2LA43D

Product Rendering: Futuristic PDA?

2009-09-29T22:09:00.000-07:00

I started a new course in Product Visualization and Rendering with Maya/Mental Ray. They stressed how we need to keep up with industrial design, design mags...ie have to keep checking out what is cool and in style so that our reel/demo reflects what is in demand. Our first assignment was to design a PDA of the future, model and render with Maya, and composite it with a photo we shot. I came up with one that is compact, has a flexible,clear, and retractable OLED screen, and is super thin. That's what i would want anyway. I took a shot of my own hand and then composited it. I tried to make it into a mock ad, so I guess I went a bit far but was having fun so what the heck..

Week 9: Dynamics-Texture emission from an object

2009-09-09T23:12:00.000-07:00

Just finished working on probably the toughest particle challenge yet...the exercise here was to camera project a background plate with coke can sitting on a hydrant onto a 3d version of the can. Then, the can will 'emit' particles in the same color as its label and be blow away by the wind revealing a 'glass' can underneath. whew! Took a bit longer to do then to explain, but learned a lot about hardware rendering with this one.

Enjoy!

Week 9: Dynamics_Particle Emitters

2009-09-08T00:47:00.000-07:00

We started the last and final week with a bang: dynamics. More specifically we focused on particles and forces and ways to control them with scripting expressions. Emitters are the way particles are born into the scene( rate of emission, inital velocity...). Just like geometry objects, emitters can be placed on motion paths for effects like the one above.

Particles are what are emitted and they are a few types for different looks (dots, spheres, streaks...). Certain types can be rendered with the Maya software renderer, but most are done with hardware rendering, which takes advantage of the hardware on your video card (if you have a decent one). It's must faster than software rendering and with some motion blur and some post work, can look pretty great.

Forces are ways to control particles once they emit, such as gravity, wind, drag, vortex. In the above example i have gravity on the sparks so they tend to fall dowward but an upward directional force on the smoke to make it drift upward, as well as some turbulence to make it swirl a bit.

I would have loved to make it explode at the end, but we dont have that kind of time..on to the next lesson! : )

Week 8: Skinning

2009-09-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

Been offline for a while since skinning week was really intense and not much time for much else. Unlike other weeks, there aren't that many examples to show as the concept is rather simple but the work is very tedious and difficult to do get exacting results without lots of work.

The term 'skinning' is not unlike the hunting term (where animal's skin is removed) but in this case we are putting on skin, not taking off. Just like a real person, characters have a skeleton with joints that move and the skin follows along. It's the same in 3d but..and its a big but..it the skin moving with the bones doesn't just happen automatically. One has to go in assign each vertex in the outer skin to a joint inside and then decide how much influence that joint has over that point. If its 100 percent, then moving that joint will make that point follow it 100%. if 50% assignment, then the movement of that skin vertex will move some average of that joint and of the position of whatever other bones of which that vertex is a member. When done correctly, arms bend and stretch correctly, wrists turn and everything behaves as it should. This kind of work is only noticible to most people when something doesn't look right. So it's kind of an invisible art. I think skinning and rigging artists are the unsung heros of 3d character animation.

In the image above, the white areas are showing 100 percent assingment to the elbow and black areas have no assignment, i.e. wont deform when the joint is bent. Grey areas have multiple joints assinged to the those vertices. The cool part is if you have a pen and tablet, like a wacom, you can paint these assignments with the pen using white and black colors. So literally you are painting the influence a selected joint has on the skin. It makes the process faster and more bearable then if had to just use a mouse or assign the numbers by data input. The red circle in the image is the brush shape i was painting with.

The finishing touches related to skinning include the use of deformers. Skinning itself is a deformation proces but with other deformers on top you can make a muscle flex when the arm is bent or correct and area around a joint that isn't deforming/bending propertly. Once assinged, just bending the arm will make the bicpes flex, etc. It's really cool.

