Portfolio building animation
LOOP DE LOOP
BRIEF WORD
LUCKY
Production
Without boring anyone with hours of me prattling on about things I find exciting in maya that others probably don't, here is a brief summary of the production and what I have learnt..
Dynamic Curves
I was struggling to get my hair to properly collide with my meshes even when my meshes were converted to collision objects/colliders, after playing about I found when I was creating my curves that maya default added 5 cv points of each curve which in the relation of the long hair strands bending around a curved complex object simply was not enough cvs so I increased this to 20 per strand and it instantly solved the problem. I am mentioning this as there was no literature anywhere about this and the setting was hidden in a none obvious place in maya, so I ended up emailing the autodesk Q&A and got a good answer back from their senior xgen technical guy, I so was pleased with the response and also my own investigation to a solution to a problem that has been driving me nuts for weeks. Sometimes you just have to dig.
Below is a clip of me driving my dogs xgen hair with the curves set to a bright colour so you can see the input attractions that each one draws on the hair and how it works. The hardest part in all of this is getting the damp and motion drag at the correct levels as again there is no set amounts or literature to how to set literally hundreds of options so it pure trial and error and sometimes frustrating as the slowdown even when cached is quite severe when driving so many curves all over the dog.
IMAGE PLANE FOOTAGE FOR THE PHONE
As for the mobile phone its not a mystery how to get footage onto a poly plane in maya using image sequences to texture a model so I wont prattle on about that but just thought id share anyone wanting to make a scene with love footage on using arnold then a trick I worked out was to plug the same image sequence into the transmission attribute of the shader and increase to about 0.500 as well as having the standard plug in to the diffuse for the basic footage! the transmission as you would presume makes the surface transmit light yet with the image sequence plugged in and to slightly overexposed then it makes the surface glow the footage from the diffuse giving a really convincing glowing phone or tv screen. As for the phone ringing footage it was just stock I took off youtube and then re sized in after effects to phone screen aspect ratio and then exported as image sequence.
A very subtle effect and you have to look close to see the phone slider ringing and the slight movement on the screen. I feel it is little subtle things like this that can really finish off an animation and just give it that final edge.
AS EXPLAINED BELOW IN MY CRAP INFOGRAPHIC : D
PLAYBLASTS
Below a trial run playblast of some animation set on the dog with all my hair settings refined, driving xgen hair demands lots of playblasts and test as you simply cannot get real time playback in your viewport so this process is essential and regular in creation.
I created sound in premiere then used that attached to my maya time slider to sync my dog barking and growling body wiggles to the intended track to be used.
Here is my final film rendered out with relatively high sub surface sampling and also high diffuse sampling to reduce noise on my hairs and especially in the volumetric scattering which gets pretty noisy when lots of lighting is used. I am very happy with the fine balance I got between high quality renders but also reasonable render times. These frames took approximately 12-15 mins per frame running on an 8 core workstation. The subtle lighting and atmosphere I created in the scene worked with the centre solo chair I think really focusing on the main object which is the dog the leading the eye to the phone. Good 3 point lighting and creating a well lit scene using light and shadow blockers and some Gobos on my lights to focus attention where I wanted really helped to get rid of that over clean plastic 3d look I have grown to hate. In a nutshell the old movie tricks of the hollywood golden era of how to set up and light a scene are more important in the modern era than we choose to
remember, and something I am focusing a lot of my spare time reading and research to.
As for the hair dynamics not perfect but a good step in the correct direction and a huge huge help im my animation of my final extended film. Things in maya are beginning to feel more fluid for me and intuitive and a lot more fun these days.
LUCKY
"LUCKY" from craig potterton on Vimeo.
CONCLUSIONS
This process was purely to test my rig before paying for rendering on my final extended, but more importantly I feel these short competitions are a great way to use my models and rigs for promoting myself and my work online, when I put my so much work into these assets I feel I should expose them in as many places as possible. As for the dynamics 0
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