Small update

I've gone through the basic nParticle simulation process on Maya a couple times in a certain format for the Masterclass tutorial I'll be giving and it went well. There were some slight hiccups on the way when I couldn't add particular solvers to particular meshes, but I found ways around it.

Like for instance...for some reason, naming the emitters and meshes in the scene before giving the meshes passive collider nucleus solvers just doesn't work for some odd reason. Annoying as hell but I guess the names and all can be sorted out after everything's been done. The real downside to all this is that the render time in Mental Ray with the different shaders and lighting (Raytracing) is huge. It makes testing out renders really tedious because one single frame in some situations takes about 6 minutes to fully render. Couple that with the fact that the computers at college aren't exactly top notch, it would take much, much longer - say, about 8-10 minutes per frame. Now, imagine that, but with like 500-700 frames. Not cool, is it? So in the end, all I can show to the class is how to add the attributes and shaders, and let them render it out at home or w/e. Because it sure as hell ain't gonna be feasible at college.

nParticles n' Rendering

CWATIDIDTHAR? Hurhurhurhurhurrrr.

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For the past day or so I've been playing with a few render settings and shaders in a few different render engines, including Maya Software, mental ray, and V-Ray. Maya Software was easy to use, since we use it all the time in class. I didn't particularly use it that much at all. Mental ray was easy enough, quite similar to Software actually. But V-Ray was quite a bit different, and for that matter "better" for lack of a suitable word. I like the options that are given to you, like for instance V-Ray Render Elements (for filters and effects) and Indirect Illumination (for all sorts of lighting setups) and the big bunch of cool shaders that come with V-Ray. Also stuff like bump mapping and subsurface scattering look nicer on V-Ray. It didn't take too long to get used to either. I guess that's why I was told that some people are sworn V-Ray patrons for all their work. Me personally though, I'd just use the one I feel like working with whenever.

I also tried working with nParticles. I'm now more accustomed to using RealFlow though since the workFlow (hahaaa) is straightforward and just better/more accurate for liquid simulation, as its name points out. nParticles ain't bad per se...but it isn't exactly optimized for the best water simming out there. The water (unless you try to use a ridiculous amount of small asss Ball nParticles and risk crashing Maya over and over) is all blobby when converted into to a mesh. On top of that, for some reason after the particles settle, the mesh gradually loses its resolution and eventually disappears. Quite annoying really.

Though, we don't have RealFlow at college, do we? So we gotta work with what we got. Sucks a bit, but hey, better than nothing. Anyway, here are some renders I made with the nParticles with different engines:

mental ray render:

V-Ray render:

V-Ray Depth of Field test:

So as you can see comparing the first two, the V-Ray one looks a tiny bit better, at least in my opinion. 

In the mental ray render, there are 10 little cubes in the air for the particles to flow over (as with the V-Ray one too) and I gave these a metallic shader to give them that shiny/glossy surface. I gave the floor thing a ceramic shader for it to be able to reflect the other things in the scene. 

With the floor thing on V-Ray, I used a marble bump map to give it that weird surface. I had to mess around with it a lot till it looked like smooth granite (I can't blame it. I mean, after all, I did choose marble). Before, it looked like a rough marble surface which didn't fit in this particular scene. I gave the cubes a V-Ray light material with a temperature colour mode so they kind of glowed a bit without being full-on luminescent. I wanted to see what they would look like through the water. Was not disappointed. They look pretttty damn accurate. 

That last one took forever to render just because of the DOF. Totally not worth a test render. Plus after it rendered, my CPU started to idle at around 45 degrees Celsius, which scared me for a bit. 

nDynamics Simulations ftw.

Remember when I last updated this blog? Or maybe you remember when I last got off my computer? Neither does Pepperidge Farm. Also, boring paragraphs of my progress with Maya nDynamics follows...

I've been doing lots of nParticle and nCloth simulations. Hella fun to say the least, though it takes quite a lot of processing power. I'm still experimenting with some of the basic physics values like air density, wind, force field generation and so on. So far I've learnt a bit about simulating realistic liquid particles (my primary focus for the Masterclass thing). nCloth is just too much fun though (and for that matter more straightforward to work with than nParticles). Basically, it's your very own collision simulator. You can do anything from shattering simple objects to destroying entire cities. I heard about there being a much better plugin for that stuff (a little like RealFlow but for collisions) but I forgot the name.

