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.

Virtual Filmmaking

Check out this article in Popular Mechanics about some of the animation techniques used on Avatar:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4339455.html

We've experimented with some similar virtual camera tricks at work. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more of it over the next few years - along with more performance capture of course.

As for stereoscopic film, call me behind the times, but I still don't like it.

Tip of the Week: Hypershader Connections - Part 2

Here's a quick follow-up to last week's tip:

Hovering the cursor over a connection arrow gives you detailed information about the connection - you'll see the output attribute from one node and the input attribute from the other.

But you can also tell, at a glance, what type of connections are in place.

Hypershader connections are color coded according to data type. Green arrows indicate connections for triple-valued attributes such as color, specular color, or any other rgb/xyz channel. Dark blue arrows indicate single-valued attributes such as diffuse. Light blue indicates a double-valued attribute such as repeatUV. If you're working with merged connections, a bold yellow arrow indicates that there are multiple connections between two nodes.

37th Annual Annie Award Nominations

The nominee list is in for the 37th annual Annie Awards, to be held Saturday, February 6th, 2010 in LA.

The Best Animated Feature Category consists of:

• Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs — Sony Pictures Animation
• Coraline — Laika
• Fantastic Mr. Fox — 20th Century Fox
• The Princess and the Frog — Walt Disney Animation Studios
• The Secret of Kells — Cartoon Saloon
• Up — Pixar Animation Studios

You can view the nominees in all 28 categories here.

Tip of the Week: Viewing Hypershader Connections

Ever since Maya 2009, the default view in the Hypershader merges all input and and output connections between two nodes into a single arrow.



Sometimes this is helpful - it eliminates some of the clutter when you have a complicated shading network. But sometimes it's nice to be able to see at a glance how many connections there are, or to be able to select and delete connections individually.

Luckily, you can switch back and forth between the two.

In the Hypershader window, go to Options > Merge Connections to toggle between views.

New Pixar Short

I love it when the big studios experiment with different styles.

Though to be fair, this isn't really a new style for Pixar to be working with - it's just not typically a style that they release their films in.

If you've ever seen any of Pixar's pre-vis animatic work, you'll know what I'm talking about. (They frequently include segments as DVD extras. There was a ton of footage at the MoMa exhibit in NYC a few years ago, and snippets pop up online every so often). Half the time, I think that their animatics are more polished and more entertaining than some of the other studios' finished products. When you look at the time and money that they put in to story, character, and style development during the pre-vis stage, it's no wonder that their finished films so consistently deliver.

In any case, I'm not sure what the origin is behind this new short, George and AJ. Perhaps this style was the plan all along. But it almost looks like they might have been developing a fully rendered 3D piece and decided that the animatic was strong enough to release on it's own. The VO sounds like proxy in places, which would further support the theory. Check it out:



Granted, the average independent studio or solo animator can't afford to put together something this elaborate for all the work that they do. But I think it's important to put as much time and effort into pre-production as you have room for. It's better to spend a couple weeks putting together a board-o-matic upfront than to devote a year of your life, slaving away in 3D, before realized that your original idea didn't work so well to begin with. Storyboards and animatics can tell you what's working and what isn't before you dive into the more time consuming 3D process.

I say this from experience. A few years ago, I started tinkering around with a new idea for a short. I actually got as far as spending a month or two modeling and rigging some characters. But before I got too far along, I finally started to realize that the story just wasn't working in the animatic phase, and I decided to pursue other projects. Looking back, I'm glad that I did.

And who knows? Your animatic might take you off in a direction you didn't expect, and you could wind up with a finished product in a whole new creative style.

Tip of the Week: Command Line Mental Ray

Rendering outside of the Maya GUI (either by right clicking or using .bat files) provides all kinds benefits over normal batch rendering. (If you're unfamiliar with the process, you can read my tutorial on rendering with bat files). However, you can run into some obstacles when using Mental Ray.

Normally, if you right click on a Maya file and click render, the render will adhere to all of the render global settings in your file - start frame, end frame, image name, etc. However, one thing that it ignores is which renderer to use.

You can set your scene up and set all the mental ray settings, but when you try to render it outside the Maya GUI, it will always start rendering with the software renderer by default.

In order to make it render with Mental Ray, you have to specifically force it. Right clicking and clicking render won't work. You have to either open up the command line or create a .bat file.

