New daleks

Watching the new series of Doctor Who at the moment, which is a bit hit and miss. Along with dumbed down dialouge, crummy camera angles, and silly stories, the latest miss is the new dalek design, which essentially makes it larger, fatter, and crayon coloured. Someone also decided to redesign the eye stalk, making it articulate using ball joints and visually displaying a fleshy eye in the lens. Wow. I hate it. The tennant series had a much more mature sci-fi feel, where as smith's is pulling us into the 80s again with its colourful visual style. Too bad the show was getting pretty ugly back then... and while it is possible to make a good looking picture while limiting your colour scheme to match a rubix cube, I don't think they're currently hitting the mark for me. Oh well.

The Terrible Thing of Alpha 9

This animation is becoming an old favorite that I keep going back to look for. It has a great story and efficient style that tells of a pretty clever animator behind the scenes.

KeyTangent Script

There are heaps of these kind of scripts around, but usually you want to make your own to suit the way you work. This script sets all keys for selected objects in the current time range to use preset tangent types, and also sets your default key tangent type as well. Lets me quickly bounce between stepped and plataeu modes while sketching out my animation, also good if you are working in a large timeline and don't want to trash your curves in finished sections.

string $inTangentType = "linear";
string $outTangentType = "step";

// Convert all keys for selected in timeline to $outTangentType
int $minTime = `playbackOptions -q -minTime`;
int $maxTime = `playbackOptions -q -maxTime`;
string $minmaxTime = $minTime + ":" + $maxTime;
$sel = `ls -sl`;
keyTangent -inTangentType $inTangentType -outTangentType $outTangentType -time $minmaxTime $sel;

// set default key tangent to $outTangentType
keyTangent -global -ott $outTangentType;

Open Script

Quick little script for opening files in the current folder, good little trick if you work like I do, and if you hate getting distracted everytime you have to go hunting for the file you want to open.

string $file = "_ANIM.mb";
file -save;
string $scenename = `file -q -sceneName`;
$filename_arr= stringToStringArray($scenename, "/");
stringArrayRemoveAtIndex((size($filename_arr)-1), $filename_arr);
$filename_arr[size($filename_arr)] = $file;
string $filename = stringArrayToString($filename_arr, "/");
file -o -f $filename;

Of course replacing the $file with as many different files as you want. In each shot I'll have an _ANIM, _CAM, _ENV, _LIGHTING, & _RENDER at least, so I can quickly zap between them using duplicates of this script.

Shot Workflow

Well, I've been racking up alot of shots with test animation, just to make sure it looks right, and in the process I found myself in the deep and mosquito ridden jungles of disorganisation. As such I've been getting some housework in order - after things came to be in a bit of a tangle, i began untangling with my unoffical favorite part of doing projects: automation.

The first thing is having a file referencing plan in the shot folder. When I had about 10 shots I realised that I was running around between files chasing settings like light attributes and render passes - it had the potential to get very confusing very quickly. So I made things a little more strict by having the animation, effect and environment elements all funnel into the lighting file. I made a rule that this lighting file is the only place where light linking happens, and where the beauty is developed. This lighting file is then referenced into the render file, which by another rule is the only place where render layers/passes and other render options live. After I did this, life became a little simpler, and I realised I could reuse environment, lighting and render files between shots - so all I really had to do was work on the animation.

After I did this I was able to work on new shots more freely, but that led to another problem - reorganising shots. Each shot is stored in a numbered folder, and inserting shots means renumbering others, which is a pain the next time you go to open your comping file. Since I knew I'd want to be constantly reorganising things, I automated my comping workflow as well, so it is the least intrusive to my work.

Of course, to minimise the amount of re-wiring in comping files the solution is in the use of relative paths, and having a different Blender comp file for each shot. The awesome part is I can reuse my comp files if my maya render layers follow a naming convention. Blender stays quiet if a image sequence input doesn't actually find any files, so the same comp file can be used for a variety of comping situations. When I've finished animating a new shot and rendered it, I just throw in a Blender comp file, open it, adjust the duration and hit render. All of the layering is done for me as per my render layer names, and the image sequence nodes can be set to 999 frames long - they just become blank when they run out of frames (most of my shots are only sub 200 frames).

All this means less time stuffing around, and more time animating :D

Connect Mesh script

This is just a little melscript to connect the geometry of two selected objects. Its better off as a button for me as I use it quite frequently.

// Make mesh connection between first to second object in selection 
string $select[] = `ls -sl -dag -lf`;
$str1 = $select[0] + ".outMesh";
$str2 = $select[1] + ".inMesh";
connectAttr -f $str1 $str2;

Useful things in Windows 7

Just wanted to point out some less obvious things I like about Windows 7... not that it's new anymore.

• Copying Files. Oh yeah, the best thing about Windows 7. Copying a file using Ctrl+C also copies the full filepath to the text clipboard. This is very handy for quickly opening files rather than navigating using a program's open dialogue.


• Libraries. Right click a folder and add to library. They are basically expandable shortcuts. They are great for when you're working with specific parts of a big project (in my case, my work drive and render drive), and don't enjoy the repetitive action of navigating to and fro every morning. There was a hacky trick where you could do this in XP using folders created in the start menu.