In the clip above, I'm showing the calethenics test that characters are put through when doing skinning. It's the best way to see how things are bending and what areas need more tweaking. Also you can see me grab come small points called clusters which are a type of deformer I assigned to the areas in and around the biceps/elblow are to correct the bend and make the bicep flex when the arm is bent.

Not much else to say or show about skinning, as i said it's easy in concept but just lots and lots of testing and tweaking. I liked it since i got to feel some sense of painting again, but I don't think I would like doing it everyday for months on end.

Last (and coolest) week coming up: Dyamics :P

Week 7: Rigging/Kinematics - Set Driven Keys

2009-08-25T22:49:00.000-07:00

Wrapping up this week we covered the last of the constraints, Set Driven Keys. For artist who aren't so versed in coding in MEL (or don't care to be), this was of visually constraining one objects value to another's is a godsend. That's the long and short of it really...we are telling Maya that when object 'A' is in this position or state, put object 'B' (or C, D or as many as like) in that position or state. You can even use Set Driven to connect an object's value to a slider control that appears in the work area so making a mouth open/close, wing flap is really easy.

In the screencap above, I wired the rotations of the joints of a hand to the position of crosshair's position. Moving the crosshair from left to right causes the joints to rotate and the hand closes. Then wired the positon of the locator to the slider I made called 'Grip' so just changing that value makes the same action. Having this kind of east control allows animators to focus on animating and not on finding objects in the scene and speeds up their workflow.

Week 7: Rigging/Kinematics - Ant rig

2009-08-22T16:05:00.000-07:00

Rigging week was very interesting , but for me the most challenging week yet. You really need to think like an engineer and being really good at math doesn't hurt either. Maks, our instructor did a great job to trying to teach some tough material. My brain really hurt by the end of the week..haha. It is really fun though, trying to solve puzzles of how the get the relationship or control you want in skeleton or hierarchy.

In the above screen cap, I'm just showing a rig we worked on for class which is a skeleton for an ant, using IK (inverse kinematics) for the legs and FK (forward kinematics) for the spine. All IK means is that a chain of joints reacts/orients based on the placement of the end of the joint chain(effector). It's a quick method to pose arms and legs, but you lose the nice arcs you get with FK, like in the natural motion arcs of our arms and legs. FK, on the other hand, works by rotating the 'top' joint first (say the hip) and then then rotating the knee joint, then the ankle...etc. It's a lot of animating compared to IK. So much in fact, that IK is almost always done for a walk cycle.

It might be easier to see in the clip above. The legs of the ant are IK and the spine is FK. A good rig make the animator's job easier because he/she just have to move or animate a few controls and can access them easily. the circle's near the feet of the ant are an example of this.

Week 7: Rigging/Kinematics

2009-08-20T01:54:00.000-07:00

This week we are doing rigging, which is the process of creating skeletons basically, for characters or mechanical objects. It's pretty involved and we are still working on creating a skeleton (or 'rig') for a character, so nothing to show yet : (. Rigging has always intimidated me a bit and it's one of the most, if not the most, technical area of 3d, but Maks (our instructor) is doing a great job making it easier to understand. He is a super talented guy who has worked on many motion feature films as a rigging artist for Beowolf, Bad Boys, Matrix, Stuart Little, Harry Potter, just to name a few. Check out his film credits here... feel lucky to have such an experienced instructor. : )

more later!

Week 6: Animation - Rigid Body Dynamics

2009-08-20T01:05:00.000-07:00

Late getting the posts out lately since class has been pretty intense this past week. We finished out last week with a short intro to rigid body dynamics. We will go over them in detail during the final week: Dynamics. We got to see the basics of how it works anyway. Rigid body simulations calculate the collisions between hard objects that do not deform or penetrate each other (basically hard objects). Soft bodies are things like rope, cloth..stuff that changes shape upon contact.

It's real-world based in physics so you need to assign things like gravity, mass, friction, etc...to all the objects, so you can get very realistic-looking behavior as things collide. However, the down side is since it's a simulation, you dont have direct control over the result or look like you do with keyframed animation. All you can do is adjust properties and see what happens, so it takes many many tries and the calculations too take a long time. So, its a slow process. That said, if you had to animate with keyframes 100 pencils dropping on a table and make it look realistic it would take much longer and probably still not look natural. But it depends on the scope and particular shot so it really depends.

