Maya Workshops: Photogrammetry

  Today's workshop was in the use of photogrammetry in order to mix computer-generated models with photographs. This technique can be used to create realistic-looking objects using photo-projection. This scene however is only a static image and the camera can't be moved to explore the scene. But it can be used to move objects though a static frame.

  I think this technique is good for showing how the setup of lighting and shadows can make something convincingly real.

Maya Tutorials: Soft Body Workshops

  Today's Maya workshop was all about soft bodies. Geometry that can be deformed though motion and influence from other objects. It is a useful tool to give objects that feeling of looseness like clothing, sand, snow or loose skin.

  It was the first time in a while I have been scripting, but I am more comfortable with the process than I was when I started last year.

Sculpting Worshop: Head Progress

  I had not posted it while in progress aside from orthographs of the head, but Garrus has come along fairly well during the sculpting workshop. The only drawback I think is I made the head slightly too large, as it ended up using a lot of clay to get a finished result.

  I have considerations for finishing him over the summer, I have more clay on the way and aside from detailing and a bit of smoothing, what remains are his eyepiece and the three horns that rise from the top of his head. I plan ot stick ot slow cooking him, only 115 degrees in the oven, trying not to think too hard on the worst-case-scenario of him exploding but a low heat might help offset that risk. If he does, at least I still have a record here.

He's come out fairly close to the source design, the lower face might be slightly longer than its supposed to be as he has a very deep head. But I have sculpting tools to rectify that as it likely jsut means raising the mouth-line..

Maya Tutorials: Streamline Render and Final Gather v1

  Next on the tutorial list is techniques using Mental Ray. Which along with talking about final gather (which involves bouncing light off surfaces), also demonstrates using a Mental Ray shader to produce glow within renders. This glow effect, by the looks of things, is a lot more solid than the glow effects from using a normal surface-shader, which calculates a glow as a post-effect. The mai ndifference with the mental ray shader is it acts as a light source, with enough intensity it projects itself onto other surfaces as seen below.

  The other primarytechnique was using legacy systems to shave time off renders. However it seems that over the Easter break (I started this tutorial jsut before), the file generated what might possibly be a bug that produces rather grainy ray-tracing shadows, so while the shadows are less intense, the depth map render provides cleaner shadows while the ray-trace feels somewhat gritty. Other attempts at using ray-tracing, on other files, turns out much smoother however.

Depth map render

Ray-trace render

Maya Tutorials: Sprites and Conditional Goals

  Another set of videos that I meant ot upload a little while ago. These are some of the last of the legacy particle tutorials that I needed to construct. This is an attempt to use this week to see if I can catch up with some of the things I needed to do to get back on track. It's taking its time but I am gradually getting there.

  The conditional goals tutorial was relatively smooth to do although initially I had some trouble as while for a time the animation worked, it didn't correspond to the locator and particles would gather at the base after dropping off. That was until I realised my scripting error regarding connecting the particles' freedom to drop to the position of the locator, as I missed out the inclusion of a y vector i none of the parameters - a simple fix and everything is good and a charming reminded that all it takes is one small typing error to make a piece of software act crazy.

Acting Workshop: Ninjas and Interviews

  Today's acting class is the penultimate for this term. A shame because I have been really enjoying it so far. The photographs here are of an exercise that Ryan (far right in the below picture) introduced to our instructor last week. The aim is to tag out the people next to you until there is only one left by way of performing a martial arts move to strike at their hand. Things get incredibly tense when the game is down to two people and looks like something out of a martial arts film.

  I enjoyed it, and while I was often outed early on, I can see it as a good awareness, improvisation  and reflex exercise, especially when the game gets extremely tense near the end when there's only one person left to be sent out.

  After this exercise there was more character building. Like in a previous session we had to walk about the room with random motion, a clap from Dan the instructor signified for us to freeze, while a second clap demanded we perform an action that corresponded to our poses. We were then to pick our favourite pose and build the character, who would be interviewed by the rest of the class. These interview sessions were very deep, with lots of questions and emotion that helped build a complex character out of what started as a single pose. But due to the amount of time taken we were only able to get through half the group, the other half (which includes me) may or may not do interviews with our characters until next week, although Dan the instructor says he has a plan in mind.for what will happen in the final lesson.

