Red girl

Almost done compositing the turntable. I can't decide if I like this fancier look or if I should just put it on black and center it like my others. Also I have to find and replace the Redgirl logo with the correct one if I decide to keep it like this.

And here you can that horrible issue I was having with the hair and not having collision ramps.

Look how puffy and fuzzy and icky it looks. After so much time I've spent on hair it just feels painfully tragic. But I can't keep working on her. Too many other things to do.

Redgirl Round 2

        Finally back to work on this thing after it sort of crashed and burned at the end of school. The biggest issues all had to do with the hair. I managed to fight all of them until I went to render and found to my horror that for some unknown reason when I'd go to render it would render as if the hair did not have a cache on it at all, which it did and would display it correctly in the viewport but not in the rendered images. As far as I could find out via the internet, classic hair just has a really shitty and unreliable cache system. I could have tried caching differently, but by then I didn't have the time to remake the caches. And then a hundred little issues popped up, the render farm went down for a couple days, and missing frames, and weird ass AE compositing errors, and my composer disappeared..  Basicly everything was an utter fail and the few shots I got into a video form were almost all off and extreamly short and confusing.

But yes, I still graduated. I put my all into everything and I learned a lot.

I've been working on Redgirl again for the last 2 weeks or so. But I've sort of resolved not to spend too long on it at a time or push myself too hard. The time I spent on this project was really unhealthy for me physically, emotionally, and socially and I'm still trying to get myself back to the health I had 6 months ago, while also not going into more debt.

My goals are small for this project and I don't see myself finishing it completely anytime soon. Right now the plan is to get the main character into a finished state for a turntable.

First Thing. Make completely new hair in 2013. nHair is so much easier to deal with. I also made it way simpler and faster to work with!

Restyle and tweaking to get it looking right. I decided to not try to even out the hair and leave it more natural looking because I liked the look much better.

Look how much difference the textures make! These skin textures are thanks to the wonderful Tyler Weber who did them a few months ago when I had no time at all. They look so lovely. I'm still fixing some issues we had with the bump map and of course gotta adjust that hair and eyebrows more.

Octo-hair

The collisions on this hair sim are way not good enough, but I rendered it for fun anyway. No final textures or shaders or anything either. It just makes all the work seem a bit more worth it for some reason when I see the way the any sort of light bounces of of the strands.

And the hair is suppose to be messy. If it wasn't for the interpenetrations I'd probably be okay with it, time crunch and all.

Doing some render farm tests right now on the cloaked woman. Hopefully I'll get at least the backgrounds through by next week on her shots!

DOF...

I'm starting to gather things together in scenes so I can start rendering backgrounds and make final settings for rendering as several shots are almost complete. While setting up a final HeroCam, I considered DOF. I knew that my renders where already slightly heavy, but after learning that the mia_bokeh lens node is faster, I decided to give it a try.

A tiny test on part of an image proved fairly quickly that DOF was too expensive to do in Maya. But, for funsies I wanted to see what a red heart as the bokeh would do. This is what I got.


It took over an hour and half to render the one image. I probably wouldn't use the heart bokeh look, but the added dimension from the DOF is really satisfying to me, so I thought I'd post it.

Since giving up on rendering DOF in maya, I learned today that my school possess a license of Lenscare(it had apparently been forgotten about for the last 5 years) for After Effects which I'm told works rather nice for DOF. So hopefully in a week or so, I'll get to see what that looks like.

While trying to fix some of the lighting issues I had when the camera looked toward the window, I found out about this magical thing called a portal light. Before this, I'd just been using normal direction lights and ambient lights with global illumination and final gather. I find the portal light looks more natural, is simpler to deal with as I don't need global illumination any more and it renders in about the same amount of time as my old setup if not faster in some areas. Next I'll be trying out some DOF, maybe the bokeh lens shader. I recommend looking up the portal light if you don't know about it. I found some good tutorials just by doing a google search.

Card Designs

My illustrator friend, the wonderful Dylan Davis, has been doing making some card designs to match my characters and look for the film. Here you can see the back design he made me (the circles will be reflective) and the Queen of Hearts he made for me, based of the hooded woman.

Cloak

Cloak for the crazy lady. It's not there yet, but in the ballpark I think.

rough animation

I comped together rough animation last week for my Redgirl project.



