Just an update

I know it has been a while, but that's how it goes during my last quarter. If I dont manage to post here, be sure to check out my Visual Effects web page over at http://www.sfdm.scad.edu/faculty/mkesson/vsfx705/wip/winter07/john_doublestein/john_doublestein.html
it'll be updated with my work for that class.

I havent been doing too much outside of school (what else is new?) but I'm pretty spead out on a lot of things. In addition to my course work, I'm trying to write my Thesis paper and perfect my rigging scripts. I've been working with many different students to test out my stuff and help them with their characters. Also, I've been learning more about MotionBuilder and setting up a pipeline to go from maya to MB and back to maya. The good news is that since my rig simply attaches itself to a normal hierarchy, it's easy to detach it and send the joints out to MB (sans the rig). I've also managed to strip the rig out of the maya file except for the fingers so that it's easy to merge the MB animation onto the skeleton back in maya and then animate the fingers with familiar controls. Animating in motionBuilder is quite nice, but it doesnt really have great finger support and you'd still want to do facial animtion in maya.

We're also finally in the compositing stage with Inside the Box. Yesterday I helped discover what has been wrong with our shadow passes, I'm really quite surprised that we didnt catch it sooner. Basically Maya only puts cast shadows into the shadow pass. That means that the surface shadows are only in the beauty pass. Unfortunately, we never rendered a beauty pass (only a diffuse pass) because we wanted control over the shadows, so we really only ended up with cast shadows coming through to the final render. The solution is to apply a white shader to the entire scene and turn off shadow casting in the lights. This gives us a frame that only has surface shadows that we can multiply over the diffuse pass (just like you would with an ambient occlusion shader) and combine with the shadow pass we already have. Now we have a complete shadow pass, and since we dont need to re-render the cast shadows we can turn off ray tracing and render it out through maya software. Instead of 12 minute render times for an entire shadow pass, it now takes less than a minute to repair what we already have!

On the job front, I think I've finally decided on some places to apply. I'll follow up on the PIXAR thing and see if that can happen this time, but if it doesnt, it seems that Blue Sky has a posting for my dream job on their website. I would be a happy man if I could work on the animated adaptation of Dr. Suess's Horton Hears a Who. I'll keep you posted.

Oh, and I got a new hermit crab to keep the other one company.