Sculpting Workshop: Garrus Orthographic

  For today's sculpting class I plan on working on a bust of Garrus Vakarian, an alien squadmate from the Mass Effect franchise. I decided on sculpting him because there is a lot going on in terms of design that quite interests me. He has a nice balance to his design; cars on one side of his face (which interests me as it seems like a fun texturing opportunity), and a visor/viewfinder thing on the other side. His horns are another interesting feature and thanks to the exoskeleton he has some very clear facial features.

  Because of how much his eyepiece obscures of Garrus' right eye, I chose to draw it on in a different colour, to help see what is underneath it when it comes to sculpting. I may sculpt the head festures first, with the visor being a secondary feature.

Workshops: Improvisation During Acting Week

  I've been neglecting mentioning these but lately I have had immense fun with the acting classes that have been happening on Wednesday afternoon. With the basics covered over the past few weeks, this class focused on improvisation. The images above and below were of the second group performance of the day. The first was we were to get into pairs although I was in a trio, and we had to say yes to continue a story. For instance "It's raining cats" was followed up by "yes it is, can I get under your umbrella?" then "Yes you can." I was paired with Lewis and Jack White, and after a few attempts we ended up with a story with Jack as a lemon who was a lemon salesman with a special lemon for a nipple that gave him a life-threatening side effect, and I knew because I was a lemon doctor.

 The task of the second performance was that we would improvise a scene that would be devised by someone else from the pose we took. When the lecturer clapped to single the end, the second person was to freeze and another person came up to repeat the process. It was interesting seeing how people responded to our poses, of particular note was one I did with Dan Reason, where he moved his arms about and I acted like he dropped an expensive painting. He pulled funny faces and whenever I said "wipe that smile off your face" he would pull and even bigger, funnier grin.

  An interesting occurrence was that Vlad made several scenes with Andy when their turns came around, where Vlad would agree on a date with Andy. This culminated in the final scene of the exercise - Vlad remarking there's a meteor coming ot Earth while Andy pulled a horrified "we're all going to die" face. They then decided that then would be the right time for a date.

  After the break, Dan - our lecturer - scattered the floor with various objects. The task was that while one person stood outside, the group decided on a desired performance with an object, with the main condition that it had to be guessable and  unrelated to the object's real purpose. (such as using the belt as a towel). The task for the performer (who was outside the room and so couldn't here) was to try and make the action though guesswork, the only indicators they'd be on the right track is by the volume of an applause as they got closer and closer to the desired performance.

  This led ot some rather interesting situations such as Vlad passing around the silver ball around his body (his performance was to be "alas poor Yorick" from Hamlet), Dan Reason kept wrapping the belt around his legs and my performance was supposed to be that I was a mummy. The only indication of what the action was to be was however was that people clapped as a wrapped toilet roll around my head. So I spent most of my time covering more of my head with toilet roll until Dan the lecturer stepped in.

All-in-all it was an amazing experience. It felt good to attempt these things and reminded me of the term "weird is good" that I concluded on during a life-drawing class. So while it was peculiar to be put into these situations, I far from hated it.

Maya Workshops: Mudbox Pepper

Today was the first modeling workshop for Autodesk Maya. Simon instructed us on making a pepper although we were free to choose another fruit or vegetable (so long as it wasn't too simple like an apple or a potato) to sculpt, getting to grips with increasing complexity and then texturing. Despite being only an introductory fruit, this structure is made up of some 1.5 million polygons but with it I was able to get to grips with finer details that I might not have so easily achieved working with Maya. I am beginning to find the application of textures directly on the model, especially when effect shaders are involved, to be much more intuitive. There is a slight mottled texture on the model that was used in place of a shader to mimic the microscopic unevenness of skin

Post-Stock-Take Additions

  While the deadline may have passed I do not see the harm in continuing some of the tutorials. Since the addition of the stock-take I managed to complete skinning the character and animated more of the lip sync. As well as publishing a couple of the animation videos for animating the character.