Anyway, here are some pencils being knocked out of a Styrofoam cup by a virtual wrecking ball. I purposefully didn't spend time on the materials or lighting or add nice effects like motion blur since it takes sooooo much time just to run the simulation and I'm on a lowly laptop here. To see a higher res version click here.

Also, hello out there to my classmate's Marcelo's father-in-law. Glad to know I have at least one reader! haha. Thanks for reading!

Lighting workshop with cinematographer from Jurassic Park

2009-08-16T11:06:00.000-07:00

I went to a lighting workshop at Mole-Richardson, a premiere lighting facility in Hollywood. They were offering to show CG artists how set lighting is done for different effects so we can imitate those setups in our software. Really enjoyed it. Finally understand how they light cars for ads (pic above). The speaker was the cinematographer who worked Werewolf, Jurassic Park 3 and Hidalgo. It was so amazing how they can make an indoor set look totally like its outside lighting with the right lights and filters. I think real set lighting could be more fun than CG! ha. They let interested people come on fridays to learn in exchange for helping out a bit. Think I found a new hangout : )

2009-08-14T03:16:00.001-07:00

Click here to see this guy's amazing 3d version of Mei from Studio Ghibli's My Neighbor Totoro, as pictured above. Since we studied blendshapes today, which is how character animators get all those facial expressions, our instructor showed us this artist's work as a pretty cool example of it. He did 15 facial expressions in 3d based on the 2d anime film. The models were all done in Zbrush, a popular 3d sculpting application.

Pixar's FX supervisor talks about the movie 'UP'

2009-08-14T03:08:00.000-07:00

Tonight was pretty cool..the Lead FX supervisor from Pixar came and gave a presentation on how they did the effects, particularly the balloon and rope effects in the movie 'UP', which I actually haven't seen yet. Based on what I saw it looks amazing IMHO. Pixar just keeps crankin out the hits. He also gave us the low down on what its like to work at Pixar and answered questions. Free beer and pizza too : )

Week 6: Animation - deformers

2009-08-14T02:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was about deformers in Maya, which can be used to create model or animate with. We were given the challenge to animate the cylinder below in a 'slinky' type move, not such a hard task at first glace. But we were not allowed to use any bones/skeleton or bend deformers. We had to animate groups of vertices (or 'clusters') individually to get the result. Clusters are actually what is going on 'behind the scenes' when you make a skeleton for your character and animate it, so it was the original way characters were animated (we were told) back in early days of CG. Trust me, that must have been a painful exercise to do whole character that way!

I guess they wanted us to learn this super hard way now just to get familiar with the tool/concepts. It was pretty tough to get that little sucker to deform as smoothly as with easier methods, but it's doing the slinky move anyhow..ha. Tedious but a good exercise I guess. Certainly know more about clusters than I ever wanted to...

Week 6: Animation - animated modeling

2009-08-12T21:03:00.000-07:00

Today we got into animating using our modeling tools. Normally lofts, sweeps, revolves, etc. are used to create a surface like a wine glass, for example. But the creation process can be animated too, which can create some interesting animations of things building on, like vines growing.

Again, nothing earth-shattering animation-wise, but the potential for very cool stuff is there I think...

Week 6: Animation - just to get the ball rolling

2009-08-12T20:36:00.000-07:00

Just to get animation week started, we did the classic bouncing ball with squash and stretch. Nothing mind-blowing here, but was a good start to get used to Maya's keyframing tools. Was kind of nice to do something cartoony for a change : )

Week 5: Lighting - Physical Sun and Sky

2009-08-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

(image courtesy of www.webecoist.com)

I've been especially waiting for this lesson about creating a Sun/Sky system in Mental Ray for Maya. I've played with a bit before, but getting the finishing right with exposure controls had been a mystery to me in other programs. Thankfully in Maya is pretty painless.

