Arashikage Fray

The newest G. I. Joe - Kre-O short I worked on is online this week. Most of the assets were carried over from the last project. I really wish I could have rerigged the Storm Shadow character for the drastic poses he needed. Using the old rig was a battle.




This short is suppose to mimic a Daffy Duck Robin Hood Short. Here's a snapshot of the original next to the Maya project.

This was also the first project I used motion blur with Maya, which ended up being fairly straightforward.

In other news: I moved into my new apartment/workspace last week which is a big improvement over the situation I had over the last year. I've been working on my CyberSnow piece in between setting things up. Might post an update if I get far enough anytime soon. Tomorrow I go back to working for Language Sprout doing illustration work though.

Sets

I finished all the sets for the Get the Diamonds Kre-O short a few days ago. Its a super long in-depth post. A Duke in his Tpose in every set to show scale and lighting. I'm actually adjusting at least the reflectivity of them all before final renders.

The locations consist of Space:

This set is only used for one shot, so its made for the single camera view. There is an explosion that will add light to scene so I'm okay with how dark it is right now.

 Tundra:

This is the biggest set. The cave area gets most of the screen time and everything else is made up of copy and pastes of the same glacier and shards. I had a really annoying problem with Sun and Sky and setting an environment image in. The environment image would be washed out every time even if I tried messing with the gamma. So I ended up making a separate environment sphere, but that blocks the light coloring with Sun and Sky somehow, even with the sphere as single sided. So I'm just going to have to composite it. The very top image is the composite. The one below it shows the off coloring with the environment sphere in and all the others are without it.

I decided to save time and simplify thing by making everything snow white. The overexposure of white does make visibility issues so I had to figure out what camera angles were being used and fudge somethings a little. This environment also made it clear that I needed to dial back the reflectivity of the characters.

I plan on cutting out the ground where the animation takes place and trying out brave rabbit's deformer plug in to add footprints in a high density mesh. Crossing my fingers it goes smoothly. I did find an issue with scapula bones transforming when rotating the polar bear. Not having the time to really figure out what is wrong with it I just deleted iksolver that moved the scapula, and the lack of it seems to be not really noticeable.

Roller Disco:

This was by far the most time consuming and complex set. I tried out a lot of stuff to get the best looking disco ball effect without using photons. I ended up putting a light in the disco ball with a cookie in the color and then using an offset lower intensity copy to add a blurry refracted look to the light spots. I also have a a hidden copy of the disco ball with a texture on it for the glow. Everything is grouped to rotate together correctly.

The top image is pulled out further than any of the shots in the scene. The pac man machine as shown in my previous post has a light inside it and  and a glow on the screen which can be turned off or on. If I have time I may go back and darken the floor for the pacman machine shots.

Dungeon:

The dungeon set I first thought was suppose to be more like a jail, which is the difference between the images. Its a one shot set that will be shown on the screens so nothing complicated.

Command Center:

I made this set after the cobra one. The idea was to make it very similar. I started with a sphere with a more patchwork metal look inspired by the one in the old cartoon series. I had a lot of difficulty getting it to look how I wanted. I switched the type of lighting compared to the cobra one and added a red band to add more color.

Cobra Command:

Its a cylindrical room with a doorways and the same 4 screens and key panel copied to the other side with different images on the screens. As I get through the animation the screen images will be switched out with animated shots with graphics on them.  A lot of movement happens here so I kept the floor one single height to make animating easier.

Cobra Hallway:

I did this before the either of the command centers. I got the idea of using a streaked metal look from looking at the backgrounds from the old cartoon series. This room is going to be stuffed with characters so there was no need to decorate the walls. And I left the other hallways sparse like this as well.

Command Outside Entrance:

Again, this is for one shot. I took the image a bit far away. I'm not sure how many characters are going to be in the shot yet so, that will probably change the composition and the camera distance. And I just realized the forgot to correct the gamma on Duke's textures for that shot. So he looks a little washed out here.

In other news:

As I finish this post I am just getting done printing my inventory for the art sale. Lots more than last year. I'll be making a post on that tomorrow hopefully. Still going around cleaning up my files, making back ups and organizing everything for the Kre-O project. I want to be blocking animation tomorrow. Please no more rigging problems. *crossing fingers*

Kreo/Lego Props and Things

I'm over halfway done with creating and lighting the sets for the Get the Diamonds short. I'm hoping to get done with that and start animating by the beginning on next week. *crosses finger*

But for now I thought I'd share some screenshots of some of the props and things(hence the title).

Here's a destructible Sputnik I made for one of the shots. I worked off this Lego  instruction image. Without any actual pieces it was a lot of guessing for the part sizes and actually making all the parts was kind of tedious. A simple metal material makes the parts look really great.

 I also modeled the diamonds like the Lego gems. The material is just a variation on one of the glass presets. I thought of trying to add color abberations to the shine like real diamonds, but I decided to see if I have time to come back to it. They are so small that I'm not sure if its worth the effort, with the timetable I have, and never having done it before.

 Modeling the rifle the Cobra Troopers did was REALLY annoying and difficult. Every image I could find was blurry or small and the black color on them just made it impossible to guess the details right. So I gave it my best shot. I know its not accurate, but with the black material on them I'm not sure it will matter.

While I was working on the rifles, I realized that somehow I made the Snow Trooper but not the regular Cobra Trooper. Luckily I just needed to do textures. So I've done that now, and I fixed the backwards chest.

