Adv Figure Drawing #7

I dont have much time to write, since there's less than a week left of school, but perhaps you'd enjoy seeing some progress on the sculpture. The plastic skeleton has to be done for tomorrow, then we tear off all the clay and return it, so that's my priority for today. On the final ecroche I've finished the neck, back, chest, arms and lower legs. That leaves the upper legs, butt and all the muscle striations. I lugged it into class on Tuesday (it's probably over 50 pounds) and got some great feedback from my professor. It really does blow everyone else's away, but I knew he liked it when he asked if I was also going to turn in a CD with photos of it in progress. See, he will often patronize students by complementing their work, even though it's often pretty bad (especially compared to his work) so it's hard to know if he really likes what you've done. However, he didnt ask anyone else for photos, so I knew he was impressed. I'll let you know how the final critique goes on Tuesday. I still have all the drawings to do :-(

ITB render

Here's a new render I just got back. It should be obvious that Chris did an amazing job on the lighting, as this is with just the color and occlusion, no shadow, spec or reflection pass added in yet. Good job Chris! I can't wait!

ITB reality check

Well ITB isn't going to get done this quarter :-( We just didnt have enough people committed to the revision. Hopefully next quarter will be different, but I suspect It'll be a worse struggle with everyone trying to finish their thesis work. The good news is that we have started rendering, and let me tell you, ITB in HD looks amazing. The HD resolution increased our render time, but since we rebuilt and optimized a lot of things at the beginning of the quarter, it's about the same render time as what we had for standard def in the original renders. Also with Bryan Bently's help we've got the motion blur problem solved.

My original solution was to render the motion vectors out with a mental ray shader and use a retail plugin that could read the motion vector images and do motion blur in Adobe After Effects or Shake. We even got the shader installed on the render farm. However, the plugin costs $200, so all we could do was work with the demo version.

The neat thing that Bryan showed me is that maya has a hidden built in motion blur post-processor, that can read IFF motion vectors and motion blur our final composites. From what I can tell from my tests, the results looks just as good as what we could have gotten with the expensive plug-in.

What you do is render a low quality (but at the same resolution) maya software pass with default textures, no lighting, no raytracing, and no anit-aliasing into an IFF file. This should render very very quickly. If the motion blur was turned on and the option to save motion vectors was checked, then the motion vectors are stored in the IFF file. Then you take your high quality images that have been rendered in mental ray and fully composited (without motion blur) , and run blur2d from the command prompt using the low quality IFF images with saved motion vectors as a guide. It will read the low quality IFFs and motion blur the high quality images! The advantage is that you can get a very fast motion blur on images rendered with Mental Ray, because as we all know, Mental Ray motion blur, while very accurate, slows down our render time so much that the farm gives up. So there we have it, now we just have to get everything rendered with that extra pass. Good times.

Victory is mine!

Hooray! I finally did well at a fencing tournament! Last weekend the fencing team went to Georgia Southern University for the Halloween Open fencing tournament. I did pretty poorly (placed 9th out of 20) early in the morning at the D and under tourney (a D-1 event), but things went well for me at the open later in the day, which was a C-1 rated event! I placed third (out of 21), which means I not only got a cool skull necklace as a trophy but I also leveled up! I went from being unrated to earning my D (skipping completely over the E). I lost to a B rated fencer, but not before scoring 10 points on him. I'm not sure why there was such a difference between the D and under and the open, but I suppose I was just finally on my game. I'm not sore anymore, but the bruises still haven't healed yet.

http://askfred.net/Results/results.php?tournament_id=2394&FREDSID=89c5329e6b24df6603d1ab2712ca6b26

Advanced Figure Drawing Update #6

Needless to say, I've been very busy with this class. However, I decided to show some progress today because I'm about to cover up all my nice back muscles with the latissimus dorsi and the trapezius (as you can see on the plastic skeleton). There's lots left to do and only a few weeks left of class, so we'll see how things turn out and if I can actually finish all I'm supposed to. Dont forget that this is a drawing class, so I have all that left as well!