Boom -> Bust

Boom -> Bust (Vicious Cycles #1) from Wobbe on Vimeo.

Messing with Mash in Maya

School, and preparing for shows, has kept me busy. I am picking up my 3D printed stop motion project, and experimented with the new Mash operators in Maya 2017. I attempted to use xGen iteratively before and that did not get me very far. My first attempt iterating with Mash is promising, though the images below are not quite what they should be.

Maya 2017 did seem to freeze for a few minutes but then produced geometry that showed potential for building fractal like structures using Mash. Next time I will make sure to delete construction history, with a few tweaks this should even be animatable.

Update

I wanted to add the 3D printed Stop Motion tag to an earlier post, and saw I never posted the video of the first test on this blog, so here it is

3D Printed Stop Motion Test from Wobbe on Vimeo.

Scatter Brain Matter, or the Evolution of Mankind

I have released my latest short film on Vimeo. After serious discussions around Thanksgiving, I added a subtitle to the work once known as "Mind Matter".

Scatter Brain Matter, or the Evolution of Mankind from Wobbe on Vimeo.

More Dancing Particles

So there. Took forever to get some stuff to work, particle expressions can be very finicky. But they are starting to behave the way I envisioned.

Geeknote: created the movie from a Maya playblast using Shotcut on my MacBook as this weekend I did not feel like firing up my big machine with the Adobe Stuff. Very basic but useful program!

Flock Particle Lights

Dancing Particles

Played with nParticles a bit in an attempt to create frozen motion but created this sequence in the process:
 

I used a Motion Capture (MoCap) example that came with Maya years ago and made it emit particles. Very simple. Find better MoCap data I must!

xGen Experiment

Not really have had time to create new work recently. For my classes I have been experimenting with Maya's xGen. Today I made this to test duplication of animated geometry with it.
 

We are Glass

Not really, but this thing seems to be made of glass. I updated an older experiment to test the new MacPro in my office at Monmouth University. Did pretty well rendering this with caustics and all.
 

 
Oh, you wonder what happened to "Scatter Brain Matter"? Well, the start of the semester got in the way. Need to find two days of time to finish it, but I do have picture lock!

Final Test (?)

Today I did a test for what should be the final effect for my animation "Scatter Brain Matter" (working-title-in-flux): a flood of running creatures:
 

The End is Nigh! I am rendering the one but last shot, and animating the final one. Getting really close to being done. I would have been even further along rendering if the power had not gone out at our house (twice) last night, killing the overnight render shortly after midnight. Luckily the surges did not kill my computer!

Once done with animation there is of course more compositing to be done, colors to be corrected, the edit needs to be finalized, sound and music added and mixed, titles and credits superimposed and whatnot. But there is light at the end of the tunnel.

RGB.Machine

For my animation I need something to glow inside of a"crystal ball" so I created something based on the machine from Contact and had it leave particles behind in glorious RGB. I rendered it a couple of times with different settings, here is the result:
 

GeneraTurn

With the semester almost over I am about to go into hyperdrive to finish my animation before I start my new job this Fall. Here is a prop I need for the final scene. I could have left it out but that would have compromised the mind-matter bifurcation scattering subtext.
 

I showed the latest edit test for Scatter Brain Matter to my advanced animation students at Montclair State the other day, and one of them labeled it as very "Meta". So stay tuned!

Bring Your Own Brain

I showed a Work in Progress video at the latest BYOA and was happy with the response and got some good suggestions. Important things got in the way, but I am working again on the final scene of "Scatter Brain Matter". Here is another test:
 

Blob Fail

Just to show that I am still working on the animation, here is an exploded Blob. You may wonder how violent my animation is going to be, but I can assure you this was unintentional. Wait, have I not stated somewhere that exploiting lucky accidents is part of my process?

[geek alert] So what happened? I added some joints to his trunk, detached the skin and re-skinned him. It turns out that you first need to normalize your skin weights to do this. New feature in Maya 2014? I have not experienced these kind of explosions before.

Chess.set

It should not have surprised me that this took me a bit longer to build than I had hoped for as this prop will be featured prominently in my upcoming animation Scattered Brain Matter. But here it is, all six pieces and the board, available in two trendy colours.

[Geek Alert!] Recently I started to like the new node editor in Maya, taking me back to the time when I enjoyed working in Softimage XSI. Today I was painfully reminded of why I had previously abandoned its use. It totally froze my computer three times this morning. When I finally got the Task Manager open (the first crash was so bad that Windoze did not even respond to CTRL-ALT-DEL) I saw it rapidly filling up all available RAM for no good reason. Bad Maya!

I have my three models, rigger and all. On to Animation soon!

More Blob

Progress on my animation has been rather slow. It is kind of hard to work on a computer animation when a tropical system formerly known as Sandy knocks out your power for a couple of days, immediately followed by a Nor'easter. Oh well. I made some progress today on the blob.

 

[Geek Alert!] Allow me to rant about Autodesk® Maya a bit. I don't think I'm the only one doing some UV editing after rigging and it would be nice if that history could just be deleted, just like normal modeling history. But that would be too easy. Finally found a workaround with a MEL command (polyTransfer) which is of course quite different from the very similar menu reachable "Transfer Attributes" I got the result I wanted in the end luckily.

Blobber Mouth

Just in time for Halloween, I created a first render/animation test of the Fleshy Blob character for my upcoming feature length animation:

 

It needs a lot of work, obviously. But it is the last main character I need to complete!

Blob Ready to Rig

In the month since my last post featuring this Fleshy Blob, I have not been sitting still. In fact, I have flown across the country (paid to be flown to be more precize) to attend SIGGRAPH 2012 where I did not have WiFi in my Hotel and was too busy with meetings and sessions (one of which I organized) to post any updates.

As far as the "Scattered Brain Matter" project is concerned: the Blob model is basically done (with UVs) and I also modeled the thing it will sit on. Fall semester is looming large, progress will be slow but if I just spend at least an hour every day…

Been Blobbing

Judging by this blog you might think I have been a slacker on the animation front this summer. Au contraire! I am close to finishing the first scene for what may keep the title "Scattered Brain Matter". The next scene planned contains all characters I have in mind for this piece, so I am modeling the last one: a fleshy blob. The image shows it in its current state, next to the design. The belly is not round and or fat enough. And it does not jiggle yet.

Adding some Sharpness

If the title of this post deceived you into expecting some clever remarks here, you will be utterly disappointed. This is simply a post in the Animators Anonymous category to prove that I have been working. I actually animated quite a bit, getting close to finalizing the possible opening scene for what is still tentatively called "Scattered Mind Matter". Here is a test for what may happen to the tree like structures once the animation progresses deeper into --dare I (ab/mis)use the term?-- the technicum: it gets hard.

 

 

[Geek alert!] It turns out the mesh generated from nParticles is not exactly clean and polygon reductions does not work without manually removing all manifold geometry. Polygon Cleanup can do that automatically but results in crappy topology, so the polygons identified by the cleanup procedure need to be manually fixed. And the mesh also has a number of holes in it. I guess that just shows how hard it is to fit a polygonal surface over an isosurface,and that the solution is pretty stable is quite a feat.

It's Alive! It's a L...

I do not quite like the overly suggesteive way this thing thrusts up at first, but here is a test of how these tree like structures may come into being. In a bare wasteland or on little islands appearing in a vast bubbling ocean. Oh wait, I was going to try to not make this a mega project!