Tip of the Week: Wildcards

Here's a tip that can be a major time saver.

You may already be familiar with the Input Box in Maya. It's a text field on the status line (on the top right of the screen) where you can type in the name of an object in order to select it. Type in "persp" and hit enter, and the perspective camera will be selected.

(Depending on which version of Maya you're using, the Input Box will look like either of the images below.)



A cool function of the Input Box is the ability to use wildcards (? and *) to select multiple objects at once. This makes it a very handy selection tool.

For instance, let's say you have several hundred objects in your scene that have "post" in their name (post1, post2, post3, postLeft, postRight, etc . . . ) and you want to select them all to apply the same shader to them. Simply type *post* into the Input Box, and Maya will select all the objects that have the word post in them.

The sky's the limit as far as potential uses. Basically, it's a great tool for tracking down objects that are scattered throughout your scene -- either for single nodes whose exact names you can't remember, or for multiple objects at once.

For more info on wildcards and the input box, I've posted a new tutorial on my website. You can check it out here: Wildcards.

Tip of the Week: Speedy AO

An Ambient Occlusion Pass can be one of the most efficient ways to improve the quality of your 3D renders.

The mib_amb_occlusion node is a fast and efficient way of creating an ambient occlusion pass. If you use the ambient occlusion render layer preset, Maya will create the node by default and attach it to the Out Color of a surface shader.

If you have a complex scene with a lot of geometry, the renders can be slow with the default settings. They don't have to be. By lowering the max distance attribute, you can make significant savings in render time without much of a compromise in quality. The default value is 0, which indicates that there is no max distance - mental ray will take the entire scene into account for each point that it renders. The max distance tells the renderer to only consider influence within a given distance from each point, thereby saving render time:

As you can see, lowering the max distance speeds up the render. It also makes the ambient occlusion appear tighter; there's a faster falloff. I usually find that this actually looks better in composite. (Unless you take it too far). Tweak the settings until you have a render that looks good and a render time that you can afford. Of the four images here, I'll probably stick with the max distance of 2.5.

Pumpkin Blendshapes

Here's a sample of some of the morph targets that make up my pumpkin rig. There's fifty-six shapes in total.



As I was modeling them, I needed to come up with a technique of accurately building additive blendshapes. The idea being - I want one blendshape for a left smile and one for a right smile, and when the two are added together, they equal a full smile. Modeling blendshapes that add together to a specific target is tough. There's a lot of back and forth. So I came up with a shortcut:

First, I modeled the entire smile. Then I created two duplicates of the base shape and added the smile as a blendshape to each of them. I used the Paint Blend Shape Weights Tool to make one of them into a right-sided smile and the other into a left-sided smile. Finally, I opened up the component editor and made sure that the weights on the vertices between the two models added up to 1.

I know that sounds like a lot of steps, but it's actually really fast, and it's so much less work than trying to do it by eye. This saved a ton of time, and wound up being much more precise in the end. By modeling the full blendshape first, I knew exactly what the end result would be.

I'm sure that I'm by no means the first person to have thought of this technique. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if someone's thought of a way to automate it. If you had a high-res mesh, you probably would have to automate it in order for it to be at all manageable. My pumpkin mesh is pretty low-res, so it worked great for me.

Here's an example of the additive blendshapes for a blink. First I modeled the upper and lower blinks that you see on the left. Then I used the above steps to generate the left and right sided versions.



I'm really happy with how my pumpkin rig turned out. I finally started animating a couple weeks ago, and it's gone really smoothly so far. The blendshapes are great for all the facial stuff. I've done a lot of bone-based facial rigging in the past, but it wouldn't have been appropriate for the character.

For the body motion - squashing, stretching, bending, etc - I should have used lattices instead of blendshapes. The problem with blendshapes is that they interpret linearly, so a bend doesn't really look right. It's working out okay, but if I had to do it over again, lattices would have been a little bit better.

In any case, the animation is coming along well. I'll probably post a sample in a few weeks. Check back soon!

9

I went to check out 9 yesterday. I went in with pretty high expectations. Story-wise, it left a lot to be desired, but visually it wasn't at all disappointing.

There was none of the ubiquitous blue sky/fluffy cloud look of most animated features. For that I was particularly grateful. (As I've said before, it's not that I haven't loved a lot of the animated features of the past few years -- I'm not carping on Pixar or Dreamworks. It's just awesome to see such a different style).



It was definitely within the steam-punk realm, though not so far as to be cliched. And there were a lot of very Tim Burton influenced elements.

You could see that there was a lot of real thought and detail put into the art direction. The character design was particularly interesting. The mechanical ragdolls were unique to begin with, but each character had a lot of detail. (2's headgear, 9's zipper, etc). The machines were really cool. And the post apocalyptic environment was, in my opinion, much more creative than the one in this summer's Terminator movie.

From a CG standpoint, it was good but not excellent. I was annoyed by the smeary UV on the characters (granted their textures were unforgiving, but still). The fire effects looked a little dated. And the matte paintings, which they used a lot of, tended to look really flat in composite.

None of this is any criticism of the artists of course. You do the best you can on a smaller budget. And if anything, I'd say that it makes an even better argument for the film's creative merit. It just goes to show that you don't necessarily need to spend big bucks for all the high-tech bells and whistles to create something that's visually stunning. The film might not have had the most technically cutting edge CG, but from an artistic or creative standpoint, it was top notch.

On the other hand, while I'm quick to forgive any technical imperfections in the 3D, I think it's a real shame that the story wasn't stronger. I say this because I think it could have been a really good film. They put so much imagination into creating this detailed world and cool looking characters. If they had told a better story, it could have really been something special.

Despite all that, I definitely recommend seeing it. It's a visual treat. And though the story is lacking, at least it makes sense. (Unlike some of the blockbusters I saw this summer). If you're like me, you'll enjoy the movie, and you'll walk away feeling inspired to push the creative envelope in your own work.

Tip of the Week: Qualified Hardware

If you're planning on buying a new computer for working in 3D, make sure to double check the hardware requirements.

Most of the software packages are pretty picky about which graphics cards they like to play with. Just because a certain card is fast or powerful, doesn't mean it will be compatible. You can easily spend a lot of money on a high-end card and have it not work properly. Usually, the software is either engineered with a specific line of cards in mind, or it's only tested and guaranteed for certain cards.

For Maya:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?id=13583898&siteID=123112

For Max:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?id=13606773&siteID=123112

These lists are specific to Autodesk, but if you're using Blender or Cinema 4D or any other software package, make sure to do the same thing and check with the vendor first.

Animation Saleries

When applying for a job (or negotiating for a promotion/raise), it's always good to have an idea of what others in your field are earning. In general, studios have the upper hand, because they have more information. The Animation Guild takes a yearly survey of wages for different positions in the industry. You can check out last year's figures here:

Animation Industry Wages.

By being informed, you help not only yourself, but your colleagues as well.