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!