in addition to the excerpt that's in my reel. I'll have it as a separate link on the reel page for anyone who's interested. This is going to be a little more difficult though. There are a lot of intermediate QuickTime movies that have to be recreated just right to work in my Final Cut project from a few years ago, and I'm not sure that's going to happen so easily. I might be facing an editing nightmare. In fact, I really should re-edit the thing anyway because it doesn't necessarily need to be that long. I don't know. I guess I'll make that decision when I see how long it's taking me to do it.

So that's it for now. I'm going to start rendering the frames I was missing in LA and then go to bed. Oh yeah, I'm getting somewhat decent sleep now. I like it. Perhaps I shouldn't get used to it.

At least three pages are up. I like the home page. I did a different light setup for the potato so he would show up better on a white background. I really need to render the room just by itself because it's the only interior I've ever lit and it needs to be seen. At the same time, I need to re-render my bug ship, composite it and edit it, then dig up the hippo and tweak the shadow color and re-render that, then edit all this into a DVD as well as something that will work on the site, then gather some compositing stills to go on the site, and don't forget the potato in his environment... still stressed. Four more days. Stressed. Sure is nice to go to bed before 4:30 though.

This is as far as it goes. I'll be spending the rest of the week getting my site together and polishing my old compositing projects to put up there with this shot. This was a good lighting and shading project but not so good for compositing, so by the end of the week I should have a good range of work to show off once I fix some problems on the old stuff. I have the files, only one won't open but I don't think it's a disaster yet. I'll know for sure soon enough. I guess I won't be sleeping until tomorrow night. Or I guess that's tonight, it's just 4am now and the two hours ahead of me aren't going to help much. But I'll take what I can get. I think lunch tomorrow (today) will be nap time.

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.