Texture Tests: Painted Cubes

These were some tests I did to see how painting on UV snapshots in Photoshop and importing to Maya works. I was also trying to see if I could make a traditional media look work in Maya and had some fun layering my texture with different textured materials.

Sound Design – Star Wars Episode II

This is really great being able to hear the raw sound effects side by side with their application in the movie! The sounds of Star Wars are beauuuutiful. The whole process is like sculpting with sound.

Sound Design – Star Wars Episode II (Full) uploaded by aisforandrewtoo [YouTube]

No Film School – Learn How to Sculpt Hard Light to Add More Dimension and Contrast

It’s interesting to see how light is set up and controlled/sculpted in this video. I’d never even seen this before, there’s still so much that I need to learn about lighting alone! It can really bring a scene or subject to life. The video and article is here:

http://nofilmschool.com/2015/03/control-learn-how-sculpt-hard-light-dimension-contrast-shane-hurlbut

The Power of Shaping Hard Light from Shane Hurlbut, ASC on Vimeo.

“Shaping light can add a 3D quality to your image. This cannot be done with just firing a light through some pieces of tape. It has to be controlled and manicured so that the contrast and shadow are obtained in a way that give you that wonderful three dimensional quality.”

Surrealist Sculptures

Claire found these beautiful sculptures by Ellen Jewett. We love the detail and might try and incorporate something similar into the Celtic design of our character Anam.

Images from:

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/03/surrealist-sculptures-by-ellen-jewett-merge-plant-and-animal-life/

Bobby Chiu Tutorial

This painting/tutorial from Bobby Chiu on CGSociety is a great example of how you can build characters/personalities from simple shapes: link

“When drawing characters you think as though you are acting through your pencil”.

“One of the biggest mistakes I find in beginners is that we tend to put down the details first before making sure that the structure of our forms is sound.”

Anatomy of an Alien Race (Terryl Whitlatch)

This ImagineFx article has some good creature concept design advice from Terryl Whitlatch. There’s some beautiful work on her website also:

http://talesofamalthea.com/

ImagineFx March 2013 Anatomy of an Alien Race (Terryl Whitlatch)

• “A script. A story. A place. Here’s where creature design begins.”
• “Consider all the elements that make your creature tick -the ability to run vast distances, to eat what the land provides, to flee or defend oneself. Plus the ability to create objects that not only aid in all of the above but allow the recording – as in art, writing, music – of this, and the spirituality that ties all such life experiences together. We have a civilization. We have a time, a place, a history and a culture. We have the ‘why’ of the creature – what it does. This why establishes the ‘what’ of the creature – what it looks like to do what it does. For your audience to suspend their disbelief they have to accept that the anatomical design of the animal can reasonably perform what the story or screenplay asks of it.”
• form (muscle, skeleton, etc.) adapted to function.
• do gestural studies to learn about the character.
• “The more knowledgeable you are about zoology, the stronger creature designer you’ll be. So read as much about real animals as possible – this relates to the understanding of relative anatomy and behaviour, which go hand in hand.”
• Even the curvature of the spine will inform you about the creature’s ability to walk upright or on all fours. A long tail can act as a counterbalance to prevent upright creatures from falling over.
• Expression sheets show the character in typical poses or actions from the story and should demonstrate how the anatomy is affected for various movements (this was also mentioned in the Digital Tutors topology tutorial so as to know where to add resolution to the mesh for movement).

Sound Design for Slán

I don’t think we’ve been considering enough how far we could take the sound if we really tried. So far we’ve been searching through a lot of songs uploaded onto YouTube but we might be able to make something a lot more interesting or bring out something unexpected in our animation if we put together sound effects ourselves.

I recently watched Studio Ghibli’s The Wind Rises (2013) and I read afterwards that the sounds were made by human voices. Listen to this earthquake made with human voices in this clip, it sounds really unique and quite chilling!