• Virtual Hard drives. Yeah, hardly groundbreaking. But its good that they actually support them, even if they use their own hdd format. I think this is most useful for me simply because I run bat files to attach them when I want to do some work. This is the bat script incase my computer blows up and I realise I haven't backed up my precious, precious files.

@echo off
echo > c:\script.scr select vdisk file=c:\W-drive.vhd
echo >> c:\script.scr attach vdisk
echo >> c:\script.scr create partition primary
echo >> c:\script.scr assign letter=w
echo >> c:\script.scr exit
diskpart /s c:\script.scr

:D

Woman in Shock!

This was a fun image I had in mind while designing the header for my website, during which I wanted to make an image of a damsel in distress, as if taken straight out of an old black and white episode of Doctor Who.

View in Gallery

Production Pipeline

My production pipeline is now in full swing for my short film, meaning I can press a few buttons and it spits out the composited video of the shot I'm currently working on. Its pretty important to have everything set up correctly to really streamline the rendering process, saving time to allow for focus on the final production frames. It's also much better for reviewing the animation, seeing one shot blend into the other, and seeing where the animation is needed most.

For each shot, I have the animation, environment, effects, camera, and lighting split into separate files, some of these files usually referencing other model and rig files elsewhere in the project. When working with multiple shots, it's pretty important to have some kind of pipeline for each element, so that when updates occur they update throughout the project automatically. I'll try and explain the setup here for what goes into each shot:

Character: SHOT <-- Lighting <-- [Animation, Camera] <-- Character <-- Rig <-- Model 
Environment: SHOT <-- Lighting <-- [Environment, Camera] <-- Model 
Effects: SHOT <-- Effects <-- Camera

To render each element, I have batch files in the shot folder to generate the renders on my render drive.

"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2010\bin\Render.exe" -r mr -cam _CAM:camera1 -pad 3 -rd R:\KittyString\03_MURKY_DRAIN\02_UNDERWATER_SHOT\_LIT_ANIM _LIT_ANIM.mb  
"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2010\bin\Render.exe" -r mr -cam _CAM:camera1 -pad 3 -rd R:\KittyString\03_MURKY_DRAIN\02_UNDERWATER_SHOT\_ENV _ENV.mb
"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2010\bin\Render.exe" -r mr -cam _CAM:camera1 -pad 3 -rd R:\KittyString\03_MURKY_DRAIN\02_UNDERWATER_SHOT\_EFFECTS _EFFECTS.mb 
:: shutdown -s

shutdown -s is nice too! Command line rendering with Maya is pretty common - I only use it when I'm working with the shots in this project, as it tends to minimise any mistakes in render settings. You might notice the camera specified is _CAM:camera1; this lets me be lazy with my camera referencing, as the rendered maya file will probably have 3 or 4 referenced cameras in it, but only the one we want is used for rendering.

So the rendered passes for each element is split into folders, and then assembled in the compositor. I'm using Blender and so far its very handy. The great thing is its so lightweight and simple, so after a render from Maya, I can just fire up Blender and set it to work. I have different comp files for each shot, and one for each section, allowing me to easily turn a sequence of 'just rendered' shots into a quicktime file for previewing.

So far so good! I'll be sure to post some image updates soon.

Learning Blender

I've been spending a bit of time learning Blender, and I'm starting to like it. I have tried before and was put off by the interface, but I knuckled down with some video tuts (from all kinds of people in the colourful blender community), and now I'm feeling like a pro. Still getting the hang of using it for rigging and animation, but I was surprised to find out it's got a fairly decent compositor built into it, which I might use for my short film, and anything else in the future. The sculpting tools are not bad either. And of course, its free.

Bone Replacement

This is just a simple rigging note that I've found useful in Maya.

When rigging in Maya, you may occasionally want to replace some bones in the skeleton, this can be annoying after you've already done some weight painting to the skin. The skin deformer knows which bone a weight is assigned to, but the actual weights reference a bone by name only. So we just need a new deformer. You can swap any of the bones in the skin deformer pretty easily by following this procedure:

• duplicate original_bones, creating new_bones
• remove the original_bones from the skeletal hierarchy
• rename new_bones to match original_bones

At this point, our model is still skinned to the original_bones. We need a temp model skinned to new_bones to ensure we preserve our weights.

• duplicate model, creating model_temp
• make skin on model_temp using the skeleton (which now includes new_bones)
• copy weights from model to model_temp

Now we have 2 meshes, skinned to both skeletal instances with the same weights. Though model_temp is correct, we usually don't want to trash our original model, so re-add the skin and copy the weights back.

• detach skin from model
• make skin on model using the skeleton
• copy weights from model_temp to model
• delete model_temp.

It's a fairly simple process, but very handy.

WIP Murky Drain colour concept

This is a WIP colour concept I'm working on for the Murky Drain environment my short film project.

Short Film

I've been working on a 3d animated short film during the break. The goal is to tell as simple story, be a pleasure to watch, and complete it in a timely manner. I'm slowly digging my way out of preproduction - Not running too far behind schedule but it sure is keeping me busy! I'll be sure to post updates as they come.

New Website!

Robomojo.net lives again! I dusted off that old webdesign and brightened it up to hopefully catch more attention. Still some minor bugs here and there, which will be ironed out shortly. I've integrated this blog into it as well, so I don't forget about either of them again!