Opaque3D | Blog

This is some sort of a rant against those who thing that animators and their software are some sort of mandrakes, always with a trick under their sleeves.

It always gets me when people are excessively ignorant. I read something on the newspaper the other day, and the columnist was talking about how wonderful computer animation was, because with the click of a button you could create an army of tens of thousands of warrior. Mind me… I’ve been using Maya for several years now, and I still haven’t found that button that creates the army.

That’s the reason for this blog’s entry title. People sometimes are so dumb they think we have some sort of infinite library of assets that allows us to pretty much drag-and-drop. Yeah, I know it’s easy to have the Gollum and Witchking primitive inside Maya. I am pretty sure they must have been some real big time savers for Peter Jackson. And let’s not forget about the Cloverfield monster and parasite primitives. I really have to thank Alias (and now Autodesk), Avid, SideFX, Newtek and such, for developing such amazing software that allows us to come up with the next blockbuster film in less than a freaking week.

It’s amazing to have all those “create terrain”, “create ocean”, “create human”, “create elephant”, “create lion”, “create hurricane”, and ”create army” buttons. It’s because of all those buttons that we can create such amazing work with one single mouseclick.

“Some guy” told me he wanted a fully featured animated 30 sec commercial by the end of the week, but that he needed at least a 4 second shot by next morning… Well, easy, all I have to do is load up that Environment from my extensive library of pre-made assets, then load up the characters and then plug the USB to my nose so the computer generates all the animation on the fly by reading my mind.
Idiot…

Ok… rant’s over.
I will only ask the next person that comes up with something that stupid to please show me where that “Create tens of thounsands soldiers” button is, but I can’t find it. He/she can even borrow my computer if he/she wants, as long as I am told where that freaking button is.

Hello people.

I had been needing some keyframes for a while, so I made this little thing. This is, in part, a “just for fun” thing because I love animating, but I also figured I needed fresh material for my demo. I figured that a talking animal would be nice so now I am going for a narnia kind of thing, with a somewhat realistic animal that talks and all.

This is also meant to be a proof of concept to anybody that may ask if I can make a talking animal :p

http://www.sharecg.com/v/14789/animation/talking-wolf-animation-wip

Well, I finished the short film yesterday and I delivered it to the film competition thing here in my country. Wish me luck

I am stil writing the new script and I hope to be finished by the end of the month. I will then begin doing the proof of concept things to test the “tech stuff”. As you may have guessed, Marion will be the main character of that film

It’s been a while but I am here again

You may or may not know that I was working on a short film a while ago. Well, I began working on it again a few weeks ago. There is this kind of “animation competition” in my country and I figured I would join using that film.

I’ve been rushing to get the job done because I have less than a month to finish the whole thing. Luckily all the pipeline had been worked out already so I just continued where I had left. The rendering and POST is nearly done. I hope I will have the sound editing by next week. In the meantime let me show you these two renders.

You know, I would have gone for a more impressive look, but I built the pipeline more than a year and a half ago, so I had to keep the same visual style. However I will work on a new film in the near future, using the latest techniques that I have developed

Hello again, everybody.

I’ve been working a little more on my female character. The rigging is technically finished but I still have to add some little details to make the character behave in a more organic way.

A guy at the forums showed me a sample video from the book “Stop Staring”, I think, where you would see wrinkles appear on the character’s face when he/she performs an expression. The technique could be done with either bumps or displacements, but I decided to use bumps for faster rendering.

What I did was to combine all the different bump maps to a layeredTexture node in Maya, and then I connected that as a bump map to my character’s face material. The network can be seen on the next image.

I then used Expressions to connect the bump maps Alpha output to the corresponding facial expression, so when the expression hits a value of 1, the Alpha value will also be 1. Combining the facial expressions will result on combined wrinkles onto the face. Click to watch the sample video.

Any downsides using bumps instead of displacements? As you know, displacements generate actual surface tessellation and deformation, while bumps don’t. This means that, though wrinkles will show when using bump maps, they won’t be seen on profile shots since bumps don’t deform the geometry.