With one click (in the right menu) Maya creates a Sun, Sky, and exposure node for ya - all linked together. Basically just move the light around in the scene and the sky color (and shadows) all change to match the lighting created by a sun with that angle. The exposure node is to correct and tweak the brights and darks, just like I did with the HDR example a few days ago. It's all camera based so just change your F-stop or film speed or shutter speed in the camera controls, the image will reflect that. If like to, can use your own HDR image for the background instead of the Sky color, but it wont affect the lighting - just what shows in the background. Really had fun with this one trying to make different times of day.

This week is almost done and I need a break! haha..everyone have a nice weekend.

Week 5: Lighting - Environment Fog and Fluid Fog

2009-08-08T10:28:00.000-07:00

Beware the Fog! (shot above from the movie by John Carpenter by the same name)

Today we learned about fog effects in Maya. Despite the fact I've been playing with 3d fog, it's been sunny every day here in LA. It's nice and I'm not complaining about sunny, non-humid weather, but it gets like the movie Groundhog Day after a while. Well, if you have to be trapped in some endless loop of weather, I guess there are worse scenarios. Anyway, I'm digressing...

So we learned 2 ways of creating fog. I'm sure there are more than 2 ways as it seems in Maya (and 3d in general) there are countless ways to do the same thing. The first way is environment fog and is more of a camera 'effect' as the fog doesn't really 'exist' in the scene in a 3d way, i.e. you cant fly through it. Good for a still image or maybe trying for an illustrative look. Lots of controls for density, decay, color...etc. Too many controls..haha. My shot at it below...

There is also the same effect you can put in a light, as seen in the image above. Like when light rays come in through a window and you can see small particles of dust ('God rays' they call 'em) or a spotlight shining in a smoky room, etc. You know what I mean. I threw one of those in too for good measure.

In this image, I went for a night scene, creepy graveyard, moonlit kind-of-thing. This used the other type of fog they taught us, fluid-based fog. This is part of the dyanmics section of Maya where you can create water, oceans, all kinds of neat stuff. With the right settings, can do fog as well. This type is truly 3d, meaning it exists as 3d particles in the scene so you can fly though it. Much more rendering time though, but the effect is more realistic than the 'environment' one. There are lots of presets which makes creating stuff really fast. I used it to do the moon too. Can do clouds, sun, water, explosions..anything.

I doubt I'll ever see any fog here in L.A. for reference, but that's why God made an internet full of images I guess...

Week 5: Lighting - Creating Realistic Outdoor Lighting

2009-08-07T01:46:00.000-07:00

I've always wanted to learn more of the technical aspects of photography (never took a class). But to get some of the concepts of 3d imaging, you have to learn some basics about photography. Today we learned how to create some pretty cool outdoor scenes using HDR images taken with spherical panoramic photos. First a bit about spherical panoramas...

The one thing you can notice about the shiny ball above is it's reflecting 180 degrees of the environment its set in. That can be useful. There is software that can digitally 'unwrap that distorted image and make it flat, like peeling off the wrapping of a globe and laying it down flat.

That unwrapped image (a spherical panorama like above) can be brought into a 3d application and projected onto a big 3d sphere that encloses the scene. With that in place, objects in your scene can accurately reflect or even use the lighting values from the originally shot scene. All this means is if you want a shiny metal 3d Transformer to look like its really in the enviroment with the actors, you need to do this.

These days they have spherical cameras like the one above that take 360 degrees photos which has surpassed the ues of the shiny ball (since its only 180 degrees). It's pretty pricy but lets just say you're not gonna go run down to Walmart and expect to pick one of those up.

The other part of the equation is HDRI, which stands for High Dynamic Range Imaging. Our eyes see the whole range of exposures, much more than a camera. Cameras can only capture 4 exposures (f-stops) at once, while our eyes can see 12. That's why is there is a bright light or sky in your photo the rest looks dark, but to our eyes we can see the whole range. HDR, as you can see below, captures the same image at all exposure levels and stores their information.
With all these exposure levels, you can either compress them to fit into the 4 levels of a normal photo (called tone mapping) or pick a subset of exposures you want in your end image. See how the ball below looks more like how we see with our eyes? its has many more exposures mapped to it so you can see the brightest highlights and the darkest shadows at the same time. Pretty cool....

