Another Render

Audio is coming along nicely. The whole thing is getting very close to finished. Here's another rendered image:

New Layout

As you can see, I'm experimenting with a new layout for Set Driven Key. I've also enabled a mobile version of the site to make it easier to read on smartphones and tablets.

More to come soon!

Elephants - First Look

Here's a first look at the elephants. I decided to experiment with an illustrated story-book rendering style. The bulk of the work is finished, and I'm in the process of adding some finishing touches and fixing some bugs here and there. My brother has started working on the audio. With any luck, I'll have a finished short by the new year.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Back to the Elephants

This summer was really busy with cinematics projects. I had the opportunity to do some pretty elaborate rigid body simulation work. I learned a lot, and the final scenes look great. I'm really psyched.

I'm planning on turning my attention back to the elephants for the next couple weeks. Hopefully I'll have some progress to share soon.

Mount Olympus

I've been working on some theatrical backdrops over the past few weeks. Here's a sneak peak:

Elephants

I recently started working on a new animated short about elephants. Here's the main character, all rigged up and ready to go:

Go Board

Robots Building Robots

Football Helmet

A recent afternoon project. Created in Maya and rendered with Mental Ray:

New Gallery Updates

I've made some changes and additions to the image gallery section of my portfolio site:

http://www.pdipierro.com/gallery/gallery.html

Digital Backdrops for the Sacramento Opera

I recently had the pleasure of working on a project for the Sacramento Opera, creating a series of digital matte paintings that will be projected behind the performers at next weekend's production of ORLANDO.

You can read all about it here:

Sacramento Opera Moving to Vivid World of Computer-Animated Backdrops

Many thanks to everyone at the Sacramento Opera, and thanks to the Sacramento Bee for covering the story.

Tip of the Week: Test Resolution

Sometimes when you're working on a scene, you don't need your test frames to be full res. For instance, the final output might be at 1080HD, but to speed things up while you're working on things like lighting and shading, you might only need to preview your renders at quarter res.

You could go into the render globals, do the math, and change the resolution - but it can be a pain to have to always be changing it back and forth. And there's also the risk of forgetting to change it back to full res before you submit a render and leave for the weekend.

Fortunately, there's a built in way of doing it. Just open up Render > Test Resolution, and you can tell Maya to render your previews at a different resolution. Renders that you send from the Render View or if you click "Render Current Frame" will use the test resolution. Batch renders will be unaffected.




It's quick, and it's foolproof.

Tip of the Week: Is Mental Ray Missing?

What happened? Did it break? Did I accidentally uninstall it?

Perhaps you've asked yourself this before. You open up the render settings window and try to switch the renderer to Mental Ray only to find it missing from the drop down box. You see Maya hardware and software. Maybe even the vector renderer. But Mental Ray is nowhere to be found.

Is it a bug? Yes and no.

Maya gives you the option of turning different features on and off in the plug-in manager. (Window>Settings/Preferences>Plugin Manager). Mental Ray is one of the features included in the list.


You can turn it on and off manually, but for some reason, it occassionally turns itself off - usually after a crash. (This is a bug that has supposedly been fixed, but I've seen it in every version of Maya I've ever used).

While we're on the topic of missing plug-ins, there's quite a few other features that you can enable or disable in the plug-in menu (such as a variety of shaders and import/export for obj, fbx, and anim), so if something's missing, it's generally a good place to look.

On the other hand, if there is a plug-in that you don't really use or need, keep it disabled in the meantime and save yourself some RAM. For more on that, read this old post on Paint Effects and Dynamics.

2010 Oscar Nominations

This year's Academy Award nominations were announced today. Here are the lists for Animation and VFX:


BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
Coraline
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Princess and the Frog
The Secret of Kells
Up

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM
French Roast
Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty
The Lady and the Reaper
Logorama
Wallace and Gromit in A Matter of Loaf and Death

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Avatar
District 9
Star Trek

Animated films made appearances in other categories as well. The Princess and the Frog received a pair of nominations in the Best Original Song category, snd Fantastic Mr. Fox was nominated for Best Original Score. Up picked up nominations for Original Score, Sound Editing, Original Screenplay, and Best Motion Picture - only the second time an animated film has been recognized in that category. Beauty and the Beast was the first, in 1991.

Tip of the Week: Camera Bookmarks

Camera Bookmarks are, in my opinion, an underused tool in Maya. They're a quick, automated way of saving camera locations and quickly toggling between them.

Go to View > Bookmarks > Edit Bookmarks to open up the Camera Bookmark Editor.


Here you can save and switch between bookmarks. There's also a button to automatically add your bookmarks to the shelf as custom buttons.

If you want to incorporate bookmarks into a MEL script, use the cameraView command. Type "help cameraView" into the script editor for info on the different flags that you can use.