For instance:

render myscene.mb

Will render in software by default, no matter what the settings in the file are. Instead, type:

render -r mr myscene.mb

For those of you who aren't familiar with this kind of rendering, I hope that you'll check out my tutorial or explore the Maya documentation, because it's a really useful production tool. If you're already familiar with using .bat files, and you've had trouble getting Mental Ray renders to work, I hope that this tip has been useful.

Big Year for Animation

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today that 20 films have been submitted for consideration for this year's Animated Feature Film category:

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
Astro Boy
Battle for Terra
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Coraline
Disney's A Christmas Carol
The Dolphin – Story of a Dreamer
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Mary and Max
The Missing Lynx
Monsters vs. Aliens
9
Planet 51
Ponyo
The Princess and the Frog
The Secret of Kells
Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure
A Town Called Panic
Up

The rules for the category state that in a year in which 16 or more films qualify, there will be 5 official nominees (as opposed to the usual 3 nominees). Now, not all 20 films have qualified yet, but with so many up for consideration, the odds are better than usual that we'll hit the magic number.

This bodes well for animators. The more animation being produced, the more jobs there will be for everyone involved in the process. Furthermore, Oscar exposure can give a huge boost to lesser known films. How many more people in the US saw Waltz with Bashir after it had been nominated in the foreign film category?

You can read the full press release from the Academy here: Animated Features

Projection Mapping

Check out this fascinating article on the facial animation process in Where the Wild things Are:

http://www.awn.com/articles/article/getting-wild-about-facial-animation/page/1%2C1

Outside-the-box thinking with some amazing results.

Connecting with your Audience

I read an interesting post today by Mark Mayerson:

Clarity, Logic, and Entertainment

He breaks down the process of connecting with your audience into three aspects: Clarity, Logic, and Entertainment. These concepts aren't limited to animation or even to filmmaking necessarily - you could apply the same ideas to writing a novel.

Clarity is the first step. When your audience is watching your story, do they know what's going on? This sounds pretty basic, but we've all watched movies and read books where it's almost impossible to tell what's happening. This could be because it's shot/edited poorly. Or it could be because the story is too convoluted. Either way, you must establish a reasonible level of clarity to connect with your audience.

After that, you need to stick with some sort of logic. Your audience might be able to understand what's happening, but is there any kind of internal consistency? Do the characters do what they would logically do in that situation? If halfway through Finding Nemo, Marlin decided to give up searching for his son and go home, the audience wouldn't buy into it. Characters have to stay in character, and stories must follow a logical procession. According to Mayerson, logic is harder to achieve than clarity. You're not just trying to get your story across -- you're trying to make it plausible.

Last and most challenging of all is entertainment. Does your audience laugh when they should laugh? Cry when they should cry? Do they enjoy the experience? This of course is the hardest step in storytelling, and there's no real formula.

In any case, Mayerson explains it all much better than I do, so make sure to check out his original post.

Tip of the Week: Creating Textures in 3D

Sometimes it can be advantageous to generate file textures in 3D as opposed to using photos or digital paintings.

You start by modeling a pattern in 3D - bricks, tile, wooden fence, etc - rendering out a still from an orthographic view, and using Photoshop to make it tileable and paint on top of it if necessary.

In addition to being able to create certain details that are difficult to paint or photograph, it's easy to generate a quick normal map that perfectly matches your texture.

Here's a great tutorial from cg-textures.com (an amazing texture resource by the way) that shows how to make a rope texture in 3D. It's a good example of the method:

Creating a rope texture in 3D

Tip of the Week: Maya RAM Booster

There are times where you need every ounce of RAM that you can squeeze from your computer.

If you're not using certain Maya features, you can turn them off and save overhead.

Open Window>Settings/Preferences>Preferences, and go to the modules category. Here you can turn Dynamics and Paint Effects on and off. If you don't need them, keep them off, as they take up RAM in the background.





And now for the inverse tip: If you ever run into a problem where Paint Effects or Dynamics are mysteriously not working, make sure to check settings and preferences to make sure the modules are turned on.

Another Animation by Blu

Last year, I posted a cool animation by a really creative artist named Blu. Here's another one of his movies that someone sent me recently. Same concept with some new twists. I hope it gets your creativity brewing:

COMBO: http://vimeo.com/6555161