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.

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:
 

Slowing Down Mental Ray

First, here is the obligatory line: sorry for not posting recently, have been busy.

Yesterday I pestered Mental Ray a bit, using many things known to slow it down: Global Illumination, Caustics, light radius....

With just a single object on a floor plane and one spotlight, this took over ten minutes to render. And you know what? I and seriously considering adding real depth of field. Oh, and then maybe animate it and add motion blur. While I'm at it, I should then also up the resolution from 720p to 1080p. Still, that will probably not half as bad as the radiosity render a fellow student of mine at ACCAD had running for a couple of weeks before it finally produced a very grainy image.

Why am I messing with GI? I took over a course at PRATT this semester: 3D lighting and rendering.

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!

 

Towards a Unified Animation of Mind and Matter

I am still busy with several project hoping they will culminate in one animation. Here is a look development test for the environments of one of the scenes, possibly the opening of this animated epos of scatterer-braininess wrapped in procedural matter-of-factness :

 

 

[Geek Alert!] Maya would not be Maya if I did not run into a number of quirks while creating this test. For one the Mental Ray renderer does render the Maya environment fog, but when using the camera far-near planes these seem to get stuck at the fist frame when batch rendering. To fix this very frame needs to be rendered separately, so I wrote a small python thingy (program is too big a word for these few lines of code) that uses the command line render to start a batch render for each individual frame. Joy!

Big Foot, Two Arms.

I have been wokring in Maya a bit. As I am teaching Advanced Animation this semester, and since all the students want to animate characters, I thought I'd create a test of one myself. I have a project in mind, one of those ballooning animation ideas, which has a similar character in it. Here is an animation / render test:

My plan is to build on this test and combine it with the original idea for EyeBrain, which is a scene that was cut from my Thesis animation "if(!NULL){". Maybe I will even throw in the tree like structures from the recent Maya Experiment! Do I have a title yet? How about "Minding Matter (Dark)" or "Dark Mind(s) Matter". "Never Mind the Dark Matter" maybe?

Another SIGGRAPH over...

Chuck Csuri
Originally uploaded by Wobbe F. Koning

It went by fast. SIGGRAPH 2011 has already wrapped up. It was held in Vancouver this year, which gave me the great opportunity to combine it with a visit to my sister who lives there.

Highlights? Speaking to award recipient Charles Csuri, who was still working daily at ACCAD when I studied there. Seeing a number of great animation in stereoscopic 3D, including some created by students! Visiting the compact exhibition floor was also pretty productive this year. And I think my favorite session was ILM's production session on Rango. They completely separated out animation from lighting / rendering in their production pipeline. Which seems to be the exact opposite from what PIXAR is doing. So I just had to ask how they handled shadows, for instance in shot composition. They don't. They did not run into any major problems with it though.

I had not actually seen the movie yet, but got that chance on the plane back and it is one of the more interesting animated features of late. By far. The flight was long enough to also view Megamind, but I watched most of it on fast forward. Not my cup of tea. Even though I kind of liked Monsters vs. Aliens by the same studio

Just before I left for Vancouver I managed to squeeze this out:

I think I know where I want to go with this but first we go and take a family vacation. This blog post is coming to you from the waiting room of our car dealers service center. They should have free WIFI everywhere!

Number 7

Yet another moving thingy, glowing this time.

All Progress is Slow...

..he says to himself in a comforting voice. Getting closing to actually starting to animate with these generated shapes. Just a little more look development on them.

How about a blocky retro look? This is what GIMP churns out when JPEG quality is set to zero.

Frozen Fireworks

I have been working on my basic L-System script (no fancy stuff like a rules interpreter) adding some gravity and randomness. The two on the right are generated from the same base parameters.

Earlier I worked on making these things dynamic, and posted the result on YouTube:

I animated the parameters driving the dynamics, and obviously setting them too high makes the whole shape come apart. So I need to use more points or push them around gently.

Lindenmayer

I thought setting up a basic L-System to counter the growing tubular shapes would be relatively simple. And I guess it is if you actually are a programmer. Finally got a basic version to work. Again written in Python, generated in Maya.

I did find some examples on-line but that code was rather dense and I need to mess with it. Now let's see how I can randomize this and make it grow. And preferably sway in the wind. So I am wondering again why I cannot be satisfied simply animating a cube...

It's Alive!

It's life Jim, but not as we know it:

See previous post (or posts) for details.

Update (4:44 PM): Here's another one, which required some improvements to the Python scripts and Maya Expressions:

That's more like it!

Yes, more of the same. But I am getting close to what I want. I switched to nParticles for the curve creation and luckily my scripts worked with just a little tweaking. They started failing when I limited the lifespan of the nParticles, but fortunately Python let's you "try:" stuff.

And tonight after another hour of intense screen staring I have my desktop render an animation of this shape, simply by animating the size of the particles (the radiusPP to be precise, with an expression using the particleID as variable)

So, YEAH! The real work can start: creating an interesting piece of animation using this technique.

Still Static

I got my curves-from-particles and put-particles-on-rebuild-curves script working. Now I need to take the next step: animating this to create a creepy crawly tubular shape.