VRay and Morphs

So it's been a very stressful and tedious weekend! I have had ALOT of problems in developing this models animations so far... Time for a rant I think

1. Sculpting a few morphs in Mudbox from the base model... No problem that was easy, at this point if I had known what was in store I might have just put a pencil up each nostril and bashed my head of my desk!
2. Linked up the morph targets thinking this was going to be a breeze... tested out a morph... and the models head turned inside out... FAIL!
3. It took me two days to figure this out... but it turns out that what I needed to do was export the base head as an .obj from max, import it into Mudbox, then export it back out of Mudbox as a .obj and then import it back into max! Something to do with the export processing I'm guessing but anyway that was 2 days solid of messing around!
4. Ok so the morpher modification in max gives you the ability to morph textures! Awesome right!...Wrong! Max does not support morphing textures with Mental Ray! So off I go and *Cough* acquire Vray. Now besides the fact that you have to use Vray camera, Vray Lights and figure out what the 200 different check boxes and options are it's pretty awesome! Except it turned out that the version I had was faulty so for 3 more days I have been messing around with camera settings, motion blurring, Global Illumination in order to get the thing to render anything else other than a black screen! and when I did I left my machine on for a day and a half to render 2 seconds of animation only to find out that it had been water marked with VRAY over the image AND at frame 20 had decided to start incrementally get darker until you couldn't see anything! By this point I was about to give up when after a few hours of forum trolling I found out that SP4 was available and had NO bugs!
5. Installed new version and guess what... I was put out of my misery! What i left on all night took 5 minutes to render with no water mark, no colour issues, no problems!

So it has not been a productive week and I have nothing to really show at the moment but I am back on track and should have an animation of some emotions being displayed on the "Skin" model by Friday!

Time to do some actual work now things are fixed, Ive been neglecting my other course work! I'm out!

Morph Target Animation

So I was hoping to generate a number of models for potential use of this final year project but after it took me 5 days of very instensive work to get "Skin's" Model done, I think I will just begin animating it. I have worked out I need to generate morph targets for the easisest way to switch between emotions and Visemes (These are mouth positions for individual phonems (Phonems are sounds of which words are auidbly constructed)).

To explain what a morph target is breifly: A morph target is a copy of your base model that has been altered in structure in some way. It is the targeted state for which you wish your base model to alter to. Once you have told whatever software package it is that you are using (In my case it is Autodesk's 3Ds Max 2010) that the altered model is to be considered a morph target, you can begin changing the % parameter in order to adjust how far from the base model to the target you wish the model to alter. Here is a picture to describe... [Images was extracted from Google Images, This is not my work]

As you can see you create multiple instences of your model, i.e one for happy, one for sad, left eye shut, right eye shut etc.. From here the animation is incredibly easy. You can control you model via these parameters shown in the parameter box to the right of the picture. You can alter the models in Max via maipulating the vertices... if they are low poly! However the "Skin" Model now has a 1Million Poly Count.... So I'm hoping I can generate these targets by alterations in Mudbox!

I will be doing this for the next week or so and will update with my progress!

However here is a great tutorial I found on youtube.com that describes how to create and alter using morphs!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2v5uG1tFak
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL6xY_SywgY 

My first digital sculpt! (Final Renders)

So the previous post covered nearly a week of what was a very frustrating and problem filled work flow, but having emerged at the other side I am much wiser for it. There is still alot to learn about Mudbox and working with a Max/Mud progression. However the texture painting feature is just beautiful, I mean that saved me another week of work! Because to be honest I am not comfortable with the more traditional texture mapping method!

One thing I must share is this... Do not be shy with Mudbox sculpting, get in there and manipulate that mesh! It may look awful for a while but if you play around enough you will get there with no worr.. ... ... .. . 12 hours and a handful of hair later!

Thanks to my girl Rachael Brown's friend "Skin" for allowing me to use her as a reference for this project (I know its not quite her, but if you look at the image below and compare and bare in mind this was my first ever time using digital sculpting software),I think I rocked it!

I could do with figuring out how to use the Hair/Fur modifier in Max but it's not easy by any means. If you ever read this and consider yourself confident with hair let me know as I would like to add it to this model sometime...However for now it's going to be short and textured! =D

Eyeball texture

Texture map

"Skin"

My first digital sculpt! (The making of)

For my final year project I am required to conduct research into an area of interest, thankfully I have been lucky enough to get an amazing opportunity to work alongside the Edinburgh College of Art and a high tech start up company specializing in holographic displays. I cannot mention the display technology or the company as they wish to keep their research under wraps until it is ready for commercial release. But it is a real break through, these displays show  holograms that exist in the x,y,z of space, without needing to be projected onto a screen (Current 2D technology). My role in all this is to develop a pipeline or system for the development of expressive conversational agents within the holographic hardware constraints. So I must find means of producing frames and identifying patterns for reuse. Anyway due to the high risk of collaborative projects I had to develop my own model for evaluation purposes. The collaborative project model will not be completed until late march (The ECA are designing the character, I am then selecting, Modelling, Rigging, Texturing and Animating the Model that will then be used to demonstrate the holographic hardware platform).