Anyway, that brings me to the fact that, even right now, I'm rendering a realistic water simulation I made in RealFlow. I've been doing it so far for the last couple of days. The particles and the motion frames are done. Now it's just up to V-Ray to render out the mesh I imported from RealFlow into Maya (and then added some shaders to make it look like actual transparent water).  And yeah I have V-Ray now. Suck it, mental ray. I found this really great tutorial that shows you everything step by step on how to create a water sim on RealFlow and then do the whole V-Ray thing and then composite it in NUKE. I have yet to do the compositing of the three different renders. After that, I'll try to post it up (as well as some other things I did on Maya) on here and show you what I've been up to these past few weeks. Here are a few screenies:

Motion Velocity:

Particles:

V-Ray Reflection render:

V-Ray Mesh render: 

Rendering right now, 565 frames to go! 

"Only that many, pfft" you say? No no no, you don't get it. I have a pretty decent gaming rig, and I started rendering that out at about 9:00 AM today, and it's only finished 137 frames at 4:27 PM. So, it does take that freaking long unfortunately. 

Stay tuned for more folks!

EDIT:
Okay, so, I found that the render is going faster now because the main chunk of frames at the start with the really intensive and demanding work was done. Not too much faster, but hey, I'll take any amount of fast over the rate at which it was going before. It should be done tonight at around 11:00 PM, at which time I'll start compositing the damn thing.

EDIT2: 
YUSH. I remembered the name! That collision plugin I was talking about earlier was called RayFire. I can finally crush as many buildings as I want and make it look ultra realistic, like what I've always dreamt about :D

>__>

<__<

.....

Don't worry, I'm no terrorist, nor do I like causing destruction for the sake of destruction, but...it's just so fun to watch, y'know? :B

(Excuse the amount of smilies. I do that when I remember the thing that was at the tip of my tongue. It's like I've achieved an extraordinary feat that's one day going to save humanity or something).

EDIT3:
Well that sucks. It only works on 3DS Max. I guess Fracture FX will have to do then. Or, I could just go ahead and learn all about Max. Hmmm....

Oh yeah, I remembered another alternative, which is also opensource - Bullet Physics Engine. I'll try that out too. I've only heard little things about it, I don't know much.

EDIT4:
And would you look at that, the render finished at around 8:00 PM, ahead of my ETC. Tomorrow I'll stitch it all up and make it look pretty.

Hands are f#!@ing hard to draw.

I'm not kidding, this is a serious matter. Why do hands have to be so difficult to get right? Is it because they're like a satanic curse on artists? Who knows. This is what I got up to tonight with drawing these damn things:

Now all I have to do is draw some animal-human hand/feet comparisons and some feet on their own. Somehow the stylized hands worked out okay, just not the realistic ones. Because who needs realism when you're an artist, right? Riiiight? Yeah you know what I mean. Don't pretend like you don't, you silly.

P.S. Ignore all the grammatical errors on the pages. I was sleepy. Cut me some slack! >:|

Getting back into Flash.

After the 48 hours thing, I realized I had gotten so much into Maya that I'd forgotten about my original roots of working on Flash. And so I made a small animation based on one of my most favourite shows of all time - Invader Zim. But I guess you could already tell from my name. Anyway, here it is:

http://fav.me/d7dojeg

Peggy Walk Cycle

Hey, so I'm nearly done with the walk cycle after messing around with the rigging of Peggy. I'm curious like that and hence waste a lot of time when I get sucked into something that interests me.

Anyway here's a 'lil screenie:

EDIT:

Aaaaaand I'm done. Just gotta submit it now. Yay. Animating the ponytail and keeping it consistent was a damn nightmare. A NIGHTMARE I TELL YOU. 

Since I'm finished with the bare minimum required for this assessment, I shall start my foray into exaggerated and cartoonized (lolwat?) animation on good ol' Peggy. 

Lighting more stuff up.

This was just some experimentation with the lighting we learned about. I did this after completing all the work requested by our awesome 2014 48 hour animation director Ben....until I got called back to do more extra backgrounds that is. 

Nothing fancy. I might update this post with more lit meshes later on. 

Head+Facial Features Resub

My original head drawings for the DDS assessment didn't really get a pass since they were really damn simple with little to no detailing (and a few bits of missing anatomy) so the following resubs have yet to be assessed. Hopefully they're good. Or at least enough to get an M...

^Dat baby face doe O_o

Three-Point Lighting

Lighting work: 

Ambient

Key

Fill

Rim

Three-Point Lighting

Original Test Run - Gamma 1.0

Intro

Hey peeps, this is just a blog dedicated to showcasing some of my progress at Animation College NZ. This could also prove useful for keeping track of everything I accomplish throughout the year. So, yeah. Enjoy.