Lots to do still...

Thanks to my animina-buddies Jack Sutter, Hannah Strenger, and Meg Hamann.

I animated the cutting scenes, and the old crazy lady.

Jack of Clubs

Well, winter break was less productive than I wanted it to be, but it is called break for a reason.

I really didn't get steam on my project again until about a week ago. And, TAH-DAH! Jack model is complete.

The bulging eyes and the curl at the ends of the smile where a bit of a pain in the arse, but I'm pretty happy with him. The hair creation actually went really quickly this time. I used a common method of shaping it a nurbs surface and then using curves off the surface to make the hair clumps. The hardest part was just getting it to all fit under the hat nicely, and that wasn't too bad at all.

Since then I've also finished the background models and texturing, and put the finishing touches on the old woman's cloak.

Its sort of a race between me and my new helpers for which scene will be done first, but I expect good chunks of animation to be pushed out starting this week.

The Girl

With all of her blend shapes!

Still needs some tweaking and her necklace and textures. But yay?

Eye-mustaches!

he..he...

I've been learning/testing fur to see if it works with blend shapes. AND IT DOES! YAY!

I was told to do this whole long thing with paint fx or hair on seperate planes animated to fit with the blend shapes using clusters. A wrap deformer might have made that method faster, but I remembered reading that fur is dependent on the object's UVs. So I figured it would probably move if the object got deformed, even if it was with a blend shape.

There is some downsides though. Its kinda laggy, and involves another dynamic system that I otherwise do not need. But it involves less rigging, and seems to have the ability to look pretty naturalistic and I like trying new things.

This obviously isn't the finished product. The hairs need to be combed and shaped better. But it illustrates the test. The renders took about a minute to two minutes on my machine.

Regular:

With test blendshape deformation:

Heart Necklace

So I seem to still be having issues with making a dynamic necklace. Using a dynamic joint IK setup which uses hair collisions doesn't work well with collisions. Here I've made the necklace cloth and used a parent to surface script to attach the bead. The problems with this method is that the sting pinches in parts, which then I added pressure to, but the pressure eventually rolls around like a bubble causing the necklace to swing back and forth.

Also, the dress in this is this image is probably the finished version minus textures.

Hair

Near done shaping the hair for the scissor lady aka the main character middle-aged. The girl's hair is just about the same, but cut about a foot and a half shorter. The color hasn't been worked on much yet, and the collisions need a work. I've never really used hair in Maya before so this is a bit of a bigger achievement for me.

Queen

She is rigged and textured and ready for action!

Her character is probably the least seen because of being further away and in the shadows and such, so not a ton of detail was needed. I wanted her to be like a half-formed card character so much of her look is stamped card images one her body. The face and chest was made to match the design of the face of the card as much as possible.

Hopefull some animation of her will be produced soon and I can finesse the lighting of the hallway to create the right atmosphere for her soon. I've been a bit sidetracked with hair dynamics for my main character lately, so it could be a while before I get her completely done.

Doors

New render of doors. Lots of non-visual technical stuff going on this week again.

I started working on the floor aswell, but the reflections are too sharp here still.

Dress Attempt 1

My first go at the girl's model and dress... I think the legs need to be shortened a touch and the dress shortened to be a hand-length above the knee.

Title Logo

I think I've decided on a title logo for my short film. I still don't know how much I love "Redgirl" as a title buuuut naming things has never been a skill of mine.

Yes, I know that numbers in titles isn't always appreciated but I hope in this case it works. Also, Red 6 of hearts in real life(irl) could be a title, its just not as good sounding.

Maybe I've been thinking about this too much...

Environment and Lighting Progress

Besides having the Bedroom blocked out, I've started putting detail into one of the cabinets, trim around one door, and doorknobs. I've also been working on lighting to get a more realistic bounce effect from all the white objects. Next I'll be texturing the doors with a woodgrain.

Jack is Awesome

Jack Sutter is being amazing and doing UVing and rigging so I can catch up on the rest of my life. THANKS JACK!

In the meantime, not much to show. But here, look I modeled the tv and put initial shaders on it. The Queen should be textured soon too!

Redgirl Character Sketches

Busy, busy, busy! So much so that I forgot to post my character sketches for Redgirl's design. They were done over a month ago, and are rather loose and sketchy.