 Lastly for tonight, I have the arcade machine in its actual environment. I was given the color texture to use by the screenwriter, so I really just had to model around that. I added a bump and specular map. I put the screen on a separate piece so I could add glow and put a small area light underneath to cast a tiny bit of light. The joystick was in the texture, but I painted it out and modeled a real one. The textures are step animated on or off like the face graphics on the characters with a simple set driven key attribute. (the purple glow is from the best set piece which I'll show later with the set images later)

I other news: OH MAN I LOVE HALLOWEEN! I wish I had cash to blow on making a sweet costume. More specifically LEDs(I've been watching too much Faceoff). And the MCAD Art sale is next month! AH! I gotta print stuff!

Polarbear Rigging

Part 2 of my rigging for Kre-o Get the Diamonds short.

HumanIK requires you model quadrupeds in a human style T pose, which wasn't going to work so well so I didn't try to use it this time.  Instead, I used a free script from Brave Rabbit. It helped with most of the process which sped things up quite a bit.  I had a couple issues with it, mostly to do with scale. It ended up being best to scale up the model to the rig and then scale it back down after the rig was finished rather then use the script's menu scale attribute.

I added my own bit to animate the jaw opening and closing. As well as making a move-able tongue. The jaw just involved added some joints to the rig. The nurbs curve acts as a controller via a simple expression on the rotation.

The tongue was inspired by a brief teaching experience with Andrew Chesworth who now works at Disney. It was a couple of years ago but I remembered he had shown me a rig he made with a tongue that had unconnected joints skinned to it. I can't remember much more about it, but I thought I'd give it a go. I grouped the joints under zeroed out locators and grouped the locators under the jaw controller. That way the joints wouldn't connect to each other, but would move with the jaw and I wouldn't have to mess with the pre-made rig more. The locators act as controllers and leave the tongue and the bottom of the mouth in their default position. And I have the back end of the tongue skinned to the a jaw joint so it always stays rooted to the mouth.


 I used the same process with a wolf as well.

Kre-o Rig

Long, probably boring post on rigging! If you don't know much about rigging, it will probably not make any sense. YAY! I learned a bunch of things.

This is actually my second go at it, after re-remembering that nothing works with HumanIK if you don't have the scale set to centimeters. Most notably my skeleton likes to shrink.

I could have just built my own rig, it might have even saved me some time. But, I want to stick with  HumanIK because I feel like its going to become a staple in Maya and it really could make things a lot easier in faster in a lot of cases if it works.

I had issues with the shoulders. The Kreo toy ar,ms only lift about half way to a T-pose before the shoulders pop off which is really inconvient because:

A. HumanIK works around models in a T-pose.

B. It puts an annoying mobility issue on animating and getting humanistic poses.

After a bunch of fiddling around I found the best way was to put in 2 joints in the shoulder area and make one a clavicle like bone as far as the control rig was concerned. The "clavicle" bone is used to rotate the should like the toy would work in real life in a rigid fashion. And then the shoulder bone actually bends the shoulder piece like a flesh shoulder. It's not a perfect, but I think it works pretty well without having to mess with the HumanIK rig much.

Before I figured out the shoulder I first rigged it with a V-pose, but easily managed to switch it to a T. I grouped the joints under nulls, rotated the nulls to make the T, and then deleted the nulls. That way the joints stayed zeroed out.

The last big issue I had to tackle was rigging the face. There wasn't many face expressions they had to make, but I've never rigged textures or shaders before, and my knowledge of them isn't very advanced. I found this really great tutorial which helped a lot. I did have to get a bit more complicated because of the eyewhites and things. So I ended up using a layered shader for most of it.

 However, for some reason you cannot make a set driven key or expression for the alpha on a layer in the layered texture. I found a work around by sticking a luminance utility into the alpha input. I could then make set driven keys for the R, G, and B, of the luminance attributes that would tell the alpha what value to be. So silly.

(animation curves are set driven key connections)

Here are some examples of the faces I can make for Quick Kick with the rig I made for him. His rig has the most options in total. I only put it what I felt was the bare minimum of what I needed. If I need more I can always add it without too much trouble. Right now he has a bunch of mouth shapes, open, closed, and squinting eyes, iris movement right and left, and raised and lowered eyebrows. I also added a full or dilated one for a shocked face, but it didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped.

Oh, and I did opt for having a simple pose to pose face, instead of having in between to switch between the expressions. I think it'll look more stop motion and fit with the sparse amount of faces, and being my first time with it, simple is probably better.


IN OTHER NEWS, art sale is approaching and I need to finish illustrations! Soon. I'm thinking of editing some of my collection of horrible horrible error/bug screen caps from Maya and making prints of them. If no one buys them, I can decorate my room with failure(the good kind). Another episode of F&T is going to be out in the next week I am told. I really have to get a bunch of work done on some of those episodes left too. My origami fish project is still hanging over me, begging me to have freetime to work on it. So painfully close to having another shot done. Also I think I may currently have a fever.

Oh yah, and now that the human characters are usable, I will be modeling a and then rigging a polar bear and a wolf. I've never finished rigging(someday I will finish that deer character I made) a quadruped, so yay for learning more things.

G. I. Joe Kre-O figure Models

I've finished modeling and texturing most of the Kre-O characters for the parody I'm working on called "Get the Diamonds".  Here's a few images of them. The lighting is basic so the materials don't look super great yet.

I'm working on the rigging for  these right now. Its very frustrating, because the toys themselves have very limiting movement in the arms, and trying to translate it to something that can isn't super easy. I've also had quite a few issues with the HumanIK system I've been trying out in Maya. Its super buggy and I may just have to scrap it and start the rigging over.