Character Workshop: Creatures

Tuesday's maya workshop revolved around creature design, I have some basic sketches down as notes of some of the more general limb positions. But what was really exiting about this workshop was that after a discussion on how fantastical creatures have evolved to be more believable as human imagination improved with the centuries, we were given three completely random animals that we had to make a convincing hybrid monster out of.

My pick of the hat was "eagle", "T. rex" and "goat". So my first idea was mostly a T. rex with giant wings. Adding the goat was a little more difficult.

  I got the suggestion that I could use horns and I think that really worked. I ended up creating some kind of apex killer of the mountains that would probably be best ot run for your life from before it sees you.

  The second part of the workshop was about fitting an animal into an environment. I was given desert, so to contrast eagle-ram rex above I decided to go the other direction, inspired by sesert mice and fennec foxes.

  While it is cute, the workshop's aim was something fantastical. So I capitalised on how I didn't really give the cute little shrew a mouth and give it an openable neck for serious biting, Thing-style. Still tiny, but it would deceive humans who saw it and get lulled into stroking it. Its cuteness could also be used to disguise itself in nests of something bigger, pretending ot be a baby.

  So a suggestion to make it more distinct created a nightmare-spawned piece of work that disguised itself as something you wanted to snuggle so it could ruin your day. A fun workshop indeed.

Character and Game Workshop: Shadows, Pandas and Foxes

Character Design

  Today's character workshop was about key points in a character: colour, theme, shapes and emotion. We were set two tasks over the session. The first was to take an established character that we were each assigned and rework them to fit with one of the cards we were given for the character project. The second was to draw silhouettes of a given character archetype in order to get the hang of character outlines. 

  For the first task I was given Fox McCloud. The card I had that stood out most for me was "collecting". I had a bit of flexibility as Fox is cast as your typical brave and confident hero. So I took the word and decided to draw him as a scavenger. Who would travel the galaxy collecting parts for the Arwing or trinkets that interested him. I think what I have came off rather well, the other thing that changed thematically was that as a scavenger he's probably be a bit dirtier and scruffier than the real Fox McCloud.

  I had a bit of time left on the task so I decided to have a go at fitting him into the "numeracy" theme. This one was a little trickier to pull off, I first thought of other words that related like "logic" and "scientist" but decided to have a go at drawing him as a cyborg. I don't think this one turned out as well as Scavenger Fox because looking at it now, he looks more like Wolf O'Donnel so the character's essence is therefore lost.

  With the second task I was assigned the archetype of Ninja and I generally had fun with this. I got the hang of outlines and I had the most fun defining the flow of the body and in some cases the body shape. The one thing that was suggested to me however was that the forms were too similar to each other so what I have is 13 outlines of possibly the same individual.

Games Workshop

  Soon after the character design workshop Justin (our lecturer) broke out the board and card games. I spent the evening in a group of five led by Justin that included me, Vlad, Lewis and Andy. The first game we played was Takenoko, a game where the task was to collectively construct and manage a bamboo garden of an Asian emperor while completing three types of task: Grow bamboo stalks, create garden layouts and feed the resident giant panda said bamboo.

  The thing I loved most about the game was the sense of cooperation and competition. We were all building one garden but we were competing for the highest score. Vlad won the game, achieving enough tasks to trigger endgame and I came a few points behind in second place. But the intrigue going on was so engrossing that I didn't mind that I came second. I was able to get some good-scoring tasks done especially late into the game.

  The second game was Revenge Of The B-Movie, a rapid-fire but hilarious card game where we were all (again) competing and cooperating to see who could make the best B movie names. Some of the names we were devising were hilariously silly like "Day of the Alien Priest Woman" (one of mine) or "[something] and the 50 Foot Lawyer From Down the Road" (one of Lewis's). Once again I came second, with Justin winning the game. It was an exiting game that reminded me a little of Cards Against Humanity by the way people play for laughs in a way that is either wholeheartedly funny, or so bad its good (Justin proposed that a rule where movies that fell into that category got bonus points).