Sunday, October 22, 2006

another ITB update





Thanks to you who posted comments on my last update. That test image was actually facing the wrong direction (if the characters were on the screen we would have seen only their backs) so that's what caused some of the lighting abnormalities. These new images should be lit properly. We consciously made the decision to have one side of the street in shadow and the other side brightly lit. It's not a theme of the film, but one of the concepts that we built into the subtext was that the kids from the "poor" side of the street are the ones with the imagination and the kid from the "rich" side of the street didnt need to use his imagination because he has always had whatever he wants. This is underscored in the dim lighting as well as the desaturated (less vibrant) colors of the rich side. But like I said, it's not a theme, so it's supposed to be subtle and just build contrast within the scene. Here I've posted the latest renders. You'll see just the beauty pass (diffuse, shadow, specular combined), the occlusion pass (soft shadows) and a test composite with the occlusion added to the beauty pass. I also added a subtle bump map to the street and DingDing finished the dirt maps. We havent broken the environment down into separate layers yet so we can tweak things individually (add depth of field, darken things as they recede, correct colors, etc.), but Chris did a final composite of the girl with her bears so that should give you an idea of the direction we're heading.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

ITB texture update


We're moving along on Inside The Box, but the textures are holding us up a bit. However, we're finally settled on the look for the rich side of the street. I like the multiple colors and the desaturated look. I hope you do too!

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Advanced Figure Drawing Update #5



I've got midterms this week, so I've been quite busy. For Tuesday we have to have all the primitive forms done in both sculpey (miniature) and plastelina (ecroche) which includes the skull (I finally fixed the proportions of the skull, which were off in my last post), rib cage, pelvis, scapula's, and clavicles. With the primitive forms out of the way, we'll start learning the muscles and adding them to our ecroche. In class we build them on our little plastic skeleton. On Thursday we learned the supra-spenateous (sp?), which sits above the spine of the scapula and goes under the acromion process before inserting on the coracoid process. Under that is the infra-spenateous which sits below the spine of the scapula. Beneath that is the Teras minor and beneath that is the Tera major, which actually goes underneath the humorous before attaching on the front of that bone. Besides building them, we have to do a drawn rotation of the sculpture with overlays of the primitive forms, skeleton and muscles. In addition to that we have to do the overlays on top of a classical sculpture, I've chosen Bernini's Neptune fountain in Rome. I've got a lot of drawing to do before Tuesday, so off I go!

Monday, October 09, 2006

JTD rigging tools update

Since my last post, I've added and perfected the neck rig and the leg rig modules. I've also better implemented the rig primitive system so that the rig parts automatically hook themselves onto the other primitives in the scene. This saves a lot of time previously spent in the dynamic parenting tab. With a little help from Jason (www.jonhandhisdog.com) the shoulders are finally stable and the resulting rig is really solid. I still havent figured out how to do the finger setup UI, but that's really the last step before bug checking and testing. I'm also working on a simple way to connect the original bind skeleton to the rig skeleton, since the rig skeleton gets broken up into separate parts that you probably wouldnt want to bind to a mesh. It's easy to do by hand (point and orient constraints) but since I'm aiming this at a non-technical audience, I have to come up with something that only takes one or two clicks. We'll see what I can come up with after midterms, this sculpture class is killing me.

ITB update

The "Inside the Box" revision is coming along nicely. We're finally getting animation fixes and seeing some renders. Chris Henderson's new lighting alone has improved this film by 100%. There's almost no comparison between the old film and the new renders, it's like night and day :-) Kelsey's animation was excellent to begin with, but it's even better now. The same goes for DingDing's textures. He's redone the street texture and is still working out the rich side's color. We've been struggling with how the rich side should look compared to the poor side, as we've always liked the poor side and are still having trouble finding the right color ballance. Another thing that we've been struggling with is motion blur. Mental Ray's motion blur increases our render time by 300%. It gets to the point where the render farm drops frames because it takes so long on some of the slower computers (we have to motion blur at least six layers per frame, and some of those layers are an occlusion pass). To solve this I've been doing some research. This led me to the Real Smart Motion Blur plugin for After Effects or Shake. I downloaded the demo and instantly saw the power of this plugin. It can read motion vector information (which I still havent figured out) but also does an amazing job without anything extra. It gives us good motion blur without any of the render time, especially when we separate the characters layers from the background, which we're doing anyway. Once we figure out how to get maya to give us motion vector information it will be amazing. The only trouble is that the plugin costs $200, so we'll have to raise some money somehow. Speaking of which, does anyone want to give us a grant to get some professional music done for this thing? Maybe we can get the school to foot the $5000 bill.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Mephis is burning!


I was at the 2006 North American Cup fencing tournament in Memphis this weekend on the very same day a few huge fires broke out downtown right next to our hotel. There was no need to evacuate since the worst of it was a few blocks away, but it sure was strange to walk to the convention center and see buildings still burning. There was a historic church that was completely destroyed. Even though the news said that the embers shooting into the air had caused the spread, A fireman at the tournament said that it was probably arson, as three separate unoccupied buildings were on fire on the same night and this is about the time the local gangs are doing initiations. Despite the blaze and having to share the convention center with a bunch of American Idol hopefuls, it was a good trip. I wish I had done better at the tourney, but it was still some good fencing.