Summer Work: Cel Shading Practice

    Coming up to the start of the new academic year I decided I needed a push to get back into the mood of drawing. So to do that I decided to try some cel-shading. I had considered shading to give it a bit more depth and volume but that might send me into spending eternity adding shadows.

    The suit worn by the man in the foreground relates to a guilty pleasure of mine. A tailored suit is a thing of great interest to me, and while at a glance a £90 and a £250 suit jacket can look identical, it's how it feels - as well as the materials and where it is tailored - that can make the difference...this isn't easy to convey in a drawing though.

    But I tried

    The wall appeared a little blank after painting do I decided on some decoration to make the room look more stately as well as add some content to his desk.

    The man in the foreground is the focus of the picture. I wanted to make him look frustrated, perhaps infuriated at some important news. One thing I definitely feel proud of with this piece is his right hand: Hands have bugged me a fair bit for a couple of years now, so with a bit of looking in the mirror and some hand study I like the result I came out with for the right hand at least, although his left hand I'm still not sure about how it came out. Thumb seems okay but the rest I'm not so sure.

Maya Tutorials: Santa Hat Fur Practice

    I think this is the last of the tutorials assigned to be completed for year two. But even if it isn't I'm sure that I have at least all the fundamentals I need. Granted this one was pretty quick to do and was fairly simple but the basics were there; altering the fur colour, altering length and strand angle and a couple of other properties.

Maya Tutorials: Interactive Bind Part 2

    I said I planned to push through and I believe I delivered. The weight painting is not the tidiest in the world but the effect of what I have managed can be seen in the animation below.
 

Maya Tutorials: Interactive Bind Part 1

I made an attempt on the interactive bind tutorial today. Though I'm feeling a little distracted right now so I stopped once I reached the start of the painting weights phase. I will look into the next phase soon.

I admit I may have spent more time than I needed to on creating the animation above as playblast creation was being rather uncooperative tonight.

Maya Tutorials: Back To Skinning

    My internet connection has been rather unpredictable today so while I still have other skinning tutorials to do, I thought it prudent to upload the two skinning toutorials I so far have completed in case I lose my window and the connection cuts out again.

    In terms of available techniques so far I think I prefer painting by weights technique. Though editing the weights by numerical value does appeal to me. This is because I like how I can be precise in the values and it allows me to more efficently edit more than two values at a time more promptly than painting by weights seem to do.

    Then again, I also get a better visual feel from painting on the weights. I can check and change areas more easily so I can see why painting weights might be more favourable for high-poly models.

Maya Tutorials: Fur Presets

    I was unable to find the progress gif or screenshots I had made for this tutorial, which invovled the contruction of fur. What I do have however, are the fur samples I created.

    I rememebred reading that animating fur is hard, very hard. Despite the progress made by some 20-or-more years of refinement in computer animation I have come to udnerstand why - mapping fur is fine, getting it to wave about? It looks like it would take a lot of meticulous and time-consuming planning. What did surprise me however was how quickly the fur was rendered. I had imagined that the procedure would take some time but perhaps the preocedural nature of how the fur is created was what allowed the strands to be drawn so quickly.

   I was pleasantly surpised ot discover that for the most part, designing fur is about percentages. Some of the later strands in the above GIF were made by combining different types of animal hair and I fee ltempted to suggest that there's one that, if a bit of tweaking was involved (I think it was a combination of yak, sheep and bear hair) such as colour, the fur could resemble a tree canopy.

   I suppose in animation, grass is as simple as a green fur shader with a lot of shorter strands and a few long strands. 50% Bear fur and 50% sheep's wool standing more on end and tinted green perhaps? Granted there are plenty of types and shapes of grass from the short half-inch tall strands of a golf course fairway to the sun-baked metre-long stalks of the African savannah.

Maya Tutorials: Transparency, Rim Lights and Render Layers

    These tutorials have sat unfinished for a while. While owrking though them I noticed a few techniques that I wonder could have been useful during the deveopment of my animation such as the Environment Sphere shader (looks useful for environmental reflections).

    When it come to the Render Layers tutorial I believe that I had some experience with render layers but because of time contraints I never got to perform the full beauty parlour treatment on my Infiltrate Exploit Spread composition. While the video did not og in depth about an After Effects technique set, I believe my understanding of After Effects means I can perofrm a technique transfer without too much worry.

Here is the deveopment of the two sets as I made them, taking test render shots as I went along.

 

This is the composition developed to show the mock rim lights

This is the composition enhanced with tweaked render layers