So what does that mean to a 3d artist? well, it means very realistic simulated lighting and reflections. We can light our outdoor scenes with these HDR images that look and feel very realisitc, not to mention pick whichever exposure we want to use to light with. Anway, on to what i created using this technology.

I download an HDR image of an outdoor sky and mapped to a big sphere in my scene. The image is acutally used to emit light into the scene and its color its based on the colors in the photo. By turning on FinalGather (a part of Mental Ray that allows surfaces to emit light based on their irradience or color value) i got the result below. Mind you there are no lights in the shot below, just the light coming from the HDR photograph, which is mostly blue. This is good since I'm trying to get the color of atmospheric or light from the sky which is...well, blue.

Then I added a directional light to cast warm light and hard shadows like the sun and placed it in around the same position as the sun in the photo. Result below...

The last step is to correct the exposure (just like a photograph) to get the brights and dark the way i want them, as well as saturation and overall color balance. The final image below....

I don't know if I explained all this very well, but it's what i gathered from the lecture today. Feel free to ask me about any of it and I'll do my best to answer. Lots of info about this on the web too. Here is a site with some cool 'panos' to look at. enjoy : )

Week 5: Lighting - Faking G.I. challenge

2009-08-07T01:10:00.000-07:00

It seems in that in this industry, it's common for studios to want to see if an artist can create sophisticated looks with just very basic tools (keep it simple stupid). It shows that one understands the concepts well and has a solid understanding. I heard a story from the instructor that a woman with a great portfolio and advanced lighting skills in various rendering software was told by Disney to go back and redo her whole portfolio using just the regular Maya software renderer and achieve the same look. She did. And they hired her. So, I guess it's good we learn the hard way too. : )

That seems to be why we were shown the image above that was created in 3d using G.I. and asked to recreate it using just simple 3d direct lights. G.I. (or Global Illumination) is a 3d lighting method that mimics the naturally occurring bounced light that happens when light enters a room and bounces from surface to surface, illuminating the whole room. You can create very realistic interior renderings very quickly with this method. We were asked to use direct lights in Maya, which are very primitive CG lights that do not bounce.

So to imitate a Global Illumination rendering, you need a lot of well-placed and proportioned lights. It was a challenge and not easy for sure to fake that look. My result below ...

BTW, the model is not spot on accurate to the original but since we were being evaluated for the lighting look, that was OK. Was just about look and feel kinda thing. OK, on to the next challenge!

Week 5: Lighting - classic lighting setups

2009-08-07T00:37:00.000-07:00

Been anxiously waiting for this week about lighting in Maya since it's what I plan to specialize in. This week started off with some lighting basics from the world of photography. Essentially we are trying to recreate natural and made-man lighting, so knowing a bit about photographers light shots seems to be key in getting good CG lighting.

The most basic setup is called a 3-point set up where you have a key light (main light source), fill light (to lessen the shadows) and a rim (or hair) light which helps fill out and separate the subject from the background. Most other setups are just variations of this. We were given the sheet (below) which has some classic portraits light setups (and funny descriptions since its from the '30s or something) and had to recreate in Maya with a 3d character. We had to pick 6 of them to recreate.

My results with Mr. baldy man below...

there is a whole lot to this week, so I'm going to break it down into separate posts. Easier to write and perhaps digest as well...not that I think anyone is actually reading all this stuff, lol.

Week 4: Texturing

2009-08-02T10:14:00.000-07:00

Did that get your attention? I know this stuff can be a little dry at times so just to keep up attention levels..ha. I could use one of those about now. That's a real pic above, by the way. First rule of Fight Club is...always use lots of reference photos when creating 3d!

