Demo Reelin' 2012

RoboLunky First Cut

Well, it's taken me a week to recover from thesis output, but, I think I'm feeling pretty rested now! 10 hours of sleep a day will do that haha. Anyway, it was great to see everyone's thesis on the big screen last Friday. CONGRATS EVERYONE!

Here is the first cut of RoboLunky that played in the theatre. I'll be making some updates and fixing little quirks before the second thesis show and portfolio night.



roboLunky from Dan Bradham on Vimeo.

created by: Dan Bradham
composed by: Chris T Geehan

animation: Dan Bradham, Jon Burke, Albert Kim

layout: Dan Bradham, Arsen Arzumanyan

special thanks: Chris DeVito, Jon Lin, Laszlo L. Ujvari, Vic Fina, John Mcintosh, Danica Parry, JP Lavin, Mark Neumann, Artur Elson, Brendan Gallagher

special special thanks: Monami Nagai, Mom, Grandma and Grandpa

produced at: School of Visual Arts

El Pirate Captain Two Pegs

WIP

Concept Silhouette!

Fun with pirates!

Mel eval() and an undetermined amount of flags

Every once in awhile I run into a mel command that requires an undetermined amount of flags to be passed for evaluation. Here's a quick example of how to build and pass an array of flags to eval.

string $curvePoints;
string $myPointArray[];
int $tx;
int $ty;
int $tz;

for($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++)
{
    $tx = $i;
    $ty = $i;
    $tz = $i;
    $myPointArray[$i] = ("-p " + $tx + " " + $ty + " "+ $tz);
}

$curvePoints = stringArrayToString($myPointArray, " ");
print $curvePoints;
eval("curve -d 3" + $curvePoints)

Post Production Snapshots

I'll be wrapping up rendering over the next week or so, meanwhile, I'm doing some test comps in Nuke. Here are some tentative snapshots.

Matte Passes Quick and Clean

There are a bunch of scripts to create matte passes for mental ray, but these tend to be on the more complicated end of the spectrum. So to speed up my workflow a little I wrote this script. Select some geo, go to the render layer you'd like to add the matte pass to, and type 'dbrMattePass("myName")' in the command line.

global proc dbrMattePass(string $name){
    float $mayaVersion = `getApplicationVersionAsFloat` ; 
    //get selected objects
    string $sel[] = `ls -sl`;
    
    if (`size($sel)`){
        //get current render layer and create new pass contribution map
        string $curLayer = `editRenderLayerGlobals -q -currentRenderLayer`;
        string $contMap = `createNode -ss -name ($name + "PCM") passContributionMap`;
        connectAttr -na ($curLayer + ".passContributionMap") ($contMap + ".owner");

        //create new 1 channel matte render pass and associate with current render layer and new PCM
        if ($mayaVersion == 2012)
            string $mattePass = `shadingNode -ss -name ($name + "Matte") -asRendering renderPass`;
        else
            string $mattePass = `createNode renderPass -name ($name + "Matte")`;
        
        setRenderPassType -type "MATTE" ($name + "Matte");
        setAttr -type "string" ($mattePass + ".passGroupName") ($name + "MatteGRP");
        setAttr ($mattePass + ".numChannels") 1;
        setAttr ($mattePass + ".frameBufferType") 256;
        setAttr ($mattePass + ".useTransparency") 1;
        setAttr ($mattePass + ".holdout") 1;
        connectAttr -na ($curLayer + ".renderPass") ($mattePass + ".owner");
        connectAttr -na ($mattePass + ".message")($contMap + ".renderPass");
      
        //add selected objects to pass contribution map
        for ($each in $sel){
            connectAttr -na ($each + ".message") ($contMap + ".dagObjects");
        }
    }
    else
    {
        print "Select some objects to create a matte.";
    }
} 

**Update: Didn't realize this initially because I hadn't reached post-production yet. Slipped right through my fingers, if you don't specify the values of hold-out and use transparency when creating pass contribution maps via mel, they will default to OFF. A huge error, hopefully nobody was relying on the previous code. The above represents working code.

Wolf Larsen

Wolf Larsen, of Jack London's "Sea Wolf."

Testing out skin shaders and a paint over for final look development.

Concept by Zack Lydon (http://stillibreathe.net)

Wiggle Your Keys!

dbrWiggleKeys

This guy allows you to create a series of keyframes in a specified time range to any number of attributes using the random, sine, and cosine functions of mel. It works with multiple object/controller selections so you can do cool stuff like apply a sine curve with overlap to a tentacle. I got tired of manually creating sine curves in the graph editor for my jelly creatures tentacles so this is a pretty huge time saver, gives me a nice base curve to go in and modify.

• Amplitude: the maximum deviation from the current value of the attribute. If translateY is 10 and you use an amplitude 5, the keys will range from 5-15.
•  
• Step Size: keyframe interval.
•  
• Overlap Step: offsets sine curves when multiple controls or objects are selected. Selection order determines the order of overlap.
• 
  
• Attributes: Use long or short names separated by commas. No spaces following the commas.
• ie: tx,ty,rz,visibility,translateZ
• 
  Wavelength of sine and cosine is: 4 * step size

I'll update this a bit in the near future to add a falloff option so that the keys fall off to a value of 0 + initial value over the time range.

download

shot32-36_v001

Aniiiimateeeeee

Camera Animation Broken on Batch Render

A few people at school have had issues with their cameras not animating when rendering on our farm. I think this happens when complex camera rigs are used, sometimes even one group above a camera with keys will not work. These rigs are a little bit more difficult to deal with but here is a quick script that bakes the overall camera animation to a new camera.

global proc dbr_bakeCamera(string $cam)

{

string $bakeCam[] = `camera -name ($cam + "_BAKE")`;

string $oCST[] = `orientConstraint $cam $bakeCam[0]`;

string $pCST[] = `pointConstraint $cam $bakeCam[0]`;

bakeResults -t "1:68" -at "tx" -at "ty" -at "tz" -at "rx" -at "ry" -at "rz" $bakeCam[0];

delete $oCST[0];

delete $pCST[0];

}

//usage: dbr_bakeCamera("camName") where camName is the name of the camera you'd like to bake.