G.I. Joe Retaliation (2013) is obviously a lot more bombastic than our animation but it’s still interesting hearing the sound designers talk in this feature, plus the sounds of metal are really awesome:

http://www.itsartmag.com/features/the-sound-of-g-i-joe-retaliation/

This feature on the sound design of Interstellar (2014) shows how far you can go with experimenting. We could probably spend weeks trying to figure out the sound side of things alone!

http://www.itsartmag.com/features/the-sound-of-interstellar/

In this feature about the sound design of The Dark Knight Rises (2012) I like the concept mentioned about blurring the line between sound effects and music.

http://www.itsartmag.com/features/the-sound-of-the-dark-knight-rises/

I was curious to know where we would even begin if designing our own sounds but, going by this video, good quality sound recording equipment would be quite expensive to buy. Haha I probably wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.

Maybe we should just experiment with mixing sounds from free sources?

Texture Experiments

These are some texture tests I did to try and get a better feel of the shading networks in Maya. I used some of the techniques I learned from Digital Tutors like using bump maps with different textures and creating an object with two materials by using the layered shader and transparency. I still need to look more into making custom and hand painted textures to experiment more for our Slán animation.

Digital Tutors: Utilizing Shading Networks in Maya

Utilizing Shading Networks in Maya: This tutorial from Digital Tutors covered some of the topics we went through in class like layered textures and reflections but it was good for practice and also went into bump maps, displacement maps, transparency maps, layered shaders and volumetric shaders. I was thinking the volumetric shaders might come in particularly handy in our last scene where we’re looking up at the giant monument. I was thinking we might be able to give the monument a feeling of large scale by pushing the top of it back with volumetric scattering? This is my render from the tutorial:

This is a bit ugly but if you google image ‘maya volumetric lighting’ there are some nice results. This adds a lot to the render time though, like the frame above took 3mins:13secs on my laptop and doesn’t even have a lot else going on in it.

These are my rough notes from the tutorial:

• 2d textures are placed according to the UV layout. 3D texture doesn’t accurately show in viewport. Projection manipulator box controls display of 3D texture. Moving the object will make the 3D texture swim on surface.
• ‘Assign as projection’ for material and align projection manipulator with camera view.
• Texture reference objects: ‘create texture reference object’. Stops the texture projection from swimming when geometry is moved. Plug alpha image into specularity also so as to not have specular highlights on transparent region. If bump/displacement map is behind transparent alpha texture, may need to adjust transparency threshold of shader group.
• A thick arrow indicates multiple connections to/from node. Colour is default output….can be changed e.g outColourR with output arrow or in connection editor.
• Bump map: illusion of detail through light and dark information of texture.
• Displacement map creates additional geometry at render time. From a .tga file. The displacement map connects at the shader group level. Create ‘displacment approximation’ (under rendering editor) will create resolution where it is needed.
• Transparency maps inside shading networks: plug colour and alpha files into the colour and specular maps of blinn. Also adjust transparency in the shader group if a bump map is behind transparency map in render view.
• Making reflections: adjust settings under ‘quality’ in render settings and attributes for material and lights.
• Refractions: under raytrace options. glass has refractive index of 1.6. Also adjust max ray interactions in global render settings. Max trace depth = refractions + reflections.
• Layered textures:  from left to right = top to bottom layers. Can also drop in files e.g. painted decals/patterns based on UVs.
• Layered shaders: create layered shader and plug material onto the layer stacks.
• Two-sided shading:  display face normals to check back/front. mental ray>sample compositing>twosided. Connect out value of twosided shader to outcolour of a ‘surface shader’.
• Volumetric shaders: apply volume fog to a volume primitive (like a container). Plug a 3D texture into transparency to create some noise. Adjust inflection, frequency etc. In render settings adjust >features>volume samples to about 10. Adjust shadows within fog through light attributes ‘enable ray trace shadows’. Adjust ‘shadow rays’ and ‘ray depth limit’. Adjust fog settings to interact with light illumination.

Digital Tutors: Your First Day With Shading Networks in Maya

The Digital Tutors tutorial, ‘Your First Day With Shading Networks in Maya‘, went through a lot of the basics that we already covered in class but it did cover a bit more about creating your own shading networks that I was unsure about. For instance, you can make a texture, adjust its attributes and then duplicate that texture numerous times to plug it into the different attributes of a material e.g. bump, colour, incandescence, so as to change qualities of the texture and material without changing the texture shape.

My texture test:

Also useful to know:

• upper and lower case names for materials will be sorted separately,
• bins can be created for grouping nodes
• the multiple ways of making and breaking node connections.