Another hot week in L.A. But no humidity makes it feel waaaaaay cooler than Tokyo's summer which should be feeling like a sauna about now. I kind of miss a cloudy or rainy day sometimes. Maybe I could get them to throw one of those in here and there. Anyway...

This week we had Steve McClure back and he showed us texturing in Maya and learning the Hypershade, Maya's material creation editor. It's all node-based which is cool cause it's so flexible - you can create any material imaginable. But that power comes at a price. It's a bit daunting at first, but after you understand the basics, the learning curve goes pretty fast - and it's pretty fun.

Anisotropic reflections. What? you know, it's that long highlight you see on brushed metals, hair, CDs, etc. All it means is an elongated highlight or reflection caused by different surface pattern in opposite directions on a surface. Some examples of causes are the small grooves (in brushed metal) or hair strands (in..uh, hair).

We started with a brushed metal example, a stainless-steel faucet. Also learned the 3d paint tool which was cool cause you can acually paint in 3d on the object, which is how I did the rust.

We also did some other basic metal shaders, like copper and bronze. Then played around with using layered shaders to create a patina on the bronze. Note the reflection pattern on the bottom of a copper pan also anisotropic.

We also learned about creating iridescent materials-like a cetain bugs or pearls for example. It's how the color changes on an object based on the viewing angle.

We created our material on a bug model. It's pretty psychedelic, huh? Reminds me of car paint...ha. Check out the render below to see the color shifting on the bug based on the viewing angle.

After that we moved on to making Photoshop layered materials and using them inside Maya. The workflow is really nice cause you can make all your layers for color, bump, diffuse, etc..in photoshop, import it, and Maya knows how to apply everything. We created a grungy material for a 3d dumpster with many layers and then also camera matched it to this exisiting photo of an alley.

Little compositing and voila!

Last but not least, we wrapped up with one of the hardest 3d materials do well - glass. Glass we learned is all about 3 things - reflections, refractions, and transparency. Refractions just means how light gets 'bent' when passing through transparent objects, like a straw in a glass of water. Different objects have different refractive index value and so any objects seen though them look more or less distorted based on that number. Glass is around 1.5 and water is 1.33

Shiny objects like water, glass or metal also sometimes has a property called caustics, which is a focused light pattern in reflections. Can see this is a swimming pool that has light through it or in the reflection cast by a shiny ring.

Our challenge was to model, light and texture a beer glass with reflections, refractions and caustics. My shot at it below....

Bonus challenge was to fill it with beer. It's still very 3d looking and the foam sucks, but its late and I'm tired. Better foam to come on another day : /

Looking forward to next week which is my favorite - lighting and rendering. Enjoy a cold one in the meantime : )

Week 3: Polygon Modeling

2009-07-25T15:16:00.001-07:00

Hey there. Did I say last week was tough? I guess I spoke too soon..haha. This is what I felt like after a week with Max Dayan, our polygon modeling instructor. I was really glad to be learning from such a talented, knowledgable person and share info, HE DID. Non-stop, 24/7 this guy lives, breathes and sleeps 3d modeling. I don't think he sleeps, actually. He's really funny too, which made it a bit less painful. Great teacher. Max was lead modeler at Gentle Giant studios and has worked for Rhythm and Hues as well. Check out his blog if you get a chance.

So what the hell is Polygon modeling, you ask? Well, I bet you didn't but I'm gonna tell you anyway: ) Polygon modeling is the workhorse of 3d. Yes, NURBS are sexy and alluring, but polygons are taking out the trash, cooking the meal, getting it done. Its the building block of 3d and even NURBS become polygons at render time. If I asked you if the 2 objects in the image below are the same, what would you say?

Actually they are exactly the same. With the proper smoothing of course : ) That's why polygon modeling is such a great method because you can have the sleek, sexy smoothness of NURBS, but with much easier editing and less hassle. See those blue lines on the left dice? The closer those lines are, the sharper line or crease will result as seen on the smoothed version on the right. The smoothing algorythym will try to place a curved surface between any 3 adjacent lines, so spread em out and get a soft curved surface. Tighten them up and get a hard edge. If you get that, you can model cars, faces, Shrek...its all same.