Anyway below are screen shots of the progression through the process. The final will be posted after this.

I taught myself how to patch/strip model (polygon by polygon and connect the vertices together) and modelled a base to then pump into Mudbox...However after 2 days work I forgot that Mudbox only supports 4 sided polygons... So back to square one!

Thankfully mudbox has a base head model and building in UVW cords for it. Means all I had to do was sculpt and paint :D

Base Model that Mudbox Provides

Started with the Nose and Eyes

Added Lip Volume

Eye sockets (Will add eyes later as so they are independent from the mesh and thus can be moved easily later)

Sculpt ear definition...This is real tricky

Carve out ears from skull

Begin tidying up a bit to get an idea of how things are going to look

Getting there..

Looking ok... Just need smoothed out (Also added neck and collar bone definition aswell as lowering shoulders and thinning the neck, very important for female appearance!)

Skin Colour is too light! and the nose is squint!

Fixed!...Ok, so I think I'm finished... Back to 3Ds Max

Make the eyelashes

Add the hair...No wait that looks...

....Really really wrong! Back to mudbox and just texture paint the hair I think! (This was decided after 2 days of different hair styles, colours and frizz/thickness parameter alterations... It just was not working)

Looks better but still Smack bang in the Uncanny Valley!

Ok back to Mudbox yet again by this point it was the 5th attempt!

Add eyeshadow and liner to take attention away from naked eye (very difficult to get right it turns out!)

Now we are getting somewhere! (Neck and shoulders also got altered again after this as she was looking abit butch!)

I thought glasses may hide the eyes but this clearly does not flatter her!

Ok so scaffolding bar for right ear, nice and easy...

Crazy ear ring for the left

Almost there but noticed left eye appeared stretched back, tidied this up in Mudbox, yet again!

Done! (Image is dark due to lighting settings, the rendered image comes out much lighter)

Past Work.

Here is a selected few images that shows the work I have done previously, I started off with the chest of drawers as part of a tutorial, I then did the Water tower as part of another.

The water tower tutorial is just brilliant, it can be found with other greats at...

www.cgtuts.com These two tutorials and abit of additional research enabled me to create the APM Mechanoid (This was a animation for a university module).

Catch up Posts: Wordpress

Hey Blog!

So first post! Ok so there is a little bit of catching up to do...

My name is James Alexander Simpson (Jay or Jamie to friends) and I started a learning diary for a 3D Aniamtion and Modelling module I took last semester at Heriot Watt University (Part of my Information Systems BSc(Hons) course). It was during this module that I really discovered what it was that I wanted to do as a profession and just how much I love this area of specialization. This Log can be found at the below link

http://www.thdi.co.uk/refelix

It is in this log that I have my first 3/4 intensive months of learning, from here on out I will be posting in this blog! So please have a glance through first =) but I will post my current work up on this site in the next post!

It is an truely bizzare professional that requires two of my favoitre things in life, creativity & art aswell as using very powerful computers :p . Plus it incredibly satifsying for those of us who have a small god complex! As you are essentially creating objects and entitys out of your own imagination, be it a tree, a landscape... or a transforming mechanoid. It is yours and it can be made to do what ever you want... Burn it to the ground, Fly, Shoot a massive rocket out of its leg, Jump.... or reinact Monty Python's ministery of silly walks if you really want (Possible bit of fun I was thinking for my APM Model!). The difference between 3D Modelling and Animation and 2D work is obviously the addition of the Z axis. But its not that simple, as with the introduction of this axis comes the requirment of creating a character or object that does not just look good from the angle the user is viewing it (i.e a sketch on paper or a flash animation), but must be flawless from every angle as you do not draw the model, colour it in and then alter the next image in the sequence to follow.
In the world of 3D your create your enity using a range of methods varying in complexity and suitablity for the subject in question (N.U.R.B.S and Splines for organic objects and Primative or Patch techniques for Hard Surface objects), you then must rig the model (create a skeletal structure that defines the way it will react and move to either manual developer animation or react to simulated gravity or collissions). Followed by texturing the object (essentialy painting it) and then finaly animate it. In some ways it could be considered easier than that of 2D work due to once you have created an object you do not need to draw it again in order to animate. But in other ways more complex in the inital complexity of model creation and learning curve of 3D software.

In this blog that I intend to keep for many many years I hope to describe What, How, When and Where of my newly established passion, I hope that I will end up doing it professionally but either way I will describe my journy as I go. I hope that this blog may potentialy educate me via a means of reflection (or maybe introduce me to those who are already well established in the subject area) and maybe educate others who are just begining or just interested.

Enough waffle... I will learn how to blog better in the future, for now I'm off to the gym it's weights day! I will post again soon and get the ball rolling =)

Jay out!