Set Driven Key

Tip of the Week: Test Resolution

2010-02-23T19:16:00.002-05:00

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?

2010-02-08T22:19:00.000-05:00

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

2010-02-02T19:00:00.002-05:00

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

2010-01-09T09:38:00.002-05:00

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

2009-12-16T20:25:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-08T19:10:00.002-05:00

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

2009-12-02T19:14:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-01T18:37:00.002-05:00

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

2009-11-24T13:12:00.005-05:00

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

2009-11-14T13:57:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-11T19:15:00.001-05:00

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

2009-11-10T18:51:00.006-05:00

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

2009-11-09T21:13:00.005-05:00

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

2009-11-05T19:38:00.001-05:00

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

2009-10-26T19:15:00.001-04:00

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

2009-10-22T17:32:00.003-04:00

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

Uncanny Monkeys

2009-10-21T17:45:00.004-04:00

I came across an interesting article today about a new study from Princeton University.

Robert Zemeckis wannabes beware -- apparently monkeys are susceptible to the Uncanny Valley effect. Researchers in Princeton's Department of Psychology subjected macaque monkeys to images of monkeys that ranged from cartoony to photo realistic. Like humans, the monkeys can look at photo images and cartoony images just fine - but there was a range in between that creeped them out.

According to the researchers, this is the first time that the uncanny valley effect has been observed in animals. They hope that it will shed light on a variety of disciplines from human cognition, to animal behavior, to 3D character animation.

Tip of the Week: Copy Tab

2009-10-17T11:50:00.000-04:00

From time to time, it's necessary to compare the attributes of two different nodes. You could always select the two objects in question and open up Maya's attribute spreadsheet, but that's not always the fastest or easiest way to find what you're looking for.

One useful method is to use the Copy Tab button at the bottom of the attribute editor. Normally, the attribute editor displays information for one node at a time, and automatically changes every time you select a new object in the outliner or viewport.

When you copy a tab, the copied instance continues to display the information of the node that was displayed when you made the copy. This allows you to select a new node and compare their attributes side by side.

This is useful if you have precise attributes on one node that you want to enter on another node. I find it comes in handy most often for shading, animating, and dynamics - occasions when you might want to make sure that two nodes have the same settings.

It's also a good method of troubleshooting; comparing two nodes side by side can be a thorough way of looking for discrepancies that may be causing a problem.

The 11th Annual Animation Show of Shows

2009-10-15T19:08:00.019-04:00

The Animation Show of Shows is an annual screening of animated short films compiled from animation festivals from around the world. It is presented across the country for industry professionals, animation students, agencies, and the press. The idea is to let everyone in the animation industry get a look at the most technically and aesthetically cutting edge new animations each year in order to inspire everyone to continue to push the envelope and to experiment with style and technique.

The show is open free of charge to all students, faculty, and animation professionals.

Here are the venues where you can just show up without sending an RSVP. Seating is first come first serve:

Date	Time	City	Venue
Oct 24th	Noon	Portland, OR	Cinema 21
Oct 25th	5:00 PM	Seattle, WA	Northwest Film Forum
Oct 26th	7:00 PM	Vancouver, BC	Pacific Cinémathèque
Nov 4th	7:00 PM	Philadelphia, PA	University of the Arts, Caplan Theater
Nov 6th	10:30 AM	Boston, MA	Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Nov 7th	8:00 PM	Providence, RI	Rhode Island School of Design Auditorium
Nov 9th	8:00 PM	Savannah, GA	Savannah College of Art and Design, Lucas Theater
Dec 5th	5:00 PM	Montreal, Quebec	Cinémathèque Québécoise
TBA	TBA	San Jose, CA	San Jose State University

The following screenings are open to the animation community but require an RSVP due to limited seating. If you are interested in attending, send an email to RSVP@acmefilmworks.com, enter "11th ASOS and (the location)" in the subject header, and indicate that you would like to attend. Be sure to include your full name in the email. You must receive an affirmative confirmation via email to attend. Membership in ASIFA chapters is encouraged but not required for ASIFA-sponsored screenings:

Oct 21st	7:00 PM	San Francisco, CA	ASIFA San Francisco(location to TBA upon rsvp confirmation)
Nov 3rd	7:00 PM	New York City, NY	ASIFA East, NYU, SVA, Parsons, Pratt(location to TBA upon rsvp confirmation)
Nov 5th	TBA	Rochester, NY	Rochester Institute of Technology
Nov 6th	TBA	Boston, MA	Harvard University

The Animation Show of Shows will also be playing at several studios (Disney, ILM, Sony, etc) throughout October and into November/December. These are not open to the public. If you work at a studio, check with whomever at your company is responsible for event planning or artistic enrichment.

I've attended the Providence screening the past couple of years, and I highly recommend it for anyone involved in animation. They show a wide variety of films in all different styles. As an animator, it's very inspiring, and you'll have the opportunity to see a lot of interesting films that you might not see elsewhere.

Mudboxing the Pumpkins

2009-10-11T13:02:00.002-04:00

This past week, I brought the pumpkins into Mudbox to paint some hi-res maps. I'm very pleased with the results.

Here's the low poly base mesh. Keeping things low poly has made modeling blendshapes and other rigging tasks much easier. It also makes for a super-fast animation environment.

Here's the model with a basic Maya polySmooth. It'll stay turned off while I'm animating, and I'll set the subdivision levels differently for different render layers. Level 1 should suffice for shadow casting. Level 3 for the character layer, etc.

Here it is with the normal map:

For the fine detail, I ended up layering a bump map on top of the normal map. I generated the base texture procedurally in Maya, baked out a file texture, and touched it up in Mudbox.

And here it is fully rendered with the color and specular maps, a combo of Mudbox and Photoshop work.

I think it's cool to see the progression from base mesh to rendered pumpkin.

I'm really happy with how the character turned out, and I'm psyched to start churning out some rough renders of some of the shots.

It was great to finally get a chance to dive into the Mudbox workflow - getting the models and maps in and out of Maya and Photoshop. I'm looking forward to using it more. Hopefully I'll have some Mudbox related Tips of the Week in the near future.

Tip of the Week: Transparency and Reflectivity

2009-10-08T08:00:00.000-04:00

A rule of thumb for shading - the sum of a surface's reflectivity and transparency should never exceed one. In fact, unless you're trying to recreate the cleanest, most flawless piece of glass that ever existed, the combined value should be less than one - usually quite a bit less. A hallmark of bad 3D is surfaces that are too perfectly reflective or transparent.

For materials such as glass, you'll often use falloff ramps for transparency and reflectivity. The same guideline applies - make sure that at any given point on the ramps, the value adds up to less than one:

Tip of the Week: Wildcards

2009-09-30T17:16:00.000-04:00

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

2009-09-20T20:57:00.001-04:00

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

2009-09-19T11:41:00.003-04:00

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

2009-09-12T13:44:00.007-04:00

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.