Ok, enough geek talk. Just wanted to give some background since I find it so interesting and for all of you gamers out there, you should at least know what you are looking at for 30 hours a day, right? Older video games had really low-polygon characters, that looked really blocky and sharp. The ones today are a bit more 'high-poly' and smoothed better. Anyone recognize that name? : )

Here are a few of the project we worked on this week that further illustrate the above.

A candle (unintentionally phallic, sorry)

some fingers, unsmoothed and ...

tada! the smoothed version...haha. Once you get the hang of it, it's really engaging and can be kinda fun. Here is a tire I did too...

Well, it's 2am and I guess I should get to bed. It all starts over tommorrow with a week of texturing.
Ciao!

Week 2: NURBS

2009-07-25T13:12:00.003-07:00

hey all!

As expected this week was tougher than last. This week was the 'dreaded' surface modeling (a.k.a NURBS) week. We had Steve McClure again for this class. His advice to use was that NURBS can be "a fickle mistress", both seductive and alluring, but often frustrating..haha. NURBS is just an funny acronym for Non-uniform rational B-splines. huh? And all that nonsense means is NURBS surfaces and curves are infinitely smooth, since they are mathematically described. Just like Adobe Illustrator bezier lines or postscript fonts. NURBS are mostly used in product and automobile design since they can create perfectly smooth surfaces which are needed for prototyping. All cars, cellphones, etc.. start out as CAD models and are then made into NURBS models.

So this week, we us explored various ways NURBS can be used both in product viz as well as in the entertainment field. Keep in mind the focus of each class is just that subject, so for modeling we dont worry about lighting/texturing, etc. Just the shape/form. For our first test, we created a hairdryer using a technique called "lofting" or sometimes called 'sweeping". It's just like the technique used in shipbuilding where the boat's surface is creating by laying down and conforming the planks to the 'hulls'. In the same way 3d surfaces are created my laying a surface over "curves". See the cross sections of the boat in the picture at the top? the surfaces are created by spanning those curves. Nuff said.

So for the dryer we used that same technique and also some others like 'revolving" (rotating a curve shape in 360 degress to make a surface) and filleting, another woodworking term. We also projected curves on the surface of the dryer, as well as 'trimming' those surfaces after the fact. After all was said and done, I have to say it's a cool way to build stuff. When NURBS does work, its really cool. When it doesn't..NOT so cool. Here are some quick renders of where I'm leaving this one for the moment.

The next day we did a stainless-steel sink using a technique called 'template surfacing'. With this one, you build the different levels of an object as templates (the topmost suface, the cutouts for the sink basins, then the sink bottom, etc..) and then create the rounded transitions to connect them all (fillets). Here are some screen caps to show the process...

starting with drawing curves of the templates at different heights...

and then connecting those curves with lofting, planar surfaces, and fillets.

here is kind of what it looks like when done the modeling. One cool part was making the washing board with those ridge shapes. We used a tool called "soft modifcation" which allows you to pick a point on the surface and pull it, but with a falloff in the surrounding affected area. Makes the surface kind of 'stretchy', like clay. You can see in the image below, the yellow areas a most affected by the point i picked and the more red/darker they get the less they will move. Just pulling up 1 point on the square surface i made for each rib created that shape. it would be much harder otherwise!

Lastly we did a concept car, which kind of incorporated all the methods we learned in the week. I liked the exercises, but it was frustrating a bit not to be able to take them further. The pace is just too fast to get hung up on that, so I'm trying to just get the concept down and maybe later go back and refine them at some point.

The car was done in a similar way as the boat described at the beginning. Just laying surfaces over curves with lofting, as well as all the techniques we learned. I really hope to go back and finish this one cause i think the end result could be really nice. Here is a turntable from my screen.

Well, that's enough for one week, whew! I hope I can survive the whole course...hah.
Next week is polygon modeling (my favorite) so that should be fun.

Peace!

Week 1: Intro to Maya

2009-07-25T13:12:00.001-07:00

This is week 1 of a 9-week course is called "Maya Fast Track" and so far, its living up to it's name. We are being inundated with info and the learning curve is steep. I am writing so fast i can't even read my notes! (which i cant anyway, even writing normal since my writing is so poor). I think I'll get a digital recorder so i can listen to the class later on.

Anyway, our instructor this week is Steve McClure, who has worked at various places and published a few Gnomon DVDs as well. He is a good guy for this class since he kind of knows like everything about 3d there is to know, no joke. He is amazing.

This week we quickly went through the whole 9-week class with an overview to all the areas we will be touching on, as well as learning the interface and getting used to navigating around Maya. Classes are Mon-Fri, 9am to 4pm with an hour break for lunch. We took a short, easy project through completion including modeling, texturing, lighting and rendering. We don't get much time to work on what we are learning in class, so most of that happens after class in the lab, which is from 4pm to 7, but we have been staying much later than that and the lab is open until 1am, 7 days a week. I have been staying up and working on class stuff til 3am just about every night, but I think the sleep deprivation will come back to hurt me if I cant concentrate the next day. Still trying to find a balance regarding that. Anyway, here are some quick shots of stuff we did this week ...

this is a screen cap of just a simple scene we created with maya primitives and little editing. We had to use Maya's lighting and renderer (couldnt use Mental Ray) so it's not so photo-real, but was a good project to just start to get used to the tools.

we had to light a daytime version, with light coming thru a window ...

and a night-lit one as well. As I said, its not earth-shattering, but a good exercise nonetheless.

So far the instruction is right on and I feel could learn a lot here, as long as put in the effort. : )

Arrived in LA

2009-07-25T13:11:00.000-07:00

Well, arrived a few days ago here in Hollywood from Japan. I still can't believe I am here. Talk about culture shock! LA couldn't be more opposite to Tokyo. I chose this area since the school is just a few minutes walk or bike ride. It's not the nicest area (strip commercial stuff, industrial area close by) but makes the to/from school easy. And its only for 9 weeks. Will get a bike to make it even easier. Not having a car in L.A. is like a huuuuge disadvantage - this is a car culture for sure. But, I'll be so busy with school maybe i wont feel the pain of it? I hope...

I am attending a 9-week course series at the The Gnomon School of Visual Effects to learn Maya. For those that don't know, Maya is the leading 3d application used in film and TV. It's an incredibly huge open-ended program that can do just about anything a person might want to do in 3d and more. But it's not so friendly to learn or intuitive, so the learning curve is quite long. I wanted to transition to this program from 3ds max, which i have been using for many years in the shortest time possible and at the same time learn the techniques the studio guys use to make awesome 3d but in a fast, correct workflow. Hence coming to Gnomon. The School is also very well known in the 3d community as being the best out there. They offer onsite classes, online learning, DVDs, and more. Anyone who does 3d knows about this place.

The last year in Japan, work was a bit scarce and I felt my skills (and motivation) decreasing so I think I need this to get back to where I was, and even go beyond that. I want to be able to create the highest level CG that I can and see how far I can evolve as a professional. It was either that or become an english teacher to stay in Japan, which I said I would never do (not that there is anything wrong with that). I have tried to visit a few areas, like Japantown, to have some feeling of Japan, speak Japanese with people, but it's just not the same : (

What will I do after the class? Well, that depends. I really want to go back to Japan, to be honest. I already miss being there and learning Japanese, my girlfriend, meeting my friends, and so many other things. But not finding the right fit for a job was tough and I am not old enough to retire and live on my millions. ha. If there is a way to go back and find satisfying work with a good future, then I will by all means. In the meantime, will see what I can here in California or maybe head over to NYC since there is always work to be found in both those areas. Well see.

Do I like being here and back in the US? Well, let's just say I am happy to be busy again and learning from such talented artists. For now, that's my focus. My mind is here, but